EXCLUSIVE: Move Over Mona Lisa: Fashion Is Coming to the Louvre

PARIS — Mad for 18th-century interiors, Karl Lagerfeld frequently visited the Louvre, knew its holdings by heart, and drew inspiration from its sumptuous furniture and lacquered screens.

In January, some of the late German designer’s haute couture and métiers d’art creations for Chanel all that inspired will invade the storied Paris museum, which is mounting its first fashion-focused exhibition, tracing how precious objects from Byzantine times through to the Second French Empire have fueled designers’ imaginations — and continue to do so.

“This is really the first time that the Louvre has decided to create an exhibition about the relationship between fashion and its own collections,” said Olivier Gabet, director of the decorative arts department at the Louvre Museum, revealing the project exclusively to WWD.

The goal is to “really try to understand why museums can be interesting and important for fashion designers and how our collections, especially at the Louvre, can nurture and inspire the collections of fashion designers.”

Slated to run from Jan. 24 to July 21, the exhibition — whose title has yet to be finalized — is to showcase about 65 ensembles and 30 accessories. These will be installed across the 9,700 square feet that showcase the Louvre’s vast decorative arts holdings, which range from suits of armor, ceramics, ivories, tapestries, scientific instruments, jewelry, bronzes, stained glass and silverware to the lavish Napoleon III apartments.

Officially created in 1893, the department has amassed a collection of 20,000 objects, a little more than a third of which are on display at any given time.

As it has no fashion holdings, barring some lavish coats from The Order of the Holy Spirit, the Louvre is borrowing looks from an array of fashion designers and houses in France, Italy, the U.K. and the U.S. (France’s national fashion collection belongs to Les Arts Décoratifs, where Gabet was director for nine years before joining the Louvre in 2022.)

For the forthcoming exhibition, Gabet opted to focus on “more recent creation” — from the ’60s through to today — eager to demonstrate how contemporary fashion is often rooted in history, its designers gleaning inspiration for silhouettes, colors and embellishment from artworks and decorative objects.

While the Louvre has a relatively small collection of armor, Gabet noted he could easily mount an entire exhibition exploring how these protective garments, which can echo or exaggerate the body, have influenced numerous designers, including Paco Rabanne, Thierry Mugler and Balenciaga’s Demna, who closed his fall 2023 couture show with a metal Joan of Arc ballgown.

The forthcoming exhibition could bring “a different kind of audience” to look at the museum’s “very historical collections,” which Gabet acknowledged can seem foreign and extraneous, especially to young people.

“I think that fashion design is an excellent bridge between generations and museums — a way to talk about something which is very old in a very fresh, very new and very lively way,” he said in an interview. “I hope it will be another way to look at the collection of the Louvre.”

Gabet, who is curating the display, said he aims to make links between the historical objects and the recent fashion creations immediately obvious, though they reflect varying degrees of inspiration — sometimes almost direct and literal, sometimes more blurred from a busy mood board.

The spirit of the exhibition is to exalt the fact that fashion designers and other creatives who are nourished by museums are often these institutions’ best ambassadors, drawing different perceptions and connections than curators or art historians, Gabet said.

He marveled how designers are drawn to different fields of artistic creation: Erdem Moralıoğlu to period textiles, Jonathan Anderson to ceramics and crafts, Maria Grazia Chiuri to artists during the Italian Renaissance, the late Lee Alexander McQueen to Renaissance tapestries, and Christian Louboutin to ceramics by Wedgwood and Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, and giltwood furniture, since his father was a cabinetmaker.

All of the fashions and accessories will be sprinkled across the Louvre’s permanent galleries, with interior architect Nathalie Crinière conscripted for the set design. Crinière had collaborated with Gabet on large-scale exhibitions at Les Arts Décoratifs, including the blockbuster Dior one in 2017.

The exhibition will also pay homage to Madame Carven, as she and her husband were major benefactors of the Louvre, donating an important collection of 18th-century furniture and decorative objects. “So it will be different layers of relationships,” Gabet said.

Participants are to range from Dolce & Gabbana and Yohji Yamamoto “to perhaps some surprise with younger fashion designers,” he teased.

“We need to be very open minded in the way we propose dialogues between fashion and art,” Gabet said.

Indeed, the display is to address questions about “the silhouette and the body,” the question of history and inspiration, fashion’s connection to craft, and its mixing of elements from all over the world.

The forthcoming exhibition further fans an emerging trend for art museums to incorporate fashion. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the house of Yves Saint Laurent in 2022, the late couturier’s creations went on display at six major Paris museums alongside some of the artworks that inspired them.

Fashion exhibitions also showcase more than dresses these days, exemplified by the recent Iris Van Herpen retrospective at Les Arts Décoratifs that incorporated fossils, skeletons, avant-garde artworks, microscopes and various tools and installations.

Gabet said the project at the Louvre will be unique given the depth of the collection, spanning more than a dozen centuries, and given that the exhibition is not monographic, featuring the work of about 40 designers.

He also stressed that the Louvre exhibition starts from its collection and draws links to fashion, not the other way around.

“Today, I think that fashion is even more interesting when it is shown in connection with other fields,” he said. “When you talk to a designer, of course they talk about fashion, but they also talk about art, they talk about craft, they talk about photography. It’s a big shift right now in the way fashion looks at itself — in relation to other fields of creation.”

In this vein of new perspectives, Gabet decided to tap the Louvre’s brain trust in various fields of expertise to write essays in the exhibition catalogue.

“I think it’s interesting for once to ask art historians and museum curators to share their feelings about fashion,” he said.