Drawing on their book, Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art (forthcoming in October from MIT Press), Nancy Troy and Ann Tartsinis examine Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 dress series, for the first time looking critically at the significance of these designs for the French couturier’s career, their impact on Piet Mondrian’s posthumous reception, and their resonances with the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and Andy Warhol. Building on a growing foundation of scholarship on fashion brand development and the rise of the ready-to-wear market during the postwar period, Troy and Tartsinis show how the practicalities of American manufacturing and merchandising proved crucial for the circulation and rampant copying of these couture dresses, which would become, thanks to the mass media, Saint Laurent’s most iconic designs.

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Ann Marguerite Tartsinis is a scholar of twentieth-century American art, craft, and design. She is currently a visiting faculty member in the graduate curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, while she completes her dissertation in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. From 2010 to 2016, she was associate curator at Bard Graduate Center and is the author of An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928 (2013).

Nancy J. Troy is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art, Emerita, at Stanford University and during the current academic year, the Kress-Beinecke Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, former editor in chief of The Art Bulletin, and the author of five scholarly books.