Yves Saint Laurent - Fashioning Fantasy into Reality

by Shane M. Nygaard

© Shane M. Nygaard - published by The Evolving Astrologer, March 2023 / 16.05.2023

The ocean. Since time immemorial, it has called mariners, sailors, and explorers to venture upon its vast, boundless waters. So too, has the astrological Piscean ocean called mystics, poets, dreamers, and artists to sail within its mysterious, symbolic depths.

Of all the ocean’s imagery —from corals of every color…to myriad fantastical and deadly aquatic species…to fish swimming every which way, the symbol of Pisces is signified by only two fish swimming in opposite directions—yet eternally bound together. This symbolism of Piscean opposites is reflected in the differing cultures of the Western and Eastern worlds, in the distinction between masculine and feminine energies, and in popular culture, exemplified by author J.K. Rowling’s world of Muggles and Wizards.

Unlike the boundlessness of the sign of Pisces, the planet Saturn is the planet of limitation and restriction. Saturn contains and restrains, and concerns itself with responsibility, discipline, and gravitas. It symbolizes maturity and the reaping of harvests, both bountiful and grim. Mythic Saturn is the Greek Chronos, the God of Time. Through Chronos-logical time we encounter the weight of and the wait in the daily grind.

As Saturn brings boundary to the boundless, form to the formless, and limit to the limitless, it is a most suitable vessel for navigating the expansive Piscean ocean. Artists and designers sail the Piscean seas of creative potential, not always guaranteed to make landfall, yet with Saturnian discipline and dedication, this wealth of possibilities can, in time, be brought into form.

One such Piscean sailor is the legendary haute couture (“high fashion”) designer Yves Saint Laurent, born August 1, 1936, at 7:45 pm in Oran, Algeria. He debuted with Sun in Leo in the 6th House, Moon in Capricorn in the 11th House, Aquarius Rising, and Saturn Retrograde in Pisces in his 1st House. As Saturn entered Pisces on March 7, 2023, it seems a suit-able (fashion humor) time to look specifically at this placement in the life, fashions, and revolutionary artistry of Yves Saint Laurent and how, with Saturn in Pisces as a vital placement in his natal chart, he was able to fashion fantasy into reality.

Youth, Dior & the Trapèze Collection

Yves Saint Laurent was born into a wealthy and loving family, with a glamorous mother who saw and encouraged her son’s creative spirit from an early age. As a young child, Saint Laurent produced small theater shows for his family, creating costumes for paper dolls as the characters in his shows. His mother brought Yves along on her trips to town when she purchased internationally popular fashion magazines, which were an enormous influence on young Yves. (1) And she brought him along on trips to her tailor for her dresses, which eventually led Yves to create dresses himself for the many women he grew up around, including his mother, grandmother, and two sisters.

Flash forward and through turns of events, Saint Laurent met and eventually became apprentice and heir to the throne of the world’s then-greatest couturier – Christian Dior. This was a fortuitous position for Saint Laurent, as Dior was

rigorous about quality, [and] the Christian Dior couture House would teach him about the importance of discipline in fashion. Brilliant as Saint Laurent was, he needed structure to calm and temper his creative imagination. (2)

A mentor able to discipline and structure a creative and fertile imagination was a perfect pairing for Saint Laurent with Saturn in Pisces. Within the House of Dior, his artistry flourished.

Dior’s sudden and unexpected death in October 1957 catapulted the 21-year-old Saint Laurent into the spotlight. Shortly thereafter, on January 30, 1958 – leading up to his Saturn square as Saturn transited Sagittarius – Saint Laurent presented his first collection as Dior’s successor – his Spring-Summer 1958 Trapèze collection.

A signature of the Dior aesthetic was the tightly corseted hourglass torso, which was certainly stylish but not comfortable. From the start, Saint Laurent distinguished his work from Dior’s, loosening the cinch (Saturn in Pisces loosening structure) in favor of a more comfortable fit. This became known as his Trapèze collection, with the trapeze evoking images of graceful and fluid movement – not unlike the imagery of mutable Pisces.

The Trapèze Collection

relied on none of Dior’s signature stiffening and padding. Instead, Yves’ youthful line liberated female curves from the tyranny of a nipped-in waistline…The applause was immediate, the collection hailed a triumph. (3)

This is mutable Pisces, taking what had been stiff, cinched, and padded, loosening it up and relieving the fixedness. Saint Laurent’s creative discipline paid off.

