The Louvre Opens Its First Fashion Exhibition
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Coinciding with the kickoff of Paris Haute Couture Week, the Louvre opened its doors to “Louvre Couture: Art Objects, Fashion Objects” on January 24th—marking the first major fashion exhibition in the museum’s storied history.
Staged on the first floor of the Richelieu wing, the exhibition transforms the entirety of the museum’s nearly 9,000-square-meter Decorative Arts wing into a walkable fashion mood board, with over 70 garments—rare loans and archival contributions from 45 houses—set against the Louvre’s immense catalogue of paintings, furniture, and decorative objects from the Middle Ages through the 19th century.
All of the famous French luxury houses are accounted for—Givenchy, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior—and represented in the collection are designers from Jean Paul Gaultier to John Galliano. On display are Alexander McQueen's platform Armadillo shoes and pieces from Karl Lagerfeld’s final Chanel collection dialogue with circa-1600s pottery and 18th-century furniture, respectively. Contemporary talent also shines, with Erdem, Thom Browne, and Iris van Herpen all on display.
For Olivier Gabet, the Louvre’s senior heritage curator and director of the Department of Decorative Arts, it was important to show the breadth of the designers who sourced inspiration from the museum throughout its history—from the grand couturiers like Saint Laurent and Bert de Givenchy to young creators like Paris’s disruptive Marine Serre. The exhibit casts the museum as a living source of inspiration, where antiquities are reinterpreted as inspiration for runway shows.
In a departure from the traditional museum route, viewers are invited to wander the exhibition in a non-linear fashion, weaving in and out of thematic vignettes that take a more methodological than chronological tact. Though there are some organizational hat-tips: Chanel has look number five, for example, and Dior, thirty, after its flagship store on Rue Montaigne. “This is an experience that is primarily joyful,” Florence Müller, the exhibition’s creative director, tells the New York Times. “It is secondarily intellectual. It is not meant to be in a museum.”
Unlike New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s robust costume department, the Louvre does not have a standing fashion collection of its own. (Fashion exhibits can instead be found next door at the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Galliera.) “Paris is still the capital of fashion, so there is a very strong consubstantial relationship between the houses and Paris—and the Louvre is at the heart of Paris,” Gabet told Reuters. “There is, quite obviously, a very close relationship between many creators and the museum itself.”
But aside from those obvious artistic precedents, fashion exhibits are also a proven way for museums to draw new audiences and younger crowds. Gabet knows this firsthand: In 2017, he curated the blockbuster show “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. With the Louvre drawing over 8.7 million visitors to its halls in 2024, it’s not that they’re necessarily hurting for traffic numbers—but a fresh, fashionable audience never hurts. Will the celebratory Grand Diner du Louvre planned for March 4th draw comparisons to New York’s Met Gala for the young Parisian set?
“Louvre Couture” will be on view from January 24 to July 21, 2025. Tickets to the exhibit are on sale here.
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