The Louvre in Paris opened “ Louvre Couture, Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces,” the first fashion exhibition at the famed Paris museum in its 231-year history, seeking to draw new, younger audiences amid national concern about conditions inside the landmark art destination.
The exhibition, which will run until July 21, 2025, will showcase 70 fashion garments and 30 accessories from 45 fashion houses and designers. Clothing lovers of Dolce & Gabbana, Yves Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga — revealing an unprecedented dialogue between art and fashion from the 1960s to today.
They have lent the museum 100 ensembles and accessories, which are arrayed not among the Louvre’s famous paintings and marble sculptures but throughout the nearly 100,000 square feet of rooms and galleries.
While this is the first time the Louvre has exhibited fashion garments, clothing is omnipresent in its galleries, from Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker” to Ingres’ nude, turban-wearing “Grand Odalisque.” What is worn — or not worn — has always been a central component of the creation and reception of art.
Two weeks before the Louvre opened its exhibition on January 24, Dolce & Gabbana opened a fashion spectacle of its own: “From the Heart to the Hands,” in the newly renovated Grand Palais. First opening in Milan last spring, the traveling costume retrospective features more than 200 creations of the house within immersive video installations and elaborate sets.
But this is not a museum exhibition. “This is an experience that is primarily joyful,” said Florence Müller, the creative director of the exhibition. “It is secondarily intellectual. It is not meant to be in a museum.”
Next month, the Musée du Quai Branly, a collection of African, Oceanic, American and Asian works, will open “Golden Thread,” an exhibition focusing on the art of using gold to adorn clothing and jewelry.
In May, the Petit Palais, which belongs to the city of Paris, will mount “Worth: The Birth of Haute Couture,” a retrospective of the life and work of the British designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895).
Two fashion museums, one with collections belonging to the state (the Musée des Arts Décoratifs), the other to the city (Palais Galliera), have long featured dazzling permanent collections and temporary exhibitions. More recently, luxury groups like LVMH and Kering have opened their own art exhibition spaces. Saint Laurent, Dior, and Alaïa have all created permanent spaces to show their work.
“Museums and fashion have been dancing with each other for decades,” said Pamela Golbin, the former chief curator of fashion and textiles at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “Now there’s a real rapprochement. It is not always a successful pairing, but if it triggers an interest from the public — if it can see the art differently — it’s a great way to use the power of fashion.”
“It’s very important for the Louvre to continue to open itself up to new generations and to make its own small contribution to understanding today’s world. That is exactly what this exhibition does,” said Laurence des Cars, the museum’s president, in an interview at the Louvre.
The collection weaves the threads between fashion and a diverse array of “art objects” — including tapestries, ceramics, portraits, sculptures, and the layout of the Louvre’s galleries themselves.
Visitors are invited to flâner — or wander aimlessly, as the French saying goes — through the museum and discover its less popular collections.
“The Louvre is so much more than just the ‘Mona Lisa’,” Olivier Gabet, the museum’s director of art objects as well as the exhibition’s curator, said.
A fashionable exchange
While painter Paul Cézanne once observed that “the Louvre is the book in which we learn to read,” for fashion designers, the museum is the “ultimate mood board,” observed Gabet.
From Lagerfeld to Alexander McQueen, designers have long been inspired by the wealth of collections displayed at the world’s biggest museum. Some, like Christian Louboutin, shared with Gabet childhood memories of days spent in its halls. Others, like Yves Saint Laurent, were themselves great art connoisseurs and collectors. For Gabet, the personal relationship between the designers and the Louvre was the starting point for the exhibition.
It’s a connection epitomized by the Dior silhouette that opens the exhibition, said Gabet. Entitled, “Musée du Louvre,” Gabet said that, to his knowledge, it is the “only piece in the history of haute couture to be named after a museum.
The exhibition pays homage to major historical periods, inviting visitors to rediscover the Louvre’s artifacts through the prism of contemporary designers. Highlights include a crystal-embroidered Dolce & Gabbana dress inspired by 11th-century mosaics from Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello, Venice.
A spectacular silk Dior gown featuring a Sun King motif is staged before a baroque portrait of Louis XIV himself.
Iconic pieces such as Gianni Versace’s 1997 metal mesh gown — previously displayed at the 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” Met Gala exhibition — are also on display.
The garment took two of the atelier’s seamstresses more than 600 hours — or 25 days — to stitch by hand and is embellished with Swarovski crystals, golden embroidery featuring Byzantine crosses and Versace’s signature draping inspired by Ancient Greek peplum dresses.
The gown inspired both Kim Kardashian’s gold Versace dress at the 2018 Met Gala and Donatella Versace’s iconic “Tribute” collection the same year, which featured five of the original supermodels: Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen.
Details
Sometimes, designers’ references to objects in the Louvre are literal. Karl Lagerfeld’s 2019 collection for Chanel, for instance, featured a striking embroidered jacket whose motif is drawn from an 18th-century blue and white chest by cabinet maker Mathieu Criaerd.
Lagerfeld, who considered the Louvre his “second studio,” sketched his initial designs for the dress on a museum catalog featuring the chest, before sending the final version to the Chanel atelier.
Glamour can even be found in the Middle Ages, with armour-style dresses transforming models into modern Joan of Arcs. French actress Brigitte Bardot was famously photographed by David Bailey in a 1967 Paco Rabanne chainmail tunic, which is featured in the exhibition next to a 3D-printed armour Balenciaga gown.
More often, the broad sweep of history serves as recurrent inspiration for designers, such as Italian Renaissance paintings for Maria Grazia Chiuri at Christian Dior, Medieval tapestries for Dries van Noten, or 18th-century delicacies evoked by John Galliano and Christian Louboutin.
Amidst the Paris Fashion Week, “Louvre Couture” offers a source of inspiration for designers and visitors alike, illuminating the ongoing dialogue between art and fashion.
“The exhibition is not here to say that fashion is or isn’t art,” Gabet concluded. “Fashion is about creation. The artistic culture shared between great designers — that’s the leitmotif of the collection.”
And this is just the beginning of the conversation. In March, the famed Parisian museum will host hundreds of guests for the Grand Dîner, an event that is already being referred to as the first French Met Gala.
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