An extraordinary look at how the style of Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings was posthumously
appropriated by 1960s fashion Pop art and consumer culture. Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965
Mondrian dresses are among the twentieth century’s most celebrated and recognizable fashions
but the context of their creation involves much more than meets the eye. In Mondrian’s Dress
Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis offer a fresh approach to the coupling of Piet
Mondrian’s interwar paintings with Saint Laurent’s couture designs by exposing the rampant
merchandising and commodification that these works experienced in the 1960s. The authors
situate the consolidation of Saint Laurent’s fashion brand alongside the work of such Pop
artists as Roy Lichtenstein Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann and show how conventional
understandings of Mondrian’s avant-garde abstractions were transformed by the mass circulation
of his signature style. Beyond its attention to 1960s fashion Pop art and consumer culture
Mondrian’s Dress offers critical assessments of Saint Laurent’s so-called dialogue with art
the remarkable art collection that he built with his partner Pierre Berge and the crucial role
that photography plays in the marketing of couture. The first book-length study of its kind
Mondrian’s Dress is a provocative reevaluation of how art commerce and fashion became
fundamentally intertwined in the postwar period.
