The spring 2009 collection for YSL included these so-called "collector palettes for the eyes/complexion", featuring stripes of color that can be mixed and matched to "turn your look into a work of art". "Contemporary art inspires this year’s Spring Look. An explosion of
vivid colours, graphic lines and sensorial textures reveal a strikingly
modern interpretation of beauty," says the YSL website.
I'm not really sure what the company intended these to look like – they remind me a bit of a Rothko, (one of the curator's favorite artists) but the edges of the colors are obviously neater and lack the fading that Rothko's "color fields" have:
(Mark Rothko, Yellow and Gold, 1956, image from worldgallery.co.uk)
Still, that looks like the inspiration for the palettes, no? In my opinion, it's modern visual art and not the the YSL clothing lineup for the spring 2009 season that was the jumping-off point for these palettes. The ready-to-wear collection, created by Stefano Pilati, had an "East-meets-West" feel to it and had nothing to do with modern art. One of the questions I always try to answer in Couture Monday is whether the company intended their makeup collections to correspond to the season's clothing. Usually this is not the case, as the cosmetics division of a couture house is completely separate from the actual clothing and run by totally different people. With these palettes YSL follows that pattern. And while I'm pleased the palettes look Rothko-esque, it's still a fairly vague suggestion with no clear relation to a particular artist or genre. Another somewhat disappointing release for spring!