Yves Saint Laurent viewed fashion as an art, and, as the first designer to ever have a museum show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983, elevated it to that rarefied plateau within the public consciousness. This spring, the Petit Palais in Paris celebrates the revolutionary designer with an exhibition curated by Florence Muller and Farid Chenoune that is simply called Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective. The show traces particular moments in his career and hones in on themes within it: masculinity and femininity (and the adventurous unisex spirit he sought to dress), imaginary travel, gowns and tuxedos, the designer's color palette, and, of course, the arts.

Saint Laurent's passion for art achieved worldwide fame when his collection — which included works by Henri Matisse, James Ensor, Constantin Brancusi, and Pablo Picasso — was auctioned at Christie's in February 2009 for $264 million, making it the most expensive private holdings ever to be sold. Naturally, some of his favorite artists directly impacted his designs. He famously reimagined van Gogh's sunflowers on a jacket by building up embroidery, sequins, and silk ribbons in a way that emulates brushstrokes on a canvas. Matisse's bold collages manifested themselves in Saint Laurent's satin appliqués, cut and layered atop other textiles. The styles of the designer's friend Jean Cocteau and the surrealist couturier Elsa Schiaparelli were merged on a satin jacket of shocking pink — Schiaparelli's favorite color — with the poet's text embroidered across. The clothes illustrate how Saint Laurent saw kinship in ideas, and could poetically distill an artist through handstitching and well-placed seams.

They also show how the designer had a talent for conveying the sensibility of other people through his craft. Saint Laurent mined artists — and entire art-historical periods — for an ambient kind of inspiration, using colors and textures to invoke them rather than making note-for-note references. His insight was never dull: the now-famous “Scandal Collection” of summer 1971 shocked critics with its various iterations of Saint Laurent's le smoking, a men's tuxedo jacket intended for women that transferred symbolic male power onto woman’s frame. For all the depth of thinking behind his process, it's remarkable that he was able to keep the garments so light.

Click on the accompanying slide show for a tour of a few exceptional designs in the Saint Laurent retrospective, courtesy of co-curator Florence Müller.