The 1970s Yves Saint Laurent Colour-Block Clutch: Leather in the Years of the Ballets Russes

Colour was one of Yves Saint Laurent's great instruments. In the second half of the 1970s, his collections set saturated reds, greens, golds and browns against one another in combinations drawn from painting, theatre and distant places. This oversized clutch from the late 1970s, made in France for Saint Laurent Rive Gauche in brown leather with green and red trim, carries something of that palette into an everyday accessory.

Rive Gauche

In 1966, Saint Laurent opened a boutique under the name Saint Laurent Rive Gauche at 21 rue de Tournon, in Paris. The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris describes the line as a separate ready-to-wear collection designed by Saint Laurent himself, not a cheaper copy of his couture. Boutiques followed in New York in 1968 and London in 1969, and Rive Gauche became the means by which his ideas reached a far wider public, through clothes and, increasingly, through accessories.

The Ballets Russes collection

The listing places the clutch in the period of the "Opéras – Ballets Russes" collection, the haute couture collection for autumn–winter 1976. According to the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, it was the first show the house presented at the Hôtel Inter-Continental, and the first accompanied by music. As its title indicates, the collection looked to opera and to the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev, and pieces from it are now held in museum collections, among them the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

The clutch itself was not part of that couture collection, and the listing does not claim so. It belongs to the same years, and its combination of brown with green and red reflects the taste for strong, warm colour that ran through Saint Laurent's work at the time.

The object

The Archivary describes the clutch as an authentic Rive Gauche piece of the late 1970s in supple brown, green and red leather, with an oversized envelope flap and buckle strap. It is lined in the YSL monogram fabric and has an interior zip pocket with an embossed gold "Yves Saint Laurent Paris" stamp, and it was made in France. Its condition is recorded as very good, with light signs of wear and a patina consistent with age.

The construction is straightforward and practical. An envelope flap closed by a buckle is one of the simplest ways of securing a bag, and on an oversized clutch it gives a strong horizontal line, emphasised here by the contrasting colours of the trim.

Colour on a small scale

A collection like "Opéras – Ballets Russes" was made for the runway and for a small number of couture clients. Accessories such as this clutch carried the same sensibility to people who would never wear couture. That transfer, from the stage of a couture show to an object carried every day, is one of the ways in which Rive Gauche changed the reach of Saint Laurent's work.