Comprising more than 100 looks, the show illustrates how historic art, objects, and styles have inspired today’s preeminent designers
Olivier Gabet, Director of the Department of Decorative Arts at the Louvre Museum, knows what you’re thinking. When it was announced that the Louvre would present its first-ever fashion exhibition, Louvre Couture. Art and fashion: statement pieces, in January 2025, with a fundraising gala to follow in March, it was impossible to not draw comparisons to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute exhibition and accompanying Met Gala. “With the Costume Institute, the Met has a huge, credible collection of fashion, so what we are doing is a different story,” says Gabet, acknowledging that the Louvre does not have a department dedicated to dress.
So, what place does fashion have at a museum that doesn’t have a fashion department? “It needs to be connected to the Louvre’s collection—you want to bring forth new dialogues, but they must be pertinent,” says Gabet, who curated Louvre Couture with exhibition assistant Marie Brimicombe. Open through July 21, the exhibition illustrates how historical art, objects, and styles have directly inspired 45 of the world’s preeminent fashion designers and maisons, whose sumptuous creations are displayed across 9,000 square meters of the Department of Decorative Arts galleries. Makers range from French mainstays like Chanel, Dior, and Givenchy, to international houses including Prada, Erdem, Dries Van Noten, and Undercover, and cutting-edge talents like Marine Serre and Charles de Vilmorin.
“It’s so important to see fashion elevated to the highest level at some of the greatest museums in the world,” says American designer and CFDA Chairman Thom Browne, whose wide-hipped spring-summer 2020 ready-to-wear ensembles, which recall 18th-century panniers, are complemented by whimsical Regency-era painted panels in the Louvre’s Isaac de Camondo period room. “It’s even more important that people coming to these institutions get to see the amazing work so many of us have the privilege of seeing in person.”
The approximately 100 looks and accessories on view were almost all loaned from brands and heritage departments of the houses (the two exceptions are the Alaïa Foundation and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum). “It was key to show more than haute couture because that’s no longer the only story of fashion,” says Gabet, explaining the social and logistical parameters in selecting fashion from 1960 onwards. “Contemporary fashion doesn’t require the same restrictions [as more historical pieces] and can, perhaps, be more surprising for our visitors.”
“It’s so IMPORTANT to see FASHION elevated to the highest level at some of the GREATEST MUSEUMS in the world.” -Thom Browne
While Louvre Couture has allowed Gabet to flex his sartorial savvy, honed through nine years serving as Director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD), where he dreamt up exhibitions, such as Harper’s Bazaar. First in Fashion (2021) and Shocking: The Surreal World of Elsa Schiaparelli (2022-23), his chief aim was to make his department’s diverse range of decorative objects appeal to a new generation. Gabet believes the highly elaborate objects under his purview, which include furniture, tapestry, armor, and clocks and span from the Middle Ages to France’s Second Empire, can feel “intimidating” to a younger audience. Fashion, however, is “universal and accessible,” and can act as a “bridge” to classical culture.
Nevertheless, Gabet eschews the notion that a fashion exhibition is merely an easy sell (it’s no secret that they have increasingly become major draws for museums in the last decade). “We don’t need more visitors,” he says—the Louvre is the world’s most visited museum, after all. “It’s about offering another experience to the visitor.”
And consequently, to the curators as well. Gabet says Louvre Director Laurence des Cars shares his love of fashion. While the two worked at the Louvre Abu Dhabi together in 2009, they made the museum’s first acquisition, which came from Christie’s auction of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, prompting their interest in the intersection of fashion and art, a subject they hoped to eventually explore in greater depth. In 2022, as part of a multi-venue exhibition celebrating the 60th anniversary of the first Yves Saint Laurent runway show, des Cars and Gabet dabbled in dress at the Louvre by showcasing a handful of the late designer’s garments alongside the museum’s permanent collection in the illustrious Galerie d’Apollon.
Safe to say, Louvre Couture had des Cars’ full backing, but Gabet says the “warm welcome” extended to his museum colleagues as well.
It’s this multidisciplinary spirit, the mix of old and new, and the collective reverence for exquisite craftsmanship that makes Louvre Couture soar. “For me, the work of Andrew Bolton is very inspirational,” says Gabet in reference to the Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute’s blockbuster cross-departmental shows. Indeed, Louvre Couture fuses the awe and magnitude of Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (2018) with the transportive spectacle of China: Through the Looking Glass (2015) and the period-room immersion of Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century (2004) at a scale that only the Louvre could achieve.
“The LOUVRE is haute COUTURE—it has to be PERFECT.” –Olivier Gabet
The scenography, executed by Nathalie Crinière (who also conceived the design for MAD’s recent Schiaparelli and Iris van Herpen exhibitions), also had to be “very Louvre,” says Gabet: “Everything is impressive at the Louvre, but with a simple, refined language. The Louvre is haute couture—it has to be perfect.”
Indeed, in Louvre Couture, there are almost no screens, technological interventions, or gravity-defying display cases. The Louvre’s hallowed galleries, enfilade of period rooms, and supremely spectacular Napoleon III apartments need no further bells and whistles. For fashion history buffs, the experience is twofold: “The creation of Haute Couture in Paris was during the same time as the creation of the Napoleon apartments, so it is a historic moment that this comes together in the Louvre for the first time,” van Herpen, who frequently visited the museum while working on her 2023-24 MAD exhibition, Sculpting the Senses, tells Harper’s Bazaar.
More of the Exibt
A Dior silk and cut-velvet couture gown with an ermine hem designed by John Galliano in 2004