A shifting vision

It was years later, before Saint Laurent’s exact Saturn Return (March 26, 1966), that his vision of fashion and design began to shift. We can imagine as sturdy, solid Saturn moved from fixed air Aquarius into mutable water Pisces in 1964, the ocean waves rippled. What may have been a solid practice and vision for Saint Laurent began to loosen,

I suddenly realized that dresses should no longer be composed of lines, but colors. I realized that we had to stop conceiving of a garment as sculpture and that, on the contrary, we had to view it as mobile. I realized that fashion had been rigid up till then, and that we now have to make it move. (4)

The solid lines and structure of fashion became colors and movement for Saint Laurent. Through his shifting vision, we see the astrological modality shift from a fixed view to a mutable view – a new ocean of possibilities.

The fish of art and the fish of fashion

Perhaps one of the most remarkable Saturn in Pisces expressions found in Saint Laurent’s career, which came into form as his Saturn Return moved ever closer, is when he began uniting Fashion and Art in his haute couture stylings. Traditionally, the great fish of Fashion swam in one direction, and the great fish of Art swam in the other. The two did not cross paths. Yet, in Saint Laurent’s work at this time, we see these two fish become famously and eternally intertwined,

I have always been fascinated by painting, so it was only natural that it should inspire my creations,

Saint Laurent wrote for a 2004 Paris exhibition. (5) And as Dominic Lutyens wrote for the BBC, Saint Laurent’s

passion for the arts – his designs were often inspired by artists – made him feel that his work blurred the boundary between art and fashion. (6)

The Mondrian Collection

This blurring of the Art-Fashion boundaries became evident in Saint Laurent’s Fall-Winter 1965 collection when he debuted what became known as the Mondrian Collection, a series of cocktail dresses paying homage to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Mondrian was known for pioneering an abstract art style using geometric shapes and bold colors, most notably red, blue, and yellow. Interestingly, Mondrian himself was a Pisces Sun, and the Piscean vision is clear in his approach to his art,

Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. (7)

Inspired, Saint Laurent imagined the geometric artwork as fashion, blending the heavier wool jersey and lighter silk to bring appropriate weight for the dress to hang on the body and not distort its shape. As Saint Laurent’s partner Pierre Bergé recalled when first seeing the creation,

I remember that when Yves sent for me, I was in my office. I went to see him and there was a model in the very first Mondrian dress, with a small red square ... on the shoulder. I was, of course, dazzled. It took my breath away. It was so incredibly right. It worked perfectly. (8)

Can we not see the mutability of the Piscean imagination in Saint Laurent envisioning a two-dimensional painting wrapped around the three-dimensional female form and curves, yet maintaining its more or less two-dimensional appearance?

Saint Laurent’s genius lay in his skill in keeping the lines and color blocks of Mondrian’s paintings apparently geometrically aligned on the moveable shape of a woman’s body, which he achieved by imperceptibly incorporating darts and seams into the graphic grid shapes. (9)

He took a painting, made it fashion… and then, made it move. 

The Mondrian Collection was a smash hit with the public and Saint Laurent’s clientele and was a precursor of even more artistry on the horizon.

Saturn return: Rive Gauche & Ready-to-Wear

Also on the horizon was Saint Laurent’s Saturn Return in March 1966. In sync with Saturn’s return, he and his partner Pierre Bergé opened the “Rive Gauche” (“Left Bank”) store that year, named for its location on the left bank of the Seine River in Paris. This was Saint Laurent’s “Ready-to-Wear” shop, a first-of-its-kind in the haute couture world. Earlier couturiers dabbled in ready-to-wear, but Saint Laurent was the first to fully venture into its possibilities (10) with what would become a signature of Saint Laurent’s legacy.

“Ready-to-wear” is the term used for haute couture fashions created for the general public in familiar S-M-L-XL sizing, using more affordable fabrics. These were not unique couture made from luxurious fabrics, as Saint Laurent explained a couple of years after Rive Gauche’s success,

The big difference between couture and ready-to-wear is not design. It is the fabrics, the handwork, and the fittings. The act of creation is the same. (11)

In Rive Gauche, Saturn maintained the creative status quo, yet Pisces loosened the boundaries of how and where such creativity is expressed. Lower prices made the fashions affordable, and general sizing allowed for the younger generation to embrace the famous fashions of Yves Saint Laurent without drowning in the otherwise extravagant prices.

Rive Gauche not only appealed to younger women eager to wear Saint Laurent, but also to young men of the same generation. As he had already broken stereotypes with his womenswear, Saint Laurent continued the trend with a newfound freedom of expression for his menswear. Rive Gauche for men stocked patterned silk shirts, knitted twinsets, velvet jackets, and easy trench coats, which appealed to the generation of uninhibited young men ready to explore their own identity through a more flamboyant style of dress appropriate for the era. (12) Saturn in Pisces, binding men and women together in embracing Rive Gauche.

