Under the stewardship of creative director Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s latest project pays homage to the favourite novel of Monsieur Saint Laurent, himself, through a series of slightly surreal star-studded short films.
As Time Goes By consists of a series of vignettes directed by British visual artist Nadia Lee Cohen, drawing inspiration from Marcel Proust’s seminal 1913 work, Á La recherché du Temps Perdu. Each film of the project is named after a core theme from Proust’s oeuvre: Love, Togetherness, Dreaming, Desire, Time, and Memory. These concepts are explored across a variety of unusual scenarios. Chloë Sevigny contends with a mischievous maid, played by Joey King. Charlotte Gainsbourg glides into a coffee-related commotion in a hyperbolically Parisian café setting. The so-called Pope of Trash, John Waters, forgets his umbrella after an epiphanic moment in the evening snow, and in another short we see him hallucinate through an Addison Rae performance at a speak-easy. The book itself also stars, making physical appearances throughout the shorts as a little meta-cinematic leitmotif. Aside from these overlapping cameos, each vignette is completely distinct from the last, with their continuity coming through in their very unpredictability.
Proust’s seven-volume epic, which chronicles various episodes across the Parisian Belle Époque, was infamously Yves Saint Laurent’s most beloved book. Such was the couturier’s admiration for Proust that he went as far as to buy Chateau Gabriel, the author’s old country house, and spend his summers there with partner Pierre Bergé. It is said that Saint Laurent kept each volume of the novel securely locked in a personalised Louis Vuitton trunk which he stashed away in the recesses of the chateau.
Vaccarello’s tenure as creative director has been marked by a vision of Saint Laurent that is very close to Yves. This trajectory is exemplified by the watermarking of these shorts with the house’s heritage font. The recruitment of Cohen as director for the project further displays this realignment with the house’s founder. Cohen’s artistic approach of intertwining elements of pop culture is reminiscent of the Saint Laurent’s incorporation of motifs from art and music into his designs. In this collection, the British auteur has arrived at a visual language that hovers ineffably between kitsch and chic, a sort of materialisation of the unique sense of irony displayed in Proust’s writing.
The symbiosis between Cohen’s work and the ethos of Saint Laurent is well demonstrated by two quotes from the pair. The sardonic title of the visual artist’s website biography ‘Who isn’t Nadia Lee Cohen?’ has distinct echoes of an infamous retort from Monsieur Saint Laurent, who, when pressed for a definition of the quintessential Saint Laurent woman, simply responded, ‘La femme saint Laurent, c’est moi.’
The full As Time Goes By collection of shorts is out now and available to view at Saint Laurent’s website.
