Sixteenth-century ornamental timepieces frame a crystal-studded metal bodysuit by Thierry Mugler. Gilded silver reliquaries with sculpted hands stand next to a pair of Hermès gloves. A ceramic hand warmer from Faenza, Italy, that looks like a book is twinned with a Chanel clutch that looks like a book.
This is “Louvre Couture,” the first fashion exhibition at the famed Paris museum in its 231-year history.
The last time haute couture caused so much excitement at the Louvre was in 1957, when, in the film “Funny Face,” Audrey Hepburn posed in front of the Winged Victory of Samothrace in a strapless red Givenchy gown and rushed down the Daru staircase, lifting a matching chiffon scarf over her head.
Forty-five fashion houses and designers — from Cristóbal Balenciaga to Iris van Herpen — have lent the museum 100 ensembles and accessories, dating from 1960 to 2025. They are arrayed not among the Louvre’s famous paintings and marble sculptures but throughout the nearly 100,000 square feet of its decorative arts department.
The department, whose unwieldy collection ranges from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, is crammed with thousands of objects: medieval armor, Renaissance tapestries, carved ivories, bronzes, ceramics, imperial silverware and furniture.
“It is not easy to enter our museum, especially our collection,” said Olivier Gabet, the director of the decorative arts department. “Our objective is to make more people, different people, younger people, happy, free and relaxed when they come here. We say to them: ‘OK, you love fashion. Fashion is a bridge to us.’”
With this exhibition, which opens on Jan. 24, the Louvre joins the ranks of institutions that have discovered how to use the popular culture of dress as a gateway into the world of art. And, more than ever, fashion is seducing French museums and artistic spaces.
Two weeks before the Louvre opened its exhibition on Jan. 24, Dolce & Gabbana opened a fashion spectacle of its own: “From the Heart to the Hands,” in the newly renovated Grand Palais. First opening in Milan last spring, the traveling costume retrospective features more than 200 creations of the house within immersive video installations and elaborate sets.
But this is not a museum exhibition. “This is an experience that is primarily joyful,” said Florence Müller, the creative director of the exhibition. “It is secondarily intellectual. It is not meant to be in a museum.”
Next month, the Musée du Quai Branly, a collection of African, Oceanic, American and Asian works, will open “Golden Thread,” an exhibition focusing on the art of using gold to adorn clothing and jewelry. In May, the Petit Palais, which belongs to the city of Paris, will mount “Worth: The Birth of Haute Couture,” a retrospective on the life and work of the British designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895).
Two fashion museums, one with collections belonging to the state (the Musée des Arts Décoratifs), the other to the city (Palais Galliera), have long featured dazzling permanent collections and temporary exhibitions. More recently, luxury groups like LVMH and Kering have opened their own art exhibition spaces. And Saint Laurent, Dior and Alaïa have all created permanent spaces to show their work.
“Museums and fashion have been dancing with each other for decades,” said Pamela Golbin, the former chief curator of fashion and textiles at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “Now there’s a real rapprochement. It is not always a successful pairing, but if it triggers an interest from the public — if it can see the art differently — it’s a great way to use the power of fashion.”
The defining example of this approach is, of course, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the Costume Institute’s blockbuster shows are among the museum’s most visited every year. In acknowledgment of fashion’s ability to lure visitors, the Met is in the midst of a renovation that will relocate the fashion department from the basement, where it has historically been situated, to the former gift shop in the Great Hall, the majestic main entrance.
The Louvre, with 8.7 million visitors in 2024, doesn’t need fashion to boost attendance. On the contrary, it has capped its daily attendance to 30,000 to reduce overcrowding. Only 23 percent of visitors to the Louvre are French; the rest are foreigners. And 66 percent of its visitors are first-timers, almost all of whom line up to see the Mona Lisa.
Since Laurence des Cars became the museum’s director in 2021, she has struggled to woo returning visitors, a younger crowd and more Parisians into the Louvre. She has opened the museum on some evenings, organized concerts and theatrical performances and experimented with a dance-and-exercise circuit. The new fashion exhibition fits neatly into this strategy.
Indeed, Ms. des Cars expresses so much admiration for the Met’s initiatives that some of her curators complain that she is Met-obsessed.
It is no accident that the Louvre — perhaps in a faint echo of the Met Gala — is twinning the new fashion exhibition with a fund-raising gala, Le Grand Dîner du Louvre, during Paris Fashion Week in March. Dinner will be served among the marble sculptures in the glass-roofed Cour Marly and will be followed by dancing under the pyramid. More than 30 tables were put up for sale, and the fund-raising goal of a million euros has already been exceeded, the museum said.
This exhibition is the natural next step for the Louvre, which has already tiptoed into the world of fashion. In 2022, it was one of six prestigious French museums that commemorated the 60th anniversary of the house of Saint Laurent by exhibiting 50 of his creations among their permanent collections. The Louvre put four of his embroidered and jeweled jackets near the French crown jewels in its gilded Apollo Gallery.
Currently, the small Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, which belongs to the Louvre, has an exhibition called “States of (Un)dress: Delacroix and Clothing,” which explores how carefully the artist chose the clothing in his paintings. And in March, Louvre-Lens, the satellite Louvre museum in northern France, will open an exhibition called “The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist,” examining what artists chose to wear and why, from the Renaissance to the present day.
“Art historians often have to know the history of clothing in order to know the history of art,” said Bruno Racine, the former head of France’s National Library who now heads the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which belongs to the French billionaire François Pinault, founder of the Kering luxury group. “This is nothing artificial.”
The Louvre can never match the Met when it comes to fashion. Unlike the Met, the Louvre is not a private museum but a hierarchical, state-run institution with a limited budget that takes its orders from the Culture Ministry and, ultimately, the French president.
And the Louvre has no clothes. The cruel irony is that France’s national textile collection does not belong to the museum but to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is housed inside the sprawling Louvre structure but is independent of the Louvre museum.
In a confidential memo to the culture minister Rachida Dati earlier this month, Ms. des Cars condemned the disastrous physical state of the museum, including water leaks and temperature variations that endanger artworks, overcrowding, insufficient toilet facilities and poor signage.
Even the glass pyramid showpiece designed by I.M. Pei and inaugurated in 1989 was “very inhospitable,” according to the memo, excerpted on Thursday in Le Parisien newspaper.
But for now, at least, the Louvre’s decorative arts department has one of the best stage sets for showing fashion — namely, the apartments of Emperor Napoleon III. The 40-foot-high Salon-Theatre oozes magnificent excess with crystal chandeliers, a fresco-filled ceiling and gold-leafed stucco ornamentation with vases of flowers and angels playing instruments.
A mannequin wearing an embroidered red silk and cut-velvet ball gown with a deep ermine hem designed by John Galliano for Christian Dior is set in the center of the Salon. The gown matches the Salon’s red cut-velvet upholstery and drapes perfectly. She looks right at home.
Elaine Sciolino, a contributing writer for The New York Times in Paris, is the author of “Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum,” to be published in April 2025.