Saturn return: Homage to Pop Art

Though already internationally renowned and acclaimed by 1966, Saint Laurent’s Saturn Return also solidified his place in fashion legend through the maturation of his creative genius. His Mondrian Dress marked a shift in both his vision of fashion and how he would come to combine Art and Fashion as his signature aesthetic for decades to come, a hallmark of his work.

As Saturn transited through Pisces in the mid-‘60s (1964-1967), the Pop Art movement, originating in the 1950s, reached its peak. Pop Art

drew upon everyday objects and media like newspapers, comic books, magazines, and other mundane objects to produce vibrant compositions, establishing the movement as a cornerstone of contemporary art…The Pop Art movement aimed to solidify the idea that art can draw from any source, and there is no hierarchy of culture to disrupt this. (13)

As Pop Art shifted the cultural tides, abstract expressionism’s elitism was washed away in favor of art that appealed to the masses. For Saint Laurent, as a

designer who was passionate about culture, who loved opera, ballet, and the theater, his antennae were finely tuned to the changing moods of abstraction, and the American Op Art and Pop Art movements of the mid-Sixties provided him with new ways to translate a canvas to the catwalk. (14)

He, of course, wove Pop Art into his haute couture, and amid his first Saturn Return, debuted his Autumn-Winter 1966 “Homage to Pop Art” collection.

This new collection featured knee-high dresses with bright pink pastel colors; bright red lips; comic book-style faces; and colorful heart, moon, and sun shapes throughout. The Pop Art aesthetic was now haute couture. Again, a hugely successful blending of Art and Fashion, bound together within the pieces of this stunning collection.

Saturn return: Le Smoking

Furthermore, within this Pop Art collection was what would become his most iconic creation, Le Smoking, a piece that embodies the two fish symbolism of Pisces in a most evocative manner.

Culturally, the mid-Sixties included the sexual revolution of the United States, and Saint Laurent was again in synch with the times. Le Smoking was his androgynous take on the traditional male tuxedo (“smoking” in French translates as “tuxedo” in English), now designed for women. As Saint Laurent had been blurring the lines between art and fashion, here again, he blurred the lines, only this time it was between genders and sexuality. Le Smoking used

the superb cutting of a masculine trouser suit juxtaposed with overtly feminine pussy bow silk shirts [which] played with topical ideas of sexual ambiguity…the success of his tuxedo would transcend all other designs to become the most recognized signature of his whole career. (15)

Amid the sexual revolution and women’s liberation, Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking was a look and style that empowered women, as they were able to express their sexuality without the need to reveal skin. And Le Smoking brought to women a traditional men’s style, completely rewriting societal fashion rules, thus equalizing the playing field between the genders.

As Saturn binds us into chronological time, it is only fitting (fashion humor) that, following its debut in Autumn-Winter 1966, Le Smoking has stood the test of time. And in true, structured Saturnian form, Saint Laurent featured the tuxedo jacket in each of his collections through 2002, when he retired.

Russian Peasant Collection

In true boundless Piscean fashion, Saint Laurent was never at a loss for new ways to inevitably bring the two fish symbolism to his fashions. In his Autumn-Winter 1976 “Opéras - Ballets russes” Collection, also referred to as the “Russian Peasant” collection, Saint Laurent brought the aesthetic of Russian peasant life together with the elegance of haute couture. The great fish of Wealth and the great fish of Poverty. Also, the great fish of the City and the great fish of the Country/Village.

His collection simultaneously evoked czar-era Russia and the Russia depicted in operas. Using gleaming colors and luxurious textiles (including fur, chiffon, silk, velvet, and gold lamé), Saint Laurent restored haute couture’s capacity to make people dream. (16)

Saint Laurent invoked not only the Pisces fish symbolism but Piscean dreaming. He had the ability to make people dream, as well as bring his own dreams into form. This collection was among his greatest personal successes,

The clothes incorporated all my dreams, all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart, everything I love that I gave to this collection. (17)

Boundless artistry

Throughout his career, Saint Laurent inevitably returned time and again to not only blurring the boundaries between Art and Fashion but continued to also bring two opposing genres together. In 1966 he created the evocative sheer blouse using transparent silk fabric, blending clothing and nudity. In his Autumn-Winter 1979 collection he paid “Homage to Picasso and Diaghilev,” again bringing paintings to life in fashion. In 1981-1982 it was Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger. And in1988, he brought Vincent Van Gogh’s “Irises” and “Sunflowers” paintings to life, extravagantly embroidered into jackets that became modern legends. 

