Rabat – A museum dedicated to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent will open in Marrakech this October, the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation has announced.
Covering an area of 4,000m2, the Marrakech museum will have a permanent exhibition space displaying Laurent’s work, a room for temporary exhibitions, a 130-seat auditorium, a café-restaurant, a bookshop and a research library. The 5,000 books in the library will cover topics including Arabic and Andalusian history, botany, history of fashion and poetry.
Built out of local terracotta, concrete and earth-coloured terrazzo, the museum will be situated opposite the designer’s Majorelle Gardens, which along with the Berber museum draws approximately 700,000 visitors each year.
French architecture company Studio KO were inspired by “the duality of curves and lines, and the succession of loose and clean cuts” within Laurent’s collections when designing the building’s structure.
The press release described: “from the outside, the building is composed of cubic forms adorned with bricks which create a pattern resembling threads of fabric. The inside is markedly different, like the lining of a luxurious couture jacket: luminous, velvety and smooth.”
A museum dedicated to the designer will also be opened in Paris in October, at historical couture house, 5 Avenue Marceau. Currently the site of the foundation, the building was also where Yves Saint Laurent himself worked between 1974 and 2002.
President of the foundation and Laurent’s life partner, Pierre Bergé, explained the decision to open museums in both Marrakech and Paris was natural and obvious.
“When Yves Saint Laurent discovered Marrakech in 1966, he was so moved by the place that he decided to buy a house and regularly go back there. It feels perfectly natural, fifty years later, to build a museum dedicated to his oeuvre, which was so inspired by this country. As for Paris, who needs to specify that it is where Yves Saint Laurent created all his work and built his career?”
