Inside the Louvre's first ever couture exhibition, with treasures from Versace to Dior
Throughout his legendary fashion career, Karl Lagerfeld maintained that 'Art is Art, Fashion is Fashion.' But a new exhibition, ' Louvre Couture, Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces,' might just prove the late German fashion designer wrong. Running until July 21, the exhibition features 45 designers — from Chanel and Balenciaga to Versace and Yves Saint Laurent — revealing an unprecedented dialogue between art and fashion from the 1960s to today.
Seventy garments and 30 accessories by a host of renowned designers are presented in this landmark show — the first fashion exhibition ever staged at the Louvre — with creations often hidden among the museum's nearly 100,000 square feet of rooms and galleries.
While this is the first time the Louvre is exhibiting fashion garments, clothing is omnipresent in its galleries, from Vermeer's 'The Lacemaker' to Ingres' nude, turban-wearing 'Grand Odalisque.' What is worn — or not worn — has always been a central component of the creation and reception of art.
'It's very important for the Louvre to continue to open itself up to new generations and to make its own small contribution to understanding today's world. That is exactly what this exhibition does,' said Laurence des Cars, the museum's president, in an interview at the Louvre.
The collection weaves the threads between fashion and a diverse array of 'art objects' — including tapestries, ceramics, portraits, sculptures and the layout of the Louvre's galleries themselves. Visitors are invited to flâner — or wander aimlessly, as the French saying goes — through the museum and discover its less popular collections.
'The Louvre is so much more than just the 'Mona Lisa',' Olivier Gabet, the museum's director of art objects as well as the exhibition's curator, said with a smile.
While painter Paul Cézanne once observed that 'the Louvre is the book in which we learn to read,' for fashion designers, the museum is the 'ultimate mood board,' observed Gabet. From Lagerfeld to Alexander McQueen, designers have long been inspired by the wealth of collections displayed at the world's biggest museum. Some, like Christian Louboutin, shared with Gabet childhood memories of days spent in its halls. Others, like Yves Saint Laurent, were themselves great art connoisseurs and collectors. For Gabet, the personal relationship between the designers and the Louvre was the starting point for the exhibition.
It's a connection epitomized by the Dior silhouette that opens the exhibition, said Gabet. Entitled, 'Musée du Louvre,' Gabet said that, to his knowledge, it is the 'only piece in the history of haute couture to be named after a museum.
The exhibition pays homage to major historical periods, inviting visitors to rediscover the Louvre's artifacts through the prism of contemporary designers. Highlights include a crystal-embroidered Dolce & Gabbana dress inspired by 11th-century mosaics from Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello, Venice. A spectacular silk Dior gown featuring a Sun King motif is staged before a baroque portrait of Louis XIV himself.
Iconic pieces such as Gianni Versace's 1997 metal mesh gown — previously displayed at the 2018 'Heavenly Bodies' Met Gala exhibition — are also on display. The garment took two of the atelier's seamstresses more than 600 hours — or 25 days — to stitch by hand and is embellished with Swarovski crystals, golden embroidery featuring Byzantine crosses and Versace's signature draping inspired by Ancient Greek peplum dresses.
The gown inspired both Kim Kardashian's gold Versace dress at the 2018 Met Gala and Donatella Versace's iconic 'Tribute' collection the same year, which featured five of the original supermodels: Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen.
Sometimes, designers' references to objects in the Louvre are literal. Karl Lagerfeld's 2019 collection for Chanel, for instance, featured a striking embroidered jacket whose motif is drawn from an 18th-century blue and white chest by cabinet maker Mathieu Criaerd. Lagerfeld, who considered the Louvre his 'second studio,' sketched his initial designs for the dress on a museum catalog featuring the chest, before sending the final version to the Chanel atelier.
Glamour can even be found in the Middle Ages, with armour-style dresses transforming models into modern Joan of Arcs. French actress Brigitte Bardot was famously photographed by David Bailey in a 1967 Paco Rabanne chainmail tunic, which is featured in the exhibition next to a 3D-printed armour Balenciaga gown.
More often, the broad sweep of history serves as recurrent inspiration for designers, such as Italian Renaissance paintings for Maria Grazia Chiuri at Christian Dior, Medieval tapestries for Dries van Noten, or 18th-century delicacies evoked by John Galliano and Christian Louboutin.
With Paris Fashion Week around the corner, 'Louvre Couture' offers a source of inspiration for designers and visitors alike, illuminating the ongoing dialogue between art and fashion.
'The exhibition is not here to say that fashion is or isn't art,' Gabet concluded. 'Fashion is about creation. The artistic culture shared between great designers — that's the leitmotif of the collection.'
And this is just the beginning of the conversation. In March, the famed Parisian museum will host hundreds of guests for the Grand Dîner, an event that is already being referred to as the first French Met Gala.
