Here’s a quote from Robert Delaunay, pushing his wife’s designs: Yves Saint Laurent “Mondrian Dress”, 1965 It’s easy to see Saint Laurent’s achievement as the same as Delaunay’s. The look was an instant hit, with the minimal lines of Mondrian’s style perfectly aligning with the simple modern cut of the dress. One of the most famous of all time is Yves Saint Laurent’s styling of Mondrian paintings onto dresses in 1965. I find what Sonia Delaunay was doing more interesting than many other art-fashion collaborations. She saw her collections as contributing to the public understanding of modern art, a form they could not only see, but inhabit – that they could understand literally from the inside.

In fact she always claimed her motivation as primarily artistic. But being a profitable venture doesn’t make her designs less valid as artistic statements. The idea for a clothing line emerged when she & Robert needed a new income stream when her family lost all their property in St Petersburg after the 1917 Russian revolution. Through Casa Sonia (1917-20) in Spain, and and Atelier Simultané (1923-34), her designs were a genuine commercial success. Though to be clear, Sonia Delaunay’s clothing is part art project, part business. Some of Sonia’s work is like this too, to be honest.īut I find her motivations and what she achieves by working in textile really interesting. It neither excites me or disgusts me, it just exists in a place I find of little significance. I think I hadn’t paid much attention to Sonia Delaunay before because of her husband, Robert Delaunay. Dress and car designed by Delaunay, Paris, 1925Įarlier this year I discovered an artist whose approach to working in textile I was really interested in.

Sonia delaunay