PatternVault

It’s Couture Week in Paris, and the Mondrian collection is turning sixty. Yves Saint Laurent presented his iconic Fall-Winter 1965 haute couture collection, Homage to Piet Mondrian, in summer, 1965, making 2025 the 60th anniversary of the Mondrian dress.

I first wrote about this collection back in 2012, not long after I first started this blog. I’d sewn the vintage 1960s Vogue 1556 — one of the less-photographed Mondrian dresses — and it had gone together beautifully. I researched Vogue’s series of Mondrian patterns on the circa-2010s internet. For the blog, I sat on, stood beside, and fixed my hair next to midcentury furniture in my YSL dress to echo Vogue Patterns’ original design-showroom photo shoot.

Since then, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris has updated their website with an extensive section on the Mondrian collection, including the digitized show program and behind-the-scenes video of a dress from their archives.

There was considerable technical intricacy behind the simple lines of these collarless and sleeveless dresses. In order to recreate the solid colors bordered by black lines, the squares were inlaid and combined from inside the dress, rendering the seams invisible to the naked eye. The restrained silhouette dictated the technique.

— Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris

Yvonne de Peyerimhoff, the director of Saint Laurent’s Paris salon, wore a Mondrian dress (later available as Vogue 1557) on the young couturier’s North American tour:

Around the time of Vogue Patterns’ Mondrian pattern release in early 1966, U.S. Vogue opted to show Vogue 1556 in white, honeycomb wool, without the hem band:

The glamorous Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador to the United States, seems to have worn the long, couture version of this design to a farewell dinner before the couple’s return to France. (WWD photo by Sal Traina via Getty Images.) In fact, the drawing printed on the back of the Vogue pattern must echo the couture original’s ivory with bronze (?) beaded contrast. I wonder where that dress is now?

Happy 60th birthday to the Mondrian dress: a true fashion icon.

For more see “La révolution Mondrian” / “The Mondrian Revolution” at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris.