Yves Saint Laurent Always Knew the Power of a Great Image

Although he was famously shy, it’s remarkable how often the designer Yves Saint Laurent had his picture taken. In 1957, when he was newly appointed head of Dior at just 21 years old, Saint Laurent sat for Irving Penn in what would become the first of countless unforgettable photographs of the French fashion icon. When he founded his own label with Pierre Bergé in 1961, the duo made the extraordinary decision to put Saint Laurent himself at the center of the brand's image, a rare move at the time. Through it all, the camera was a constant presence, as if he knew posterity was watching.

A new exhibition celebrates Saint Laurent’s visionary use of photography and imagery to cement his brand’s legacy. On view from June 11 to September 28, 2026, “Yves Saint Laurent and Photography” at the International Center of Photography in New York City takes visitors into the expansive visual universe of a designer whose work continues to shape how fashion is perceived today. Organized with the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris and the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, the show unfolds in two parts: the first devoted to emblematic images of Saint Laurent and his garments by photographers such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Annie Leibovitz; while the second is a wunderkammer of contact sheets, magazine pages, advertising layouts, and invitations to his shows, amounting to some three hundred photographs and objects.

“What’s most exciting about the show is that it functions as a kind of history of photography in its own right—a greatest-hits of image-making related to fashion,” says Simon Baker, curator of the show with Nastasia Alberti and Clémentine Cuinet. “Saint Laurent chose to work with the best practitioners at each moment, and he stayed friends with them. He worked with Penn for more than 30 years and Helmut Newton was a presence throughout almost his entire career. He also kept pace with what was emerging, so when Paolo Roversi and Juergen Teller began to rise as the defining photographers of their moment, he worked with them too.”

A section of the exhibition is devoted to Saint Laurent’s work with fashion magazines, including original pages and a series of Polaroids taken for styling purposes. Imagery from fashion shows appear as well, documenting backstage and front-row moments alike.

“This kind of behind-the-scenes documentation was genuinely unusual for the time,” Baker says. “It’s fairly normal now, but to have someone doing that with real artistic intention in the 1960s—when Saint Laurent was just launching his own house, getting photographed in fitting rooms in beautiful black and white, in images that were not merely documentary but genuinely beguiling—that was something else entirely.”

Saint Laurent’s expansive interest in the art world is also evident in the exhibition. Among the highlights are images from collections in which he paid tribute to artists such as Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso, translating their visual languages into stylish garments. Also on view is Andy Warhol’s 1972 portrait series of Saint Laurent, alongside a photograph of Warhol wearing the designer’s clothes.

Although Saint Laurent is considered the quintessential Parisian designer, New York played a critical role in his career. “Avedon and Penn, the two biggest names in fashion photography at the time, whom Saint Laurent worked with often, were both based in New York,” Baker says. Attuned to its local audience, the ICP show spotlights his decades-long relationship with the city through images of events and fashion shows at landmarks like Battery Park and Liberty Island. In a photograph taken by Henri Dauman in 1958, months after his Dior appointment and years before the launch of his own label, Saint Laurent stands on Seventh Avenue, surrounded by the whirling city. In great contrast, a photograph by Roxane Lowit from the early 1980s shows him holding a Statue of Liberty like a trophy, with a radiant, wide smile.

Below, take a look at a preview of the show.