Conclusion

With these examples of the haute couture fashions of Yves Saint Laurent, we see how time after time, his work embodied the astrological qualities of Saturn in Pisces, most notably bringing into form the two fish bound together yet swimming in opposite directions. Putting Saint Laurent’s work in the broader cultural context of the time, from early on, he created fashions that broke away from tradition and the expected styles for women in favor of fashions that liberate and empower. Haute couture before Saint Laurent favored cinched waists and form-fitting, movement-restricting styles, which reflected the restrictive and limiting roles society expected of women for generations. Saint Laurent loosened the cinch and brought in traditionally masculine fashions now reimagined for women. This rewrote the rules and empowered women in a way never before seen in the echelons of haute couture.

Saint Laurent’s Saturn Return occurred amid the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution in the United States, and his creativity and artistry in the world of haute couture challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, especially his ingenious Le Smoking tuxedo suit. His fashions raised questions for the times – What is femininity? What is masculinity? What is art? What is fashion? – Such questions were in sync with the times, and in sync with the softening and blurring boundaries familiar to Saturn in Pisces. During his press conference announcing his retirement, he reflected,

I am proud that women around the world wear trouser suits, tuxedoes, pea coats, and trench coats. I tell myself that I have created the modern woman’s wardrobe, that I have taken part in the transformation of my times. (18)

Through his discipline and dedication to his work, Yves Saint Laurent’s influence on fashion and his influence on women’s empowerment have become eternally sewn together into a cultural fabric that stands the test of time.

References:
(All URLs were last accessed in February 2023)
 (1) Emma Baxter-Wright. Little Book of Yves Saint Laurent: The Story of the Iconic Fashion Designer. Welbeck Publishing Group, London, 2021, p. 14.
 (2) Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni. Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent. Abrams Image. Kindle Edition.
 (3) Baxter-Wright, p. 29
 (4) ibid, p. 39
 (5) Agence France-Presse, “Yves Saint Laurent jacket fetches record €382,000 at auction in Paris,” November 27, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/28/yves-saint-laurent-jacket-fetches-record-382000-at-auction-in-paris
 (6) Dominic Lutyens, “How One Man Changed Fashion Forever,” BBC Culture, 3 October 2017, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170918-two-new-museums-pay-homage-to-the-iconic-yves-saint-laurent
 (7) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
 (8) Pierre Thoretton (Director, Writer) & Guillou, È. (Writer). (2009). L’amour Fou [Motion picture]. France: Les Films du Lendemain, Les Films de Pierre, France 3 Cinéma, Canal+.
 (9) Baxter-Wright, p. 39
 (10) Ibid, p. 52
 (11) Women’s Wear Daily, 1968. P. 54
 (12) Baxter-Wright, p. 56
 (13) “What is Pop Art? Techniques, Artists, and Examples that Shaped the Movement,” https://www.invaluable.com/blog/what-is-pop-art/
 (14) Baxter-Wright, p. 41
 (15) Ibid, p. 62
 (16) See https://museeyslparis.com/en/biography/collection-opera-ballets-russes-ah
 (17) Anne-Marie Schiro, “Yves Saint Laurent, Fashion Icon, Dies at 71,” June 1, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/style/01cnd-laurent.html
 (18) Pierre Thoretton

Published in: The Evolving Astrologer, March 2023.

Author:
Shane M. Nygaard studied archetypes at the Caroline Myss Educational Institute (CMED), where he earned his Archetype Consultant certification. His studies at CMED also included astrology, and he’s been exploring archetypes and astrology ever since! He has presented for the Minnesota Jung Association (including “The Supernatural in Popular Culture,” and “Astrology & the Collective Unconscious”), and his article “From Sunrise Through Nightfall: The 12 Houses of the Zodiac” has been published in The Mountain Astrologer. Shane presented on Utopia and Dystopia in The Age of Aquarius at OPA’s Great Awakening Conference and most recently presented “Astrology & Fairy Tales” for the OPA community after earning his “The Art of Fairy Tale Analysis” certification at the Assisi Institute. Shane’s influences include the Pre-Raphaelite Romantics, James Hillman, Liz Greene, opera, drag, Jung, and things with wings. Shane can be reached at shane.nygaard@gmail.com

© 2023 - Shane M. Nygaard - The Evolving Astrologer

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