IN FOCUS
A Museum Inspired by Fabric
The Marrakech museum occupies 4,000 square meters on Rue Yves Saint Laurent, near the Jardin Majorelle, where he lived until his death in 2008. Designed by the French architectural firm Studio KO and built by Bouygues, the building draws on Saint Laurent’ s signature interplay of curves and straight lines, as well as delicate, flowing lines and crisp, sharply defined cuts.
Its façade draws its color from the local earth— a rich terracotta red— and is composed of geometric volumes with rounded corners. Cubical forms are clad in intricate brick patterns reminiscent of lace. Inside, the architecture evokes the lining of a garment, with a soft, velvety texture and an atmosphere suffused with light.
The museum features a permanent exhibition devoted to Saint Laurent’ s diverse body of work, a space dedicated to Jacques Majorelle, a gallery for temporary exhibitions, and an auditorium seating about 130 people. It also includes a restaurant, café, book and gift shop, and a library of about 5,000 volumes, including historic works from al-Andalus.
Zellige and Caftan in the Designer’ s Vocabulary
Morocco profoundly influenced Yves Saint Laurent, as it did many artists before him, including Delacroix, Matisse, and Majorelle. This influence appears in his work, revealing a deep familiarity with Moroccan architecture and traditional arts and enabling him to combine elements such as the djellaba, trousers, and other garments for men and women alike.
Marrakech opened the door to a vibrant world of color, shaping his formal vocabulary. It also inspired a new approach to combining and ornamenting colors, resulting in silhouettes that evoke the geometric language of zellige and mosaic. In a statement dating from 1983, he recalled:
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In Morocco, I realized that my own colors were those of zellige, zouak, djellabas, and caftans.
These traditional arts, he explained, were ones he“ took up, transformed, and adapted”— a creative process that went beyond borrowing, a genuine act of re-creation. No account of Yves Saint Laurent’ s legacy would be complete without acknowledging his lifelong companion and business partner, Pierre Bergé. Together, they acquired, restored, and developed the Jardin Majorelle and established the Amazigh Museum on its grounds.
From Garden to Bottle: The Perfume Museum
This fascination with plants and gardens leads us to another museum devoted to the distilled essence of plants: the Perfume Museum, founded by perfumer Abderrazzak Benchaâbane, creator of the fragrance“ Marrakech.” His name became associated with Yves Saint Laurent when he created the eau de toilette Jardin Majorelle. Perfume serves as a final layer, adding fragrance to the body, clothing, and the surrounding space. The museum occupies a nineteenth-century riad in the heart of Marrakech’ s medina, restored in 2006. Designed to awaken the senses, it features a variety of local fragrances and traces the long history of Moroccan perfumery and its associated traditions, including scent, aromatherapy, body care, and well-being rituals.
As visitors move through its rooms, they encounter a sensory journey that begins with the distillation of floral waters and extends to the extraction of plant and essential oils. They also discover the accumulated knowledge passed down through generations of Moroccan perfumers, through a collection of rare tools and extracts used in the craft, as well as medicinal and aromatic plants traditionally used in hammam rituals.
According to Benchaâbane, the Perfume Museum“ is a place where visitors can tour the rooms in about thirty minutes and learn the basics of the raw materials’ journey before becoming bottled perfumes.”
The museum, he explains, offers an introduction to Moroccan perfume traditions and the kingdom’ s aromatic heritage,“ which is very well known in the world of perfumery. Morocco is also among the leading exporters of raw materials for high-quality perfumes, especially to Europe and the United States.”
The museum offers an exceptional showcase of Moroccan expertise in perfumery. The educational journey concludes with an exploration of the“ secret life” of plants in a small garden that evokes Morocco’ s distinctive garden traditions within the broader Arab and African contexts.
THE PERFUME MUSEUM AWAKENS THE SENSES. Ouarzazate: Behind the Scenes of the Seventh Art
If fashion and perfume shape the body and the space around it, set design creates imagined worlds. This is what visitors encounter at the Cinema Museum in Ouarzazate, which opened in 2007 on nearly two hectares of land, opposite the famous Taourirt Kasbah, on the grounds of a former studio of an Italian production company established in 1981.
The museum’ s activities were temporarily suspended in 2024 after a fire broke out in one of its wings, which was being used as a filming location for a foreign production. The damage was repaired quickly, allowing the museum to resume its activities and continue serving as an important tourist destination and cultural and cinematic center for the city.
Walking through the museum’ s corridors and galleries offers an engaging journey into the world of cinema, with its imagined worlds and narratives. Visitors can discover the filming techniques used in several major international productions that chose Ouarzazate as a setting. On display are lighting equipment, classic cameras, props, accessories, costumes, soldiers’ uniforms, Pharaonic statues, and life-size sets built specifically
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