ELAINE SCIOLINO

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

The exhibited works include this yellow faille de chine coat and velvet sheath dress from YSL’s Haute Couture, Fall/Winter 1983 collection.

When it was announced that the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective that wowed audiences at the Petit Palais in Paris two years ago would travel to Denver this week, and nowhere else in the United States, the question on many minds was: why Denver?

“America isn’t just New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Boston,” said Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime partner in life and business and the head of the designer’s foundation. “Besides, Denver asked me. Voilà!”

Has he ever been to Denver? “No,” he said. “I never go to the mountains.”

But Bergé will be in Denver when the exhibition of 200 of the creations of the late designer opens on March 25 at the Denver Art Museum. So will Betty Catroux, the Paris-based muse and close friend of Saint Laurent, and François Delattre, the French ambassador in Washington, as well as the curator and the design, technical and lighting teams who mounted the show in Paris.
Continue reading “YSL in the U.S.A.” »

From Elaine’s Lumière column for T Magazine’s The Moment.

Shoe and Eiffel tower, for Stern, 1974.
Frank Horvat, courtesy of Taschen

Weighing in at 10 pounds and 624 pages, “Paris: Portrait of a City” is too heavy to cuddle up with on the couch. This latest tome in Taschen’s series of bigger-is-better photography books on great cities needs to spread out on a coffee table of its own.

Why another photo book on the most photogenic city in the world, you might ask? One answer is that Taschen has already published similar photographic portraits of New York, Los Angeles and Berlin; London comes next.

Another is that this book is a photographic study of more than 160 years of the city’s history through the eyes of Jean Claude Gautrand, a 79-year-old photographer and photo editor who is one of France’s most eminent experts on photography. Gautrand spent three and a half years deep in the archives, libraries and private collections of Paris, sifting through hundreds of thousands of files, searching for unknown images by anonymous photographers to pair with what he calls “the greats.”
Continue reading “Paris in Pictures” »