In 1965, Yves Saint Laurent showed what would be known as the Mondrian dresses. These simple shifts "modernised" haute couture. Almost sixty years later, the Malaysian badminton players' competition kit revisits the Dutch artist's colour-filled grids
Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian dress (left) from the autumn/winter 1965 haute couture collection. Photo: Louis Dalmas/Yves Saint Laurent. The Malaysian badminton men's double Soh Wooi Yik and Aaron Chia in Yonex competition kit. Photo: aaronchia/X
It is very rare that we get to see on the badminton court players in competition clothes that are evocative of past haute couture. This Olympics, we did. Malaysian badminton players strutted out for their respective matches in eye-catching style: Yonex-designed tank tops and matching shorts that bear the Dutch artist Mondrian's unmistakable colour-blocking, framed by hard black lines. For badminton, many players from different countries tend to wear Yonex, the 78-year-old Japanese sports equipment manufacturer almost synonymous with the game. And this year, Yonex created for the Malaysian team a geometrical grid and chromatic scheme that immediately brought us back to 1965.
That year, the house of Yves Saint Laurent was only into its fourth. For the autumn/winter couture collection (they were not producing prêt-à-porter yet), Mr Saint Laurent created a set of six cocktail dresses inspired by the Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian. The whole collection was reportedly redesigned just two weeks before the showing to accommodate the Mondrian dresses that were considered as the "apex" of the presentation, even when Mr Saint Laurent did include designs inspired by other artists, namely the Russian-born French modernist Serge Poliakoff and the Ukraine-born Russian avant-gardist Kazimir Malevich. But it was the sextet of Mondrian dresses that announced fashion had "gone modern".
On the court: Aaron Chia and Soh Wooi Yik competing in their Mondrian-inspired Yonex tops. Photo: olympiccouncilofmalaysia/Facebook
Yves Saint Laurent probably knew he had a hit in his hands. He realised that the planarity of his designs allowed him to re-create the then-radical abstraction of Mondrian's Neo-plasticism—in essence, painting at its most elementary, using simple, geometric shapes in primary colours, usually placed at right angles. Mr Saint Laurent wanted to mimick this compositionally. So precisely cut his dresses were that they would wear on the body like paintings would hang on a gallery wall: flat. The effect still respected the need for the dresses to be three-dimensional. Looking at them casually, it appeared that they were made from a single fabric printed with the grid. But the coloured blocks were, in fact, filled fabric, and so skillfully applied that they appeared seamless.
Piet Mondrian was not famous during his lifetime (1872—1944), but, in the second half of the '60s he was. The colour-filled grid idea was soon copied everywhere in fashion, at every price point. So ubiquitous it was, especially on shifts, that Mr Saint Laurent himself told The New York Times in November 1965, just three months after that reputation-affirming show, "I hate Mondrian now." But one man's hatred did not diminish the widespread love for the Mondrian-grid-by-way-of-YSL. Even today. Yonex, the dominant corporate supplier of badminton wear, is not known for groundbreaking designs. When they conceived the initial Olympic kit for Malaysia's team, the clothes impressed practically no one. Now, on the court, even with a familiar graphic, impressive the clothes were not. Nor, indelible.
Update (5 August 2024, 08.12am): Men's doubles Soh Wooi Yik and Aaron Chia defeated the Dutch duo Kim Astrup and Anders Skaarup Rasmussen to win the bronze
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