Fashion and art have long danced a pass deeux, with artists who evoke clothing in their work and designers who refer to art in their creations.
But rarely the two have been investigated by large art institutions, said Annabelle Ténèze, the director of the Musée du Louvre-LensA satellite in Lens, North France, from the famous Musée du Louvre. “The intersection of art and fashion speaks to everyone. We all dress every day, what an act of artistic expression, in the way. I thought:” Why not look at the history of this relationship and show how it fits our lives today? “”
Shortly after her appointment in the museum in 2022, Ténèze set the long -term subject to her colleague, Olivier Gabet, who leads the Decorative Arts Department of Louvre in Paris, and suggested that they put it together. “I thought it was a bright and strong idea,” Gabel said in an interview last week, “because it can be read on so many different layers.”
The result is “The art of dressing: dressing like an artist”, an exhibition of 200 works of art and fashion items that investigates how these two creative worlds circles, cross and inspire each other and sometimes merge into one. It opens on Wednesday at the Louvre-Lens and runs until July 21.
“The Art of Dressing” is the second exhibition of the Louvre that combines fashion with art, after “Louvre Couture‘A show compiled by Gabet who was opened in Paris in January. For that show, Gabet has put contemporary fashion and accessories under the museum’s art and furniture collections to reveal a dialogue between métiers and eras.
The show of Ténèze and Gabet in the Louvre-Lens goes deeper and everything goes on from the influence of ancient Greece on modern clothing to the expression of gender identity by clothing. “It is a nice variety to have the position about fashion from a museum that is not a fashion museum,” said Gabet. “The perspective is different.”
With a large color photo from 1998 of the five models in the Yves Saint Laurent Room, the art of dressing opens a space in the National Gallery in London dedicated to Rubens that was restored in the mid -1990s, partly by a donation of 1 million pounds of fashion designer and his partner Pierre Bergé. On the photo every woman is dressed in a Saint Laurent -outfit inspired by an artist, such as the Mondrian dress from 1965 and the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” jacket from 1988.
Also to be seen are three looks from Saint Laurent who were inspired by Georges Braque, the celebrated cubist artist who painted a ceiling in the Louvre in the 1950s. “We wanted to show that the couturier and the visual artist can be at the same level,” Ténèze said during a tour of the exhibition last week. “What is a better way to start than with Yves Saint Laurent?”
The exhibition also takes into account the clothing that artists wore and what their fashion choices reveal about their place in society.
“Artists of the 19th century decided to represent themselves in painting by wearing a black suit that was the absolutely most bourgeois outfit in that period,” said Gabet, pointing to self -portraits by Eugène Delacroix in 1837 and Edgar Degas in 1855. Previously, as the exhibition shows, artists often depicted as St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, who wore a collar -free tunic.
In stark contrast, however, is how artists actually dress when they work: often in paint and clay-spattered overalls, such as the royal blue that preferred the 20th-century Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely. His estate still had one of those items of clothing 34 years after his death and lent it to the curators for the show. (Returning to the fashion world, the overall of Tinguely are shown near a Saint Laurent Jumpsuit from 1984 inspired by the classic French employee jacket, the Bleu de Travail.)
It was shocking in the 19th century when some Female artists visited the studio-as is apparent from the portrait of Georges Achille-Fould’s from 1893 of her mentor, Rosa Bonheur, painting a landscape while she was dressed in brown pants and a blue cook. “Women who wore pants was at the time an action allowed by society,” Ténèze explained. And also much later: Saint Laurent caused social protest in the sixties with his tuxedo for women, one of which has been in the show since 1995. “Because these artists fought against social norms, we can dress more freely today,” Ténèze said.
Thinking of androgynia led Ténèze and Gabet to look at gender identity and cross-dressing in art and fashion. In the show there are some expected icons, such as the 19th-century French female writer George Sand, who, like Bonheur, preferred to wear men’s clothing-is depicted on her most wetest in a Sepia-tinted portrait by Delacroix from 1834 and Andy Warhol, who transformed by change and wig.
But there are also a few surprises, such as Louise Abbéma’s ‘sur lac au bois de boulogne’, a landscape from 1883 with herself, in a men’s suit, and her companion, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, in a light pink dress, in a light pink Jurk, in a pale boot on a pale dress. The trustees said that they long forgotten female artists, such as Abbéma, wanted to highlight to breathe new life into the interest in their work.
The many threads of the show come together when the curators celebrate the collaborations of artists and fashion designers, such as those of the French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle and her great friend, Marc Bohan, the designer at Christian Dior from 1960 to 1989. In the early 1980s Saint Phalle created a name equipment fum; In turn, Bohan made to Saint Phalle A Gladling golden pantsuit and headpiece inspired by her snake to wear for the launch event of the perfume (that Warhol organized). Both the suit and the bottle and packaging of the perfume are in the exhibition; Unfortunately, the headpiece has been lost for a long time, Ténèze said.
When museum visitors leave the exhibition, they pass a zigzag wall of full mirrors inspired by the design of a fashion show of the British designer Alexander McQueen, explained the scenograph of the exhibition, Mathis Boucher.
“We wanted visitors to look at themselves in the mirrors and asked:” Why did I set up this today? What am I trying to say with this outfit? ” Ténèze said “just like the exhibition, it is a reflection of ourselves and our relationship with clothing.”
The art of dressing: dressing like a artist
March 26 to July 21 in the Louvre-Lens in Lens, France; louvanelens.fr.
