Yahoo Lifestyle Is the Louvre the Most Awesome ‘Moodboard’ in Fashion?
“Museums are great moodboards,” Olivier Gabet said as he led a visitor through the Louvre’s first fashion exhibition, opening to the public on Friday.
“Art history is also a history of style, a history of shape, a history of materials,” said Gabet, director of the decorative arts department and curator of “Louvre Couture: Art and Fashion — Statement Pieces,” on display through July 21.
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The sprawling showcase draws literal, oblique and sometimes amusing links between the precious historical objects on display and about 65 contemporary fashion ensembles, plus 35 accessories, installed here and there.
Some of the outfits lord over rooms dramatically; some are placed strategically near the many exhibition access points to pique the curiosity of museum visitors, while others are tucked into display cases, at times nearly invisibly.
In the Medieval and Renaissance galleries, Gabet guided a visitor toward one of the latter housing a Chanel necklace and cuff bracelets that exude the same Byzantine aesthetics as the golden and bejeweled religious paraphernalia surrounding them.
By contrast, JW Anderson’s resin pigeon clutch — which went viral when Sarah Jessica Parker was seen cradling the offbeat minaudière on an episode of “And Just Like That…” — jumps out at you like some alien presence.
Yet it is uncannily similar to its neighbor behind the glass: A brass Eucharistic dove with Limoges enamel, circa 1210 or so — a flap on the vessel used for passage of communion wafers rather than a cell phone.
Gabet, who was director of Les Arts Décoratifs for nine years before joining the Louvre in 2022, made some spine-tingling fashion selections, including a spectacular fall 2004 Dior couture gown by John Galliano whose regal, curtain-like train of patterned red velvet turned out to be a ringer with the furniture upholstery in the lavish Napoleon III apartments.
Similarly, an ivory pantsuit by the late Lee Alexander McQueen for Givenchy, stood near the throne of Napoléon I, slyly echoes motifs from the paintings, vases and other objects scattered about the room.
Gabet stressed that the fashion exhibition was not mounted for lack of visitors: The Louvre attracts nearly 9 million people per year, and management decided in 2022 to cap the number of daily admissions to 30,000.
“It’s to make the experience of the Louvre different,” he remarked during the tour. “A museum is a place of freedom: You’re not obliged to look at everything.”
However, using fashion as a carrot will surely draw younger generations, who can use a handy exhibition map to treasure hunt for looks by Jacquemus, Marine Serre, Undercover, Vivienne Westwood, Loewe and Iris Van Herpen scattered across the nearly 100,000 square feet occupied by the decorative arts department.
“The simple presence of some fashion silhouettes in the galleries bring fresh air and a certain kind of life that make many of the other objects very much alive, too,” Gabet commented. “Fashion is the most wonderful bridge we can find between popular culture and and the collection of the Louvre.”
Officially created in 1893, the department has amassed a collection of 20,000 objects from Byzantine times through to the Second French Empire, a little more than a third of which are on display at any given time. None were removed for the fashion display, though some were slightly scrunched in crowded cases to make way for a metallic Mugler bustier, or one of McQueen’s famous Armadillo shoes.
As the institution has no fashion holdings, save for some lavish coats from The Order of the Holy Spirit, the Louvre borrowed looks from 45 designers and heritage houses, from Balenciaga to Yohji Yamamoto. All were chuffed to participate.
Visitors can read an explanatory text on each invasive fashion piece — or play a “Where’s Waldo?” game and draw their own visual links between marble religious statuary and a frothy Charles de Vilmorin gown nearby, or the Bambi characters fronting a Jean-Charles de Castelbajac skirt suit and the deer embedded in sensational hunting tapestries commissioned by Maximilian I in the 1500s.
By the way, the exhibition clearly shows that Christian Louboutin’s jaunty, studded “dungeon” knee boots are not S&M-inspired, but rather reflect the shoe guru’s fascination with the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
Chanel outfits figure prominently, as the late Karl Lagerfeld knew the Louvre’s decorative arts collection nearly by heart, once dispatching a photo of a blue and white chest of drawers, circa 1743, to the embroidery house Lesage to pattern a suit for what would be his final haute couture show in January 2019.
Poignant, too, is a black and silver gown by the late Azzedine Alaïa that Gabet described as a masterpiece, stood like a sentinel amidst Rennaissance bronzes in the Rotonde Jean Boulogne.
A silk haute couture dress by Christian Dior from his spring 1949 collection, on view at the exhibition’s principle entrance, is one of the only designs Gabet could find named directly after the Louvre, though the impact of the museum’s collections can be felt in the spirit, craft, materials and silhouettes of so many recent fashion creations.
“We have no fashion in our collection, but fashion is everywhere,” he said.
Indeed, Gabet was moved to learn from his one of his curators that the artisans who created 17th-century tapestries meticulously tweaked weaving techniques to demarcate the various fabrics worn by those peopling the vast scenes.
Set designer Nathalie Crinière devised silvery platforms, plinths and window boxes for the fashions, which subtly signal the presence of contemporary artifacts from 1960 to 2025.
The decorative arts departments holdings range from suits of armor, ceramics, ivories, tapestries and scientific instruments to jewelry, bronzes, stained glass and silverware — now with temporary fashion friends.
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