Matisse’s La Blouse roumaine is the outcome of six months’ work. Eleven photographs taken by the artist document key stages in this long development. He showed these alongside the painting at Galerie Maeght in Paris, highlighting the assiduous labour of simplification necessary to achieve the fusion of line and colour that he sought. In its final form, details of the model Lydia Delectorskaya have been omitted, scraped away or covered over. The simple oval of the face echoes the curves of the baggy sleeves. The powerful harmony of the three main areas of colour confers great vitality to the painting.

Source: Centre Pompidou

Attracted by the famous painting with the same name, Yves Saint Laurent created for autumn-winter 1981 collection, “La blouse roumaine” as homage to Henri Matisse. Didier Grumbach, Dean at the French Institute of Fashion, said that for his Romanian collection, Yves Saint Laurent “had inspired from something that he loved most”, the models had also skirts stylized after the Romanian folk “fota” and the hair caught like the girls in the Romanian Villages. The creation “La blouse romaine” remains one of the headlines for “the king of fashion” that is why it was one of the pieces that made the tour of museums around the world, arriving also in Romania in 2009 at The National Art Museum with the occasion of Fashion Festival “Pasarela”. .

Story source: https://anothercoolro.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/la-blouse-roumaine-a-story-started-by-matisse/