Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Fashion myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the crepuscular half-light of the Louvre museum after hours, silver armour glows like an otherworldly beacon surrounded by tapestries and intricately decorated shields and helmets. The armour in question is not part of the museum’s Renaissance objets d’art collection that surrounds it, but rather a dress from Balenciaga’s 2023 autumn/winter haute couture collection made of 3D-printed chrome laminate. “Making clothes is my armour,” designer Demna, who was inspired by Joan of Arc, said when it was first shown.This dialogue between the history of art, the museum’s collections and a designer’s references plays out across the 9,000 sq metre Louvre Couture exhibition opening January 24 — the museum’s first in its 232-year history to focus on fashion. The show features around 100 contemporary fashion pieces from 45 designers and maisons from Balmain and Iris van Herpen to Loewe and Schiaparelli. The Louvre is following in the footsteps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Victoria and Albert in putting on a large-scale fashion exhibit — theirs have met with huge success and been big fundraising draws. However, a snobbish attitude towards fashion — which many in the art world view as more commercial and less intellectual than other mediums — has historically made many of the major museums hold back from doing shows on the subject.The Louvre has announced that it will also host a fundraising gala during fashion week in March. Some 30 tables have been offered for sale and the museum has already surpassed its €1mn fundraising target. The exhibition does not focus on presenting a chronology of fashion history. Rather, it shows modern fashion creations placed among the museum’s own collection of design objects, teasing out the historical references that inspired them.“These designers had an incredibly sophisticated culture which was a big part of their creativity, and many, like Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, were regular visitors to the Louvre. The history of art provides one of the biggest sources of inspiration to the world of fashion,” says the show’s curator and head of the museum’s objets d’art department Olivier Gabet. “It’s a mirror language — and I wanted to draw that out by reflecting it in these works of art.”The exhibition unfolds across four time periods — the Byzantine period and Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 17th and 18th centuries, and the 19th century and France’s Second Empire — with fashion creations placed on mirrored podiums and in glass display cases surrounded by the Louvre’s decorative arts collection. In one room, a Versace shirt dress is placed in the centre of a reconstruction of Louis XVIII’s bedroom, the brocade hangings mirroring the swirling black-and-gold paisley of the dress. In another, a leaf-motif brocade coat by Dries Van Noten and a dark floral dress by Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior are set against foliage-rich medieval tapestries. Jewel-encrusted Dolce & Gabbana gloves and Chanel cuffs blend nearly seamlessly with Byzantine artefacts, while an imperious high-necked white suit designed for Givenchy by Alexander McQueen stands next to Napoleon’s throne, the bee motif stitched on its dramatic sleeves referencing the French emperor’s coat of arms.But for all the attention paid to the fashion elements of the exhibition, they are placed relatively sparsely throughout the museum’s collections, with most rooms featuring only a few pieces. For Gabet, this was by design. “I didn’t just want the collection’s objects to be secondary,” he says. “I wanted there to be a context, a conversation, and for visitors to look at the [collection’s] objects in a different way.”Gabet first became interested in the connection between art and fashion 15 years ago, when he was working with Louvre director Laurence des Cars on the launch of Louvre Abu Dhabi. As part of the project, some of the first acquisitions the Abu Dhabi collection made were of fashion pieces from the 2009 sale of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé’s estate. Later, once des Cars joined the Louvre and Gabet was running the Musée des Arts Décoratifs next door in Paris, the two dreamt up the idea of doing a collaborative project “linked to fashion”, Gabet says. When Gabet was hired by the Louvre in 2022, des Cars quickly gave him the green light. While fashion houses were deeply involved in sourcing the pieces from their collections and archives, the exhibition differs from those hosted by other museums in not having any luxury or fashion sponsors — which Gabet said was important so that he could maintain a free hand in his curatorial choices. Attracting younger generations to the museum is also part of the calculus. “All the museums do not want to step too far from the generation of 15- to 25-year-olds . . . this [show] also allows us to talk about our collections differently, to link them to a form of popular culture that is quite fascinating.”For Gabet, the essential is to convey that the Louvre has created a fashion exhibition that is “serious” and “where the objects in the Louvre are not devalued by the presence of fashion, and fashion finds a setting that suits it very well with a dialogue that is on an equal footing”.Follow us on Instagram and sign up for Fashion Matters, your weekly newsletter about the fashion industry
