Photos By Gail

“Clothes that will stun the crowds in museum exhibitions in the future,” was how New York Times fashion critic Bernadine Morris summarized Yves Saint Laurent’s spring /summer 1988 haute couture collection. A highlight of the collection was the Irises jacket shown here, a simulacrum of Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 painting. The jacket echoes the original’s cropped composition, zooming in even further on the curved and twisting lines of the irises. More remarkably, the embroidery amplifies the luminosity of Van Gogh’s colors, and enhances the materiality of his thick, short, wavy brushstrokes.

According to Maison Lesage, who executed the embroidery, this artistic and technical tour de force involved 600 hours of hand work, 250 meters of ribbon, 200,000 beads, and 250,000 paillettes in 22 colors. Nine female artisans worked on the jacket in sections, sewing seamlessly to create a unified canvas.

Photographed as Part of the 2024 Exhibit Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion  at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.