Silk Pirates: Abraham & Gustav Zumsteg

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“ART IS A WELLSPRING OF INSPIRATION THAT NEVER RUNS DRY” Gustav Zumsteg

Sommer  of 1971

This is one of the must have books for your library if you are serious about Textiles- Soie Pirate. The History of Abraham Ltd (volume 1) and Soie Pirate. The Fabric Designs of Abraham Ltd. (Volume 2) .The set of books covers the important  Abraham Textile archives that were donated to the Swiss Museum by the Hilda and Gustav Zumsteg Foundation  in 2007. The archives were exhibited at the Landesmuseum Zürich this winter 2011.

Abraham's bold graphics at the exhibition

 MATISSE

from Gustav Zumsteg's Private Art Collection

Abraham Ltd. began with Jakob Abraham in 1878, but the story here is the dynamic Gustav Zumsteg-an integral part of the legendary company. Partnering with Ludwig Abraham in 1943, after serving as an apprentice, Gustav Zumsteg's innovations and artistry established the company's reputation as the premiere maker of luxe fabrics to the couture houses of Paris. His artistry is stamped in Zumsteg's painterly abstract designs, exotic florals and butterflies and graphic checks.

MIRO 

 from the Zumsteg  Collection

from the Abraham Archives

from the moment Christian Dior launched his New Look-Zumsteg had Abraham right there on the pulse-supplying the designer with the sumptuous fabrics of the moment.

Dior 1955, Fotograf Forlano

Zumsteg was friend and collaborator to the haute couture designers-Balenciaga, Dior and Givenchy and an intimate of designer Yves Saint Laurent. Imagine juggling the desires of those legends and seeing to it that each had Abraham's best-and of course That Best did not overlap. He considered his friendship with Saint Laurent a "coup de foudre" with a shared love for books and music. The two phoned every Sunday to catch up and share stories as friends do-however there was a formality to their working relationship. Their closeness did intensify the design process and their collaborations were always inventive & original.

above images from the exhibition

Zumsteg on his craft:

"I feel instinctively what is happening in fashion; it's a process that almost never stops. My work and its realization in practice, the supervision of the designers, the contact with the dyers and weavers...are a logical continuation of this process, this instinct, this vigilance, this identification of myself with everything we call Fashion."  (from the book quoted from Die Weltwoche,1955)

Pierre Balmain, Sommer 1952. Fotograf André Ostier-Heil

By the mid 1950's Zumsteg was crowned-"the eminence grise of haute couture" with Dior's collection from 1955 featuring 30 of the Abraham silks alone. Neue Zurcher Zeitung qualified this title with the following-" It is the quality of this Zurich silk that delights the great couturiers-a quality that makes the most subtly nuance & radiantly exquisite color schemes possible."

more from the Archives

from Yves Saint Laurent upon Zumsteg''s death:

"Gustav Zumsteg was my ally, my friend and my collaborator for some 45 years, I used his fabric in my most beautiful dresses. His talent was a never-ending source of inspiration. I owe him many unforgettable moments."

scene from the exhibition in Zurich of the archives

By 1955 Abraham started cutting  four metres of their most beautiful fabrics to preserve in their archives.Fastidiously kept , the archives hold silk samples, press cuttings, and photographs pasted in scrap books.
The books have the tactile quality that Abraham silks had- pages of the scrapbooks - silk samples paired with photographs of runway shows- stars like Catherine Deneuve in YSL and Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy bring the book's pages to life.

“ART IS A WELLSPRING OF INSPIRATION THAT NEVER RUNS DRY” 

G.Zumsteg

a BONNARD painting from Gustav Zumsteg's Collection

also from the Zumsteg Collection - 

Jean Tinguely

Art was his Muse & his passion for Art  drove all of his textile designs. As well as being an artist-he collected. His art was displayed on the walls of his mother Hulda's famed Zurich restaurant-Kronenhalle.
The restaurant was a gathering place for designers and celebrity thanks to Zumsteg's client list-Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Plácido Domingo, Catherine Deneuve, and Yves Saint-Laurent.  Decorated with paintings by Chagall, Matisse, Miro, Kandinsky, Bonnard and the list goes on.

 The restaurant  reflects the elan & elegance of Gustav Zumsteg.

Chanel with company and Zumsteg dine at Kronehalle

Fine tuning was Zumsteg's secret-he was an absolute perfectionist. He would study a painting, travel to see exotic flowers just to nuance his designs-that is what set him apart. Wisely, with their concentration on design, Abraham did not produce their silks- discreetly outsourcing that aspect to other firm. One of its best-kept secrets was the Ratti Company in Como, Italy. Zumsteg travelled to Como almost every week to collaborate with owner Antonio Ratti. Their partnership thrived for more than thirty years.



of Gustav Zumsteg  Donatelli Ratti-Antonio Ratti's daughter remembers:


"His gaze was penetrating, and his eyes were a brilliant shade of blue... He would cry when moved-when he came into contact with something that was exceptionally beautiful."

Gustav Zumsteg

a George ROUAULT from the Zumsteg Art Collection

BONNARD

Zumsteg's collaborations with haute couture and his artistry elevated the business of textiles and the Abraham company as well. The archives serve as a validation of that and as a treasury for couture's greatest era.

