The Norman Parkinson Archives/Iconic Images: © Iconic Images/Norman Parkinson
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Piet Mondrian, New York City, January 1942.
From skirts to swimsuits to socks to Yves Saint Laurent’s celebrated cocktail dresses from 1965, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s pictures from the 1920s and 1930s, with their carefully outlined, primary-colored rectangles and squares, have inspired the fashion world. Mondrian’s clearly defined and boldly colored imagery looks good on the blank canvas of a piece of clothing. On his own slim frame, however, Mondrian preferred unadorned suits with single-breasted tailoring and tie. The simplicity of a suit echoes the trim unfussiness of Mondrian’s famous Compositions, and ultimately it is the artist’s clean lines that have captivated elegant designers. Equally minimal were the plain round glasses he wore, and his occasional mustache was trimmed to a modest cube. He may have pared his wardrobe down a little too much now and then. In a 1966 edition of the art journal Studio International, the artist Naum Gabo recalls how, after Mondrian moved to London in 1938, Gabo “once called on him in the morning early, and he was wearing an old coat. I found that he didn’t have any warm pajamas.” As Mondrian had arrived in the country with so few clothes, Gabo’s wife, Miriam, took him shopping for “a real smock with gathers at the yoke” to paint in.
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Models wearing dresses from Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian Collection during the designer’s final runway show, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2002.