Yves Saint Laurent, the Kering-owned French fashion house, announced a sidestep into film production back in 2023, with what appeared to be a series of unofficial pacts with veteran arthouse filmmakers.
Since then, the fashion house has popped up on the credits of several high-profile titles, such as Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez and Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope. But there’s never been much real insight into how Saint Laurent supports these projects. Veteran costume designer Catherine George peeled back the curtain a little this afternoon during a Q&A session at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece. George worked with Saint Laurent on Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Lion-winning feature Father Mother Sister Brother.
“The film was made in collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent, who are now making films, and their creative director is a great film fan and cinephile. He has chosen particular directors, Jim being one of them, alongside Paolo Sorrentino, Abel Ferrara, David Cronenberg, and Pedro Almodóvar,” George said.
“So they wanted to collaborate with Jim. He did a short film for them, and they chose this project. So, initially, when Jim asked me if I wanted to read the script, he said, Catherine, I’ve got a project that shoots in Dublin, Paris, and New York, but it’s a little complicated, because Yves Saint Laurent will be collaborating with you on the costumes.”
George said the process of working with Saint Laurent was initially “a little time-consuming.”
“We were in New York and they were in Paris, so choosing colors sort of took a day because the fabrics were FedExed. But it was worth it because when they came, they were incredibly beautiful. They have access to the best materials. And when we got to making the garments, the quality of production was really incredible.”
Back in 2023, Saint Laurent said that it was the first fashion house to “count full-fledged production of films among its activities.” Nonetheless, the collaboration between French fashion houses and filmmakers isn’t new. Chanel has worked in cinema for decades and financed Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). Saint Laurent’s other 2025 title is Claire Denis’s The Fence.
Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother stars Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, Sarah Greene, Luka Sabbat, and Françoise Lebrun. The film tells the story of estranged siblings who reunite after years apart and are forced to confront unresolved tensions and reevaluate their strained relationships with their emotionally distant parents.
In a review out of Venice, where the film won the Golden Lion, Deadline’s Damon Wise called the movie “an elevated cringe comedy” that harkens back to Jarmusch’s earlier work of the 1980s and ’90s.
“Compared to 2005’s Broken Flowers, this is a wilfully obscure step back to his deadpan, experimental roots, a gentle, almost deliberately un-film that is best not viewed in too much proximity to the witching hour,” Wise wrote.
Mubi will release Father Mother Sister Brother in the U.S. on December 24.
The 2025 Thessaloniki International Film Festival runs until November 9.
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