Yves Saint Laurent Museum

The Yves Saint Laurent Museum opened adjacent to the Jardin Majorelle in 2017, housed in a building designed by Studio KO whose terracotta brick facade draws on the red of Marrakech without replicating it directly. The museum holds an archive of more than five thousand haute couture garments, fifteen thousand accessories, and eighty thousand fabric samples from across the designer's career, a body of work that spans from the early 1960s through the early 2000s. The permanent display rotates items from this archive through a series of large, carefully lit rooms designed specifically for the presentation of clothing as object. The garments are mounted to show their construction as well as their surface, and the sequencing across the permanent rooms traces both the evolution of a visual language and the relationship between that language and specific cultural sources, among them the Morocco that the designer visited repeatedly across decades and that exerted a lasting influence on his colour and form. Temporary exhibitions occupy a separate wing and address aspects of the archive or themes connected to it with varying degrees of focus. The building itself, with its curved reading room and the quality of light in the permanent galleries, is worth attention as architecture. The bookshop at the entrance is unusually well-stocked for a museum of this type. The museum's reading room, a curved space lined with publications related to the designer's sources and work, is among the most considered spaces in the building, and rarely crowded.