The first exhibition in the UK of the work of Yves Saint Laurent, one of the most influential fashion designers of all time, is being unveiled in County Durham in a few week's time

Given his towering influence on the world of fashion, one might have expected the first major Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in the UK to have gone to London. Instead, it’s coming this month to County Durham, being staged in Barnard Castle’s stunning French chateau-style Bowes Museum.

It’s a coup for the museum and the North-East, but a decision which has the backing of Saint Laurent's former partner, who said the museum was the perfect setting for the show. "The Bowes Museum is a natural destination given its exceptional work with fashion and textiles; the museum and its location also clearly reflects Yves Saint Laurent's and my own passion for inspiring, timeless places,” said Pierre Bergé, president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé, which is committed to the promotion of the work of YSL internationally. “It is the perfect setting for us – a museum built as a French chateau, in the age of the Second Empire”

The Yves Saint Laurent: Style Is Eternal exhibition will highlight the defining elements of Saint Laurent’s vision, and the significant influence it has had on fashion and the way we understand womenswear. It will feature 50 outfits, many never shown outside Paris before, and spans Saint Laurent’s incredible career. It will include designs influenced by art history, such as his sharply cut and patterned Mondrian dresses, and his Russian collection, inspired by the costume designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s early 20th-century Ballets Russes.

It will also include his endlessly imitated jumpsuits, trench coats, trouser suits and the dinner jackets he transformed into women’s evening wear, dubbed Le Smoking, which he launched in 1966 and which still feature on almost every red carpet. His mannish clothes for women were socially important. As Bergé has said: “If Chanel gave women their freedom, it was Saint Laurent who empowered them.”

After heading up the Christian Dior fashion house from 1957 to 1960 as creative director, Saint Laurent created his own fashion house with Bergé, with its first catwalk show in 1962. Saint Laurent had the ambition to dress all women, not only exclusive haute couture clientele and in 1966, he opened the first ready-to-wear boutique to bear a couturier’s name, Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, opening the way to fashion as we know it today.

For 40 years, Bergé managed the business while Saint Laurent focused entirely on the creative side, and the pair built it into a multi-million-pound fashion and perfume empire.

In the first dozen years, the designer defined a new style and composed the quintessential elements of the modern woman’s wardrobe: the pea jacket and trench-coat in 1962; the first tuxedo in 1966; the safari jacket and the first trouser suit in 1967; the jumpsuit in 1968. During the 1960s and 1970s, the firm popularised fashion trends such as the beatnik look, safari jackets for men and women, tight pants and tall, thigh-high boots. He also started mainstreaming the idea of wearing silhouettes from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

The show will link into the Bowes Museum’s own fashion collection and will explore a number of themes – art, transparency and women’s emancipation – as well as highlighting the different eras and styles of his creative career.

“The Bowes Museum feels honoured to host the first exhibition in the UK of one of the most influential fashion designers of all time,” said Fashion Curator Joanna Hashagen. “This certainly is a great moment in the history of The Bowes Museum, as well as for fashion display in the UK.

  • Yves Saint Laurent: Style is Eternal. July 11 to October 25

The Bowes Museum, Newgate, Barnard Castle, County Durham DL12 8NP. T: 01833-690606; W: thebowesmuseum.org.uk