NO ONE IS quite sure how the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum, got its name. One theory goes that the area was an ancient hunting ground for wolves (lupi in Latin), which used to roam near the Seine. Recently the museum has again become a hunting site, this time for more funds and new donors. To better accommodate the nearly 9m visitors who traipse through its galleries each year, it must raise around $800m for a renovation.
That may seem like a lot, but the museum is vast. According to one estimate, it would take 18 eight-hour days to see the more than 400 rooms of the Louvre if you were to stop at each work for 15 seconds. (Though that is rarely anyone’s ambition: 80% of visitors come primarily to see the “Mona Lisa”.) “It may well be the best-known and yet least understood museum in the world,” writes Elaine Sciolino, a journalist, in a forthcoming book, “Adventures in the Louvre”.
Against this backdrop, the museum has opened the first fashion exhibition in its 231-year history. It brings together around 100 outfits and accessories from 45 fashion houses and places them alongside the Louvre’s decorative-arts collection, which includes furniture, objects and more.
Hundreds of years divide the museum’s works from the couture creations, but they are intriguingly, and playfully, matched. Leather gloves from Hermès share a case with reliquaries from the 1300s in the shape of saints’ hands. A Balenciaga chrome-plated dress is placed next to a suit of armour from around 1560. A white-and-gold trouser suit by Givenchy, including a handsome sash featuring bumblebees, stands near a throne which belonged to Napoleon. He chose the industrious insect as his emblem.
The show’s aim is to entice new visitors to discover a different wing of the museum, after they have elbowed their way for a selfie in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous work. “The Louvre is very diverse, much more than only one painting and a few other ancient sculptures,” says Olivier Gabet, the curator, who thinks the exhibition has already helped people “rediscover parts of the collections they don’t know”.
Fashion is “attracting new audiences, yes, but it’s also attracting new donors”, points out Aurelie Cauchy of the Twentieth, an art-advisory firm. The Louvre did not seek sponsorship from fashion brands for the exhibition, which meant the museum retained critical and curatorial control. Instead, on March 4th the Louvre will host its first fashion gala, modelled after the Met Gala in New York, where impractically dressed celebrities swarm and help raise vast sums to support the institution. At the Louvre’s soirée every fashion house involved in the show, and even some that were not, have bought pricey tables.
Fashion shows are the blockbusters of the museum world, selling out tickets. On view until July 21st, the Louvre’s couture show is one of the best focused on fashion ever staged by a museum. That is because it does not come off as nakedly commercial. Here the relationship between fashion and objects feels intellectual and authentic. About a third of the couture pieces were directly influenced by the museum’s collection, according to Mr Gabet.
For example, Karl Lagerfeld, a longtime designer for Chanel, asked a textile producer to mimic the pattern of a blue-and-white chest for a blazer he designed in 2019; the outfit is on display next to the chest that inspired it. Lagerfeld, Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent were frequent visitors to the Louvre, a reminder that an industry known for ditz and glitz is knitted to high culture and history.
To see how a fashion show can go awry, however, you do not need to travel far. Just trot across the Tuileries gardens and Place de la Concorde to the Grand Palais, where a crassly commercial exhibition devoted to Dolce & Gabbana is on view. The Italian fashion label has erected what feels like a cross between a shrine and a stage (each room has spotlights and its own soundtrack). The firm is peddling brightly patterned coffee pots while trying to position itself in the company of high art and religion—Botticelli paintings are embroidered onto garments, sequinned mosaics of Jesus are stitched onto sweatshirts.
The crowds of visitors jostling to take photos on a recent afternoon would assume the museum complex had staged the show. But in reality the fashion label has simply rented the space and curated the show itself as a branding exercise. As more cultural institutions “link themselves with what is trendy and what society is doing”, it is important to retain “the critical voice” rather than just “the Instagram factor and the spectacle”, says Federica Carlotto of Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
Having at last conquered the Louvre, fashion is likely to strut into even more museums. Designers, of course, have every incentive to collaborate. Compared with seasonal runway shows that last less than ten minutes, museum shows enable a designer’s work to “take on a new life” with a “wider audience”, says Erdem Moralioglu, who has a piece on display in the Louvre’s exhibition. Audiences like the shows, too. “Fashion tells us as much about the world we live in as other areas of human ingenuity,” says Tim Marlow, chief executive of the Design Museum in London. You may not be able to envision yourself lounging on Napoleon’s throne, but there is something about couture that is, perhaps surprisingly, accessible. Everyone—even, despite rumours to the contrary, the emperor—wears clothes. ■
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