The Louvre has long been an elegant backdrop for the fashion world. Think of that mod icon Anna Karina sprinting through its halls in Godard’s Bande à Part, or a crimson-clad Audrey Hepburn joyfully descending the Daru staircase in Funny Face. More recently, the Louvre has embraced the role of fashion host, inviting the likes of Ferragamo and Louis Vuitton onto its grounds. Once a palace, the museum is now the site of Fashion Weeks past and future.
With “Louvre Couture. Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces,” an exhibition that opened yesterday in the Decorative Arts Department, the museum is no longer just a stylish setting but an actor in fashion history. Indeed, many have wondered, given the success of fashion exhibitions around the globe, why the Louvre has held itself apart for so long. One must remember that unlike the Metropolitan Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum, and despite galleries overflowing with historic textiles and representations of dress, the Louvre does not have a costume department. This exhibition, the first on fashion curated by the Louvre, stages dynamic encounters between dress and art, while exploring the role of art history in the designer’s creative process.
Organized by Olivier Gabet, with the assistance of Marie Brimicombe, “Louvre Couture” is spread out across nearly 100,000 square feet, with about 100 looks and accessories from the 1960s to today placed in dialogue with decorative art from Byzantium to the Second Empire. Rather than de-contextualizing the works in a temporary exhibition gallery, the Louvre’s scenographic approach encourages free-range wandering of the body as well as of the mind. Emphasis is placed on the notion of juxtapositions, echoes, and associations that Gabet likens to the Surrealist game cadavre exquis.
“Louvre Couture” stars 45 designers and houses, and moves from legends like Balenciaga and Schiaparelli to more recent fashion figures such as Rabih Kayrouz and Marine Serre. The garments and accessories are matched with ceramics, silver, furniture, tapestries, jewels, and objets d’art, and explore art-historical inspiration as well as the shared lexicon and methodologies of fashion and art.
Sometimes, the groupings involve direct citations, such as a Chanel Spring/Summer 2019 jacket that re-interprets in embroidery the motifs of a Rococo chest of drawers. Others are playfully evocative, demonstrating a designer’s proclivity for the silhouettes and aesthetics of a certain period or spotlighting Gabet’s nimble seeing, as when he pairs JW Anderson’s 3D-printed pigeon clutch with its 13th-century analogue—a Limoges Eucharistic dove. The alliances go beyond a 1:1 comparison between a fashion look and a decorative object to capture both the spirit of an era and a timeless, visual vocabulary.
This exhibition may be a first for the Louvre, but it is anchored in history and heritage. It comes as no surprise that couturiers have a penchant for the decorative arts. A temple to the muses, the museum is a muse in itself. Designers, drawing inspiration from museums into their own seasonal collections, are in turn breathing life back into works from the past.
With an unprecedented number of couture pieces entering the institution’s beloved halls for the first time, “Louvre Couture” frames the galleries through a novel and very contemporary lens. Artistic, cultural, and social expression, fashion is a language that we all speak and a means of seeing the world around us. Gabet recognizes the exhibition’s potential to reach a large, diverse audience that might not otherwise be drawn to the Decorative Arts Department. “Fashion,” he says, “is a wonderful bridge.”
“Louvre Couture. Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces” is on at the Louvre, in Paris, until July 21
A Paris-based enthusiast of fashion studies and art, Lacey Minot has written about the history of pajamas, ghosts in white dresses, and Foujita’s sense of style. Her work appears in a variety of international publications