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The frequent Trump epithet losers would be a suitably pejorative modern equivalent. This despised underclass is pitted against a punitive regime that honors bullies, sycophants, and plutocrats. They are not the sort of people who might expect compassion and understanding from the current administration. I find the gaudy, mass-market musical's appeal to Trump ironic but not surprising. Since it premiered on London's West End in 1985, the show, with its rousing anthems and its tear-jerking tale of victory over oppression, has thrilled more than 100 million people. We know that Trump has a weakness for bombastic 1980s musicals, and Les Mis is certainly that. Having spent four years writing a biography of Hugo, I can't help but find it a sweetened, antiseptic version of his weird, digressive underworld of moral and literal sewers. The original book would surely bamboozle and exasperate Trump if he ever undertook the journey through its 1,500 pages. The author himself wouldn't seem to hold much appeal for the leader of the MAGA movement. The president mentioned Hugo in 2018 at a White House dinner for Emmanuel Macron and the French delegation: 'This is the divine flame, which Victor Hugo wrote that 'evil can never wholly extinguish,' and which 'good can make to glow with splendor.'' Trump was referring to the shared military glories of France and the United States from the American Revolution through the Second World War. In fact, the words were taken from a description of the central character of Les Misérables, destitute following his conviction for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children. The narrator wonders whether Jean Valjean's soul has been destroyed, or whether an immortal 'spark' (not 'flame') has survived his dehumanization by a vindictive justice system. When Les Misérables was published in 1862, Hugo was an outcast. The founder of two distinct periods of Romanticism, he was the world's most famous living writer and an international symbol of freedom and democracy. By then, at the age of 60, he had spent 10 years in exile after opposing the coup d'état led by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-crowned emperor of France who reigned as Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870. Hugo, as a refugee in the Channel Islands, was an embarrassment to the British government. The intelligence services of France and the United Kingdom considered him a socialist menace. Spies reported his dealings with suspected immigrant terrorists. His diatribe against ' Napoléon le Petit ' was smuggled across the English Channel in walking sticks, sardine tins, and women's underwear. Miniature copies were concealed in souvenir plaster busts of Napoleon III. The exiled poet was criticized for his arrogant attempts to influence British and American foreign policy. He was mocked for his poor English and his wild appearance, as he recalled in his notebooks: 'To the English, I am shoking, excentric and improper '; 'I oppose the death penalty, which is not respectable'; 'I am an exile, which is repellent, and on the losing side, which is infamous.' I would venture to say that Hugo would not be made welcome in the Oval Office today: 'I look like a workman,' he wrote, and 'I fail to wear my tie in the correct fashion.' Les Misérables is one of the last universally read masterpieces in Western literature. In its own day, it was as popular as its musical adaptation would be in the next century. In France, it was bought even by people who had never learned to read. It was devoured by soldiers in the trenches of the American Civil War. Like all great works of art, it has a mind and momentum of its own. This ostensibly simple tale contains labyrinthine complexities and contradictions. Hugo had been a monarchist in his youth and then became a moderate liberal. At the time of the 1832 revolt, which takes up almost one-fifth of Les Misérables, he was a property-owning family man firmly opposed to violent protest. 'We should not allow barbarians to bespatter our flag with red,' he wrote in his diary. The barricade at the heart of the novel and the musical is actually a scene from the savagely repressed uprising of June 1848. Hugo had just been elected to the National Assembly as a right-wing moderate. When the rioting broke out, he fought with the forces of law and order against the insurgents, whom he considered innocent but misguided. These were the starving unemployed of the Paris slums, the malodorous and degraded masses that polite society called ' les misérables.' He took prisoners and was directly responsible for deaths and deportations. Tormented over his culpability, he had a crise de conscience and joined the socialist opposition to the dictatorship of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Hugo became the mascot and inspiration of liberation movements in Greece and Italy and throughout Central and South America, so it is fitting that the musical's opening and concluding song, 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' has been chanted in this century by antigovernment protesters in China, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Belarus. Less obviously appropriate is the adoption of Les Mis by Trump and the MAGA movement. No artistic genre is the exclusive property of one faction. As the Trump administration demonstrates, forms of moral discourse evolved by left-wing thinkers can serve the purposes of right-wing ideologues. The novel and the musical both have roots in popular 19th-century entertainment—vaudevilles, comic operas, and newspaper serials. Both were sneered at by middle-class reviewers and adored by the public. The MAGA reading of Les Misérables is just the latest example of its populist appeal. It also typifies the volatile nature of political buzzwords. Misérables was an insult that French insurgents picked up and brandished as a banner. By the same process, after Hillary Clinton called Trump's supporters 'deplorables' during the 2016 election campaign, her dismissive term inspired the digital backdrop of a Trump rally in Miami: Under the words les deplorables, a doctored image from the musical showed a crowd storming a barricade, waving the French Tricolor and the Stars and Stripes. That evening, the crowd sang a MAGA version of 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' In 2025, the U.S. Army Chorus sang this appropriated anthem of popular revolt at the White House Governors Ball. Hugo would likely have been repelled and fascinated by Trump's demagoguery, his rambling mendacity, his grammatically illogical but easy-to-follow oratory. The writer might have been reminded of Napoleon III, who hovers in the background of the novel as a sinister, clownish figure. Two significant differences are that Napoleon III had a long-standing interest in justice, and that he was never envious of Hugo's fame. After granting him and his fellow outcasts amnesty in 1859, Napoleon III lamented the great man's decision to remain in exile. In 1862, he allowed Les Misérables to be advertised and sold in France, leading his government to review its penal and industrial legislation and to concern itself with the exploitation of women and orphans, as well as the education of the poor. Trump's attacks on universities, the arts, and free expression increase the likelihood that any future American equivalent of Les Misérables will also have to be written in exile. But none of this knotty history need spoil Chairman Trump's triumph when he sits in the royal box at the Kennedy Center and hears the people sing for his pleasure.
