It is a cliché that visiting Marrakesh is to experience a full-blown assault on all of one’s senses. What I didn't expect on a recent visit to the pink city was to experience two of the most exquisitely crafted and modern exhibitions of recent years. The Musée Yves Saint Laurent and the Musée Berbère in the Jardin Majorelle are not merely highlights of Marrakesh, but also two of the most inspirational and rousing exhibitions of art you will see anywhere …….and they don’t even purport to be art exhibitions.
The French fashion designer bought the garden originally created by painter Jacques Majorelles saving it and the artist’s studio from ruin and property developers and restoring both to an incredible oasis of beauty and calm. Majorelle’s art-deco studio (painted not in signature art-deco white but in sumptuous Majorelles blue) sits sublimely amid an A to Z collection of giant cacti and towering tropical plants that must surely rival anything in Kew gardens. It now houses an ethnographic collection of Berber costume and jewellery that sumptuously celebrates the diversity and richness of this fascinating culture. Next door, the new museum dedicated to Yves Saint Laurent is an elegant piece of modern architecture containing a homage to Yves Saint Laurent and presenting his life and work in a captivating multi-sensory exhibition.
Having little previous knowledge of Yves Saint Laurent's work, beyond an awareness that he was one of the first fashion designers to bring haute-couture to the high street, I was completely thrown by the refreshing genius and vitality of his art. A lover of Morocco and the rich traditions of Berber costume, Yves Saint Laurent borrowed freely from the culture as well as great modern artists such as Picasso and Braque. Like many truly gifted creatives, he didn’t confine himself to one medium; he designed for the theatre as well as compiling beautiful collages on the theme of love and eclectic ranges of intricate jewellery and accessories to complement his range of clothing.
Of course, there are some contradictions here: Yves Saint Laurent was a twentieth century European; who believed that ‘there is nothing more beautiful then the naked human body’; who celebrated and worshiped the female form and yet whose designs borrowed from an ancient African culture that seems to go out of its way to hide the female form. As a hugely successful entrepreneur who built a vast modern business empire, his inspiration was drawn from a civilisation that has never known the affluence of Parisian society. He was at the forefront of a hedonistic and fast-moving fashion industry but loved a country where the timeless, devout and deep-rooted traditions of the Berber culture are completely oblivious to the fads and narcissistic individualism symbolised by first world fashion.
However, I am sure Yves Saint Laurent had an answer to this paradox. He once said, ‘fashion fades, beauty is everlasting’. The beauty of his designs and his art, so allied with the music and times of the sixties and seventies, certainly lives on.