Yves Saint Laurent's collaborations with Zumsteg

Sommer 1994, Yves Saint Laurent

YSL 1971

"Times have irrevocably changed, The way we once worked hasn't the same sense. It's not meaningful today." YSL


more about Zumsteg here
swiss info here

Images from the books & Images from these sites

christies Zumsteg's art

kultur-online

soie pirate

couleurblind

photointern

fashion affair.com

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Saint Laurent rive gauche interiorworthy

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 Paris 1966

Saint Laurent rive gauche

La révolution de la mode

“I want to be the Prisunic”(chain store)of fashion &  make clothes that everyone can wear, 

not just rich women”

YVES SAINT LAURENT

Saint Laurent with Betty Catroux &  Loulou de la Falaise

  the opening of the first Saint Laurent rive gauche boutique in London
New Bond Street -September 10 1969
© Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images

The Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent has recaptured the modern ambiance of  Yves Saint Laurent's 1966 Rive Gauche Boutique. designed by Isabelle Hebey for its 15th Exhibition this year. The shop holds sixty iconic ready-to-wear pieces by the designer

Loulou de la Falaise is artistic director of the Exhibition. She was the couturier’s muse for more than three decades, pulled together the designer's work from the era in order to mount the show:
"The tricky thing about doing this show was to find multiple editions of the same style and make themes,” de la Falaise

“The shop had to look real. If we’d combined lots of diverse pieces, it would have seemed like a sale.” de la Falaise



The boutique opened on the Left Bank’s rue de Tournon on September 26 of that year &  featured  bold firey Chinese red screen walls and carpet, of the moment Djinn benches by Olivier Mourgue ,Noguchi lamps and sculptures by Niki de Saint Phalle. 


A full-length portrait of the designer by painter Eduardo Arroyo hung in the Rive Gauche boutique keeping watch over his flock...

All photos of the recreated boutique © Luc Castel, Courtesy of the Fondation YSL-Pierre Bergé

Eduardo Arroyo,  Spanish realist, painted the 30 year old Yves in his realistic pop art style.

 Velazquez, mi padre 1964 by Arroyo at r.

Olivier Mourgue  designed the now classic Djinn chairs in 1965 and Stanley Kubrick gave them their iconic fame in  his  own masterpiece '2001: A Space Odyssey.'  The chair, a wave-like, low-slung silhouette- was in fact- sculpture. Named from Muslim folklore, the Djinn was a spirit  that assumed human &  animal form and possessed supernatural powers of persuasion. 

Djinn from architonic

scene from Kubrick's 2001movie

Noguchi's "AKARI" paper-lamp designs were used throughout the space. The designer Noguchi was commissioned by the mayor of Gifu, Japan, to revive the town's lantern industry that, says Noguchi, had become "reduced to cheap party decorations and painted silk."  The Noguchi  lanterns were made of a mulberry paper, beautifully made and modern.

Niki de Saint Phalle

St Phalle with  day glo  vinyl silk screen NANAS

Vogue 1968

Inspired by Larry Rivers wife Clarice's pregnancy, artist Niki de Saint Phalle created her first Nanas made of paper maché and wool in 1965 and by September 1965, St Phalle exhibited the Nanas in her solo exhibition at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris. The surreal sculptures  explored the position of women in society- the Nanas represented every woman- clearly something the boutiques echoed.

a Saint Phalle Nana in the courtyard of the boutique

St Phalle Nana, 1968

YSL as seen in the Exhibition Boutique

Today- over four decades after the Boutique opened- the interior looks as fresh as it did on its first day. With that idea in mind, some of best of modern design-now classics- are held within the shop space. Yves Saint Laurent had the consummate EYE.

One sees it in the manifestation of the design of this everywoman boutique, his ready to wear and couture designs, his connoisseur's  collection of art, antiques and in his private homes. No surprise that this boutique withstands to test of time. To that end, his successor Stefano Pilati has in his tenure at YSL  published a seasonal Manifesto that brings 'the brand back to the streets'.  This echos Yves Saint Laurents own vision in making  it New.

the Spring 2011 video & Pilati quote below from Laura Bradley at another thing here

see the Manifesto here photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin,


Stefano Pilati:
"I fell in love with the idea of manifestos and with the term itself, because the word 'manifesto' implied a sense of breaking through something while still being connected to and aware of how things are today. In terms of the format, I didn't really relate to any historical manifestos I've seen because my medium is fashion… There is fashion photography in the manifesto so even the idea of showing the pictures larger than they appear in normal magazines was part of the act of manifesting. First of all you need to question whether it's interesting or not to be political about fashion, or instead you wish to reinforce a message to people that is simply about looking good and projecting a positive energy about yourself. I was no longer interested in thinking of fashion in an elitist way. Everything I picked up from the manifestos in the past suggested that they were trying to create energy around an ideology that was considered, in its time, underground. So I thought for today I would offer another perspective of a luxury brand to a broad demographic that doesn't necessarily relate to fashion in the way that a more privileged layer of people do. I wanted to create a wider influence for the message that was being sent from the catwalk, by taking imagery of a collection and giving it to people on environmentally friendly paper in the street without targeting a specific demographic. One of my visions for Saint Laurent is about giving back, so that even if you can't afford it, you can still pick up the essence of the message, the elements of fashion that might be considered increasingly irrelevant but remain for me its main aspects: the silhouette, the way the clothes are cut, the fabrics, a special pattern. It's to say – "These are my thoughts and this is my message – you can pick up something from this and do it yourself. The Yves Saint Laurent manifestos are against aggressively, against exclusivity, against classification, against isolation, against introversion, against always looking at oneself. This is what it comes to in the end. Fashion can give rise to all of these things and it shouldn't, especially today."

“I want to be the Prisunic”(chain store)of fashion &  make clothes that everyone can wear, not just rich women” YSL

and that he did- becoming the first  French couturier with a ready to wear line- this recreation of his boutique reminds us...
and it was just the beginning.



Photos of the recreated boutique © Luc Castel, Courtesy of the Fondation YSL-Pierre Bergé

from 5 March to 17 July 2011


 Links:

YSL here
more at Vogue.com here
Shop Noguchi 
Niki Saint Phalle blog here
de la Falaise quotes from universal excuses by Rebecca Voight here

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