French luxury fashion house Saint Laurent launches its unique vision of a book store in Paris, transforming the sleek space on the city’s Rive Gauche into a culture hub with curated objets d’art, happenings and exhibitions.
Saint Laurent has long been lauded for its iconic style and innovation within the fashion world, and in turn, society. Within its first decade, the Maison had democratised fashion by introducing the ready-to-wear concept, normalised trousers as appropriate female attire for all occasions, and pioneered a beatnik aesthetic. Expanding beyond the limits of the industry, Saint Laurent’s impact has been celebrated globally, including by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which hosted a retrospective a mere 20 years after the Maison’s 1962 beginnings.
Its founders, the late Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, appreciated culture in its broadest sense, amassing a USD 260 million-dollar private art collection (since auctioned off ). Under creative director Anthony Vaccarello, who has been at the helm since 2016, the Maison continues to pursue an intimate connection to the arts by ways of internal initiatives and institutional collaborations. It opened eponymous museums in 2017 in Paris and Marrakech to showcase its haute couture and, by 2019, was hosting exhibitions in its Rive Droite boutique-turned-concept store. Here works by seminal artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Serra, Alberto Giacometti and Ed Ruscha have been presented, a testament to the Maison’s savvy understanding of the contemporary art scene.
In 2022 the Fondation Pierre Bergé initiated the mould-breaking YVES SAINT LAURENT IN MUSEUMS exhibition series in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne, Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée National Picasso-Paris and Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. The showcases instigated a dialogue between the Maison’s innovation and the collections of the various institutions. The following year, Saint Laurent Productions was launched to support arthouse cinema – the first two films were shorts by Pedro Almodóvar and Jean-Luc Godard – and, most recently, the Maison has opened Saint Laurent Babylone, an art, book and record store dedicated to rare out-of-print and original items. Soon, the shop will also host exhibitions and live happenings.
Saint Laurent Babylone’s location on rue de Grenelle in Paris’ seventh arrondissement holds sentimental value, as Laurent and Bergé lived in the area. The store embraces the clean, monochrome aesthetic of the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique, married with hints of Parisian Haussmannian architectural tropes, a style which made a home for itself in the district’s Sèvres-Babylone neighbourhood in the late 20th century. The store also reinforces the Maison’s prioritisation of engaging with artworld dynamics and a rotating exhibition model. With a selection of objects and events curated by Vaccarello, the gently Brutalist space provides an optimal platform for public programming. Purposefully fluid, the venue is undoubtedly in line with Laurent’s personal proclivity to move objects around to “give them a new life”, a philosophy which sidesteps stagnation and opens the door to new perspectives.
Committed to new modes of expression in terms of format and content, Vaccarello’s eye has readied an exclusive, subversive selection of tomes for bibliophiles and culture-heads alike, casting an even wider net by including DJ sessions, author readings and other activities to nurture a chic incubator for artistic innovation. Saint Laurent Babylone will do more than facilitate exchange and provide an intriguing collection of material, however: it also welcomes the expansion of Saint Laurent Rive Droite Editions (SLRD).
Engaging the same sensitivity to and consideration of materials and artisanal craftsmanship for its fashion and beauty creations as for its books, SLRD produces publications-as-objets d’art that interrogate themes such as the gaze and the human relationship to images. The Maison’s in-house publisher also collaborates with artists such as Venice Biennale Golden Lion-winning Cai Guo-Qiang – for whom it also commissioned a 2023 solo exhibition at the National Art Center in Tokyo – and the late prize- winning photographer Jeanloup Sieff. It also supports and documents projects such as Chronorama Redux at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, which took a contemporary look at a selection of photographic works acquired by the Pinault Collection from the Condé Nast archives.
Never shying away from bold and sophisticated artistic choices, Saint Laurent ensures that it continues its legacy of pursuing new directions to recontextualise and reframe the ways in which art and beauty are experienced and enjoyed.
