Sixteenth-century decorative time works framed a metal bodysuit strewn with crystal by Thierry Mugler. Gilded silver relics with sculpted hands stand next to a pair of Hermès gloves. A ceramic hand warmer from Faenza, Italy, who looks like a book is plagued with a Chanel coupling that looks like a book.
This is ‘Louvre Couture’, the first fashion exhibition in the famous Paris Museum in his 231-year-old history.
The last time that Haute Couture caused so much excitement in the Louvre was in 1957, when Audrey Hepburn, in the film ‘Funny Face’, for the winged victory of Samothrace in a strapless Red Givenchy dress posed and the Daru stage struck, one Lifting matching chiffon scarf over her head.
Forty-Five Fashion Houses and Designers-From Cristóbal Balenciaga to Iris van Herpen-Have Lent the Museum 100 Ensembles and Accessories, Dating from 1960 to 2025. They are arrayed not among the louvre’s Famous tea near-Sulpare Fe-Sulpeures Fetarees Fetare’s Fetarees Fetare’s Fetarees Fe Sulptures Fetarees of his decorative art department.
The department, whose awkward collection varies from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 19th century, is full of thousands of objects: medieval armor, Renaissance walls, cut ivory, bronze, ceramics, imperial silverware and furniture.
“It is not easy to enter our museum, especially our collection,” said Olivier Gabet, the director of the Decorative Arts Department. “Our goal is to make more people, different people, younger people, happy, free and relaxed when they come here. We say to them: ‘Okay, you like fashion. Fashion is a bridge for us. ” ‘
With this exhibition, which will be opened on January 24, the Louvre adds to the ranks of institutions that have discovered how the popular clothing culture can be used as an access gate to the art world. And more than ever, fashion seduces French museums and artistic spaces.
Two weeks before the Louvre opened its exhibition on January 24, Dolce & Gabbana opened its own spectacle: “From the Heart to the Hands” in the recently renovated Grand Palais. First opening in Milan last spring, the traveling costume retrospective has more than 200 creations of the house within compelling video installations and extensive sets.
But this is not a museum exhibition. “This is an experience that is especially joyful,” says Florence Müller, the creative director of the exhibition. “It is secondary 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 that focuses on the art of using gold to decorate 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 about the life and work of the British designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895).
Two modemusea, one with collections that belong to the state (the Musée des Arts Décoratifs), the other to the city (Palais Galliera), have long had dazzling permanent collections and temporary exhibitions. More recently, luxury groups such as LVMH and Kering have opened their own art exhibition spaces. And Saint Laurent, Dior and Alaïa have all created permanent spaces to show their work.
“Museums and fashion have been dancing together for decades,” says Pamela Golbin, the former main curator of fashion and textile in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “Now there is a real rapprochement. It is not always a successful combination, but if it causes an interest from the audience – if it can see the art differently – it is a great way to use the power of fashion. “
The determining example of this approach is of course the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the blockbuster shows of the costume institute are the most visited every year. As a recognition of the capacity of fashion to attract visitors, is the in the middle of a renovation that will move the fashion department of the basement, where it has traditionally been located, to the former gift shop in the large hall, the majestic main entrance .
The Louvre, with 8.7 million visitors in 2024, does not need fashion to stimulate the presence. On the contrary, it has closed its daily presence to 30,000 to reduce the overcrowding. Only 23 percent of visitors to the Louvre are French; The rest are foreigners. And 66 percent of his visitors are first-timers, who almost all stand in line to see the Mona Lisa.
Since Laurence des Cars became the director of the museum in 2021, she has trouble recurring visitors, a younger audience and more Parisians in the Louvre in Woo. She has opened the museum for some evenings, organized concerts and theatrical versions and experimented with a dance and exercise circuit. The new fashion exhibition fits neatly in this strategy.
Indeed, Mrs. des Cars express so much admiration for the initiatives of the fact that some of her trustees complain that she is being obsessed with.
It is no coincidence that the Louvre-Misschien in a weak echo of the new fashion exhibition is twinning with a fundraising Gala, Le Grand Dîner du Louvre, during the Paris Fashion Week in March. The dinner is served between the marble sculptures in the glass of the glass with glass and is followed by dancing under the pyramid. More than 30 tables were offered for sale and the fundraising goal of a million euros has already been exceeded, the museum said.
This exhibition is the natural next step for the Louvre, which has already come into the fashion world. In 2022 it was one of the six prestigious French museums that exhibit the 60th birthday of the Saint Laurent commemorative house by exhibiting 50 of his creations under their permanent collections. The Louvre placed four of his embroidered and jewelry coats near the French crown jewels in the Gilded Apollo Gallery.
Currently, the Kleine Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, which belongs to the Louvre, has an exhibition called “States of (un) Dress: Delacroix and Clothing”, who investigates how carefully the artist chose the clothing in his paintings. And in March, Louvre-Lens, the Satellite Louvre Museum in Northern France, will open an exhibition called “The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like A Artist”, and investigates what artists chose to wear and why, from the Renaissance to today.
“Art historians often have to know the history of clothing to know art history,” said Bruno Racine, the former head of the National Library of France, who now leads the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, who belongs to the French billionaire François Pinault, founder of the Kering Luxury Group. “This is nothing artificial.”
The Louvre can never match the with when it comes to fashion. In contrast to the Louvre is not a private museum, but a hierarchical institution -run with a limited budget that records his orders from the Ministry of Culture and, ultimately, the French president.
And the Louvre has no clothes. The cruel irony is that the national textile collection of France belongs to the museum, but from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is housed in the vast Louvre structure but is independent of the Louvre Museum.
In a confidential memo for the culture minister Rachida Dati earlier this month, Mrs. des Cars convicted the disastrous physical condition of the museum, including water leaks and temperature variations that put artworks, overcrowding, insufficient toilet facilities and poor signage and poor signage in danger.
Even the glass pyramid droppiece designed by IM Pei and inaugurated in 1989 was “very inhospitable”, according to the memo, extract on Thursday in the newspaper Le Parisien.
But for the time being, the Decorative Arts Department of the Louvre has at least one of the best stage sets to show fashion – namely the apartments of Emperor Napoleon III. The 40-foot high Salon theater seeps beautiful excess with crystal crowns, a fresco-filled ceiling and with gold-leaf stucco decoration with vases of flowers and angels that play instruments.
A mannequin who wears an embroidered red side and sliced ball dress with a deep ernmine sum, designed by John Galliano for Christian Dior, is in the middle of the salon. The dress corresponds to the red sliced upholstery of the salon and curtain perfectly. She immediately looks at home.
Elaine Sciolino, a contributing writer for the New York Times in Paris, is the author of “Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love on the largest museum in the world”, which will be published in April 2025.
