Saint Laurent celebrate Renato D’Agostin’s road trip photography in new exhibition

Hosted at Saint Laurent’s Rive Droite stores in Paris and LA, the exhibition collates Renato D’Agostin’s photographs of a 2015 road trip across America

Renato D’Agostin photograph of American highway
Renato D’Agostin at Saint Laurent Rive Droite
(Image credit: Photography by Renato D'Agostin, courtesy of Saint Laurent)

Coinciding with Paris Photo – the international photographic fair which took place in the French city earlier this month – Saint Laurent has invited Italian image-maker Renato D’Agostin to exhibit a 2015 series in the house’s Paris and Los Angeles Rive Droite stores. The stores, based on Yves Saint Laurent’s original 1966 Rive Droite store on the Left Bank, primarily house the brand’s collaborative endeavours and limited-edition pieces, alongside furniture, art and vintage music ephemera. ‘My choices are all very instinctive,’ Vaccarello told Wallpaper* on their opening in 2019. ‘I don’t want to intellectualise it too much. Just keep it in the moment – Rive Droite is really about l’air du temps.’

The series, part of which was published in 2015 book 7439, documents a journey D’Agostin took across the United States, travelling 7,349 miles east to west on a vintage 1983 BMW R100 motorcycle. The ethereal photographs – each developed en route, with D’Agostin turning his various hotel rooms into temporary dark rooms – capture an ‘initiatory journey where the man becomes an artist in a series of luminous and contrasting images, full of grace, light and subtlety,’ as the notes describe. A composite of 34 images makes up the various pieces displayed in the exhibition, comprising three triptychs (the central point of the show), as well as a number of diptychs. 

Renato D’Agostin at Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Paris

Saint Laurent T-shirt with Renato D’Agostin print

Saint Laurent T-shirt featuring Renato D’Agostin (Rive Droite exclusive)

(Image credit: Courtesy of Saint Laurent)

The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to purchase D’Agostin’s work (all pieces will be on sale), which features in numerous public collections, such as the Library of Congress and the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the International Centre of Photography in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles, the Centre for Creative Photography in Arizona and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

An exclusive ‘Renato D'Agostin’ book will also be available to purchase in Saint Laurent Rive Droite stores and on the house’s website, alongside a series of T-shirts featuring D’Agostin’s prints made in collaboration with the Venice-born photographer.

Renato D’Agostin at Saint Laurent Rive Droite runs until November 30, 2022. 

ysl.com

Fashion Features Editor

Jack Moss is the Fashion Features Editor at Wallpaper*, joining the team in 2022. Having previously been the digital features editor at AnOther and digital editor at 10 and 10 Men magazines, he has also contributed to titles including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Mr Porter’s The Journal and more, while also featuring in Dazed: 32 Years Confused: The Covers, published by Rizzoli. He is particularly interested in the moments when fashion intersects with other creative disciplines – notably art and design – as well as championing a new generation of international talent and reporting from international fashion weeks. Across his career, he has interviewed the fashion industry’s leading figures, including Rick Owens, Pieter Mulier, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Christian Lacroix, Kate Moss and Manolo Blahnik.