PARIS — A fanatic about 18th-century interiors, Karl Lagerfeld frequented the Louvre, familiarizing himself with its collection and drawing inspiration from its opulent furniture and lacquered screens.
In January, some of the late German designer’s haute couture and métiers d’art creations for Chanel will go on display at Paris’s prestigious museum in its first fashion-focused exhibition, tracing how the treasures, spanning from the Byzantine period to the Second French Empire, inspired – and continue to inspire – the designer’s imagination.
“This is really the first time that the Louvre has organized an exhibition about the relationship between fashion and one of its collections,” Olivier Gabet, director of the Louvre’s decorative arts department, told WWD exclusively about the project.
The goal is to “truly understand why museums are interesting and important to fashion designers and how our collections, and in particular the Louvre’s collection, can nurture and inspire fashion designers’ collections.”
The yet-to-be-titled exhibition, scheduled to run from Jan. 24 to July 21, will feature around 65 costumes and 30 accessories. They will be displayed in a 9,700-square-foot exhibition space that also showcases the Louvre’s vast collection of decorative arts, from armor, ceramics, ivory, tapestries, scientific instruments, jewelry, bronzes, stained glass and silverware to the opulent apartments of Napoleon III.
Armor believed to have been worn by Henry IV.
Stephane Marechal
Formally established in 1893, the department has amassed a collection of 20,000 objects, just over a third of which are on permanent exhibition.
The Louvre does not own a fashion collection, except for the magnificent coats of the Order of the Holy Spirit, so it borrows clothes from various fashion designers and brands in France, Italy, Britain and the United States. (France’s national fashion collections are owned by Les Arts Décoratifs, where Gabet was director for nine years before joining the Louvre in 2022.)
For his upcoming exhibition, Gabet chose to focus on “more recent creations”, from the ’60s to today, wanting to show how contemporary fashion is often rooted in history, with designers drawing inspiration for silhouettes, colours and decoration from works of art and ornament.
While the Louvre’s armor collection is relatively small, Gabet noted, it could easily mount an exhibition exploring how these protective garments, which can either reflect or exaggerate the body, have inspired a number of designers, including Paco Rabanne, Thierry Mugler and Balenciaga’s Demna, who closed his fall 2023 haute couture show in a metallic Joan of Arc ball gown.
The upcoming exhibition may expose the museum’s “very historic collection” to a “different kind of audience”, but Gabet acknowledged that the collection may seem foreign and irrelevant, especially to younger audiences.
“I think fashion design is a wonderful bridge between generations and the museum, a way to tell the story of something very old in a very fresh, very new, very vivid way,” he said in an interview. “I hope it will become another way of looking at the Louvre’s collection.”
Gabet, who is curating the exhibition, said he aims to make connections between historical objects and more recent fashion pieces immediately obvious, though they reflect varying degrees of inspiration — sometimes almost direct and literal, sometimes more vague, born from cluttered mood boards.
Gabet said the spirit of the exhibition is to celebrate the fact that fashion designers and other creatives nurtured in museums often make different perceptions and connections than curators and art historians, making them museums’ best ambassadors.
He marveled at how designers were drawn to different areas of artistic creation: Erdem Moralioglu to period textiles, Jonathan Anderson to ceramics and crafts, Maria Grazia Chiuri to Italian Renaissance artists, the late Lee Alexander McQueen to Renaissance tapestries, Christian Louboutin to Wedgwood and Sèvres porcelain and, because his father was a cabinetmaker, gilded furniture.
An ornately decorated chest of drawers, part of the Louvre’s vast collection of decorative arts.
Thierry Olivier
All the fashion and accessories will be displayed in the Louvre’s permanent galleries, with set design by interior architect Nathalie Crinière, who has previously collaborated with Gabet on major exhibitions at Les Halles Decoratifs, including the blockbuster Dior show in 2017.
The exhibition will also pay tribute to Madame Carven – she and her husband were key patrons of the Louvre, donating an important collection of 18th-century furniture and decorative objects – “so there will be different layers of relationships,” Gabet said.
Participants include Dolce & Gabbana and Yohji Yamamoto, and he predicted that “maybe some young fashion designers will also participate.”
“You have to have a very open mind when proposing a dialogue between fashion and art,” Gabet said.
Indeed, the exhibition explores questions of “silhouette and body”, history and inspiration, the connection between fashion and craft, and the mixing of elements from around the world.
An upcoming exhibition furthers the emerging trend of museums embracing fashion: To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s brand in 2022, the late couturier’s work has been exhibited in six major Paris museums, alongside some of the artworks that inspired him.
Fashion exhibitions now include more than just dresses; for example, the recent Iris van Herpen retrospective at Les Halles Decoratifs included fossils, skeletons, avant-garde artwork, microscopes, and a variety of tools and installations.
Gabet said the Louvre project will be unique given the depth of the collection, which spans more than 12 centuries, and that it is a non-monographic exhibition featuring the work of around 40 designers.
He also stressed that the Louvre’s exhibitions start with the collection and then link with fashion, not the other way around.
“I think that today fashion becomes even more interesting when it’s shown in relation to other disciplines,” he said. “When you talk to designers, of course we talk about fashion, but we also talk about art and craft and photography. There’s a big change now in the way fashion sees itself in relation to other creative disciplines.”
With this new perspective in mind, Gabet decided to ask several thinkers from across the Louvre’s disciplines to contribute essays to the exhibition catalogue.
“I think it’s interesting every now and then to ask art historians and museum curators what they think about fashion,” he said.
Reliquary bust in the Louvre.
Philippe Fouseau
