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At the Louvre, the Biggest Fashion Show in Paris

Published

12 months ago

January 24, 2025

At the Louvre, the Biggest Fashion Show in Paris

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 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.

Related Topics:Fashion and Apparel Featured Louvre Couture (Exhibit)Louvre Museum metropolitan museum of art Museums Paris - France

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Lifestyle

After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

Published

9 hours ago

January 9, 2026

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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.

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After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

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TMZ Streaming Live, Come Into Our Newsroom and Watch Things Happen!

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January 9, 2026

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Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

Published

21 hours ago

January 9, 2026

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Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

From left: Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician, and Fiona Dourif plays Dr. Cassie McKay, a third-year resident, in a fictional Pittsburgh emergency department in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

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The first five minutes of the new season of The Pitt instantly capture the state of medicine in the mid-2020s: a hectic emergency department waiting room; a sign warning that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated; a memorial plaque for victims of a mass shooting; and a patient with large Ziploc bags filled to the brink with various supplements and homeopathic remedies.

Scenes from the new installment feel almost too recognizable to many doctors.

The return of the critically acclaimed medical drama streaming on HBO Max offers viewers a surprisingly realistic view of how doctors practice medicine in an age of political division, institutional mistrust and the corporatization of health care.

Each season covers one day in the kinetic, understaffed emergency department of a fictional Pittsburgh hospital, with each episode spanning a single hour of a 15-hour shift. That means there’s no time for romantic plots or far-fetched storylines that typically dominate medical dramas.

Instead, the fast-paced show takes viewers into the real world of the ER, complete with a firehose of medical jargon and the day-to-day struggles of those on the frontlines of the American health care system. It’s a microcosm of medicine — and of a fragmented United States.

Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael "Robby" Rabinovitch in The Pitt.

Many doctors and health professionals praised season one of the series, and ER docs even invited the show’s star Noah Wyle to their annual conference in September.

So what do doctors think of the new season? As a medical student myself, I appreciated the dig at the “July effect” — the long-held belief that the quality of care decreases in July when newbie doctors start residency — rebranded “first week in July syndrome” by one of the characters.

That insider wink sets the tone for a season that Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, says is on point. Patel, who co-hosts the show’s companion podcast, watched the first nine episodes of the new installment and spoke to NPR about his first impressions.

To me, as a medical student, the first few scenes of the new season are pretty striking, and they resemble what modern-day emergency medicine looks and sounds like. From your point of view, how accurate is it?

I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care — the highs, the lows and the frustrations — The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created. And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.

OK, but is every shift really that chaotic?

I mean, obviously, it’s television. And I know a lot of ER doctors who watch the show and are like, “Hey, it’s really good, but not every shift is that crazy.” I’m like, “Come on, relax. It’s TV. You’ve got to take a little bit of liberties.”

As in its last season, The Pitt sheds light on the real — sometimes boring — bureaucratic burdens doctors deal with that often get in the way of good medicine. How does that resonate with real doctors?

There are so many topics that affect patient care that are not glorified. And so The Pitt did this really artful job of inserting these topics with the right characters and the right relatable scenarios. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a pretty relatable issue in season two with medical bills.

Right. Insurance seems to take center stage at times this season — almost as a character itself — which seems apt for this moment when many Americans are facing a sharp rise in costs. But these mundane — yet heartbreaking — moments don’t usually make their way into medical dramas, right?

I guarantee when people see this, they’re going to nod their head because they know someone who has been affected by a huge hospital bill.

If you’re going to tell a story about an emergency department that is being led by these compassionate health care workers doing everything they can for patients, you’ve got to make sure you insert all of health care into it.

As the characters juggle multiple patients each hour, a familiar motif returns: medical providers grappling with some heavy burdens outside of work.

Yeah, the reality is that if you’re working a busy shift and you have things happening in your personal life, the line between personal life and professional life gets blurred and people have moments.

The Pitt highlights that and it shows that doctors are real people. Nurses are actual human beings. And sometimes things happen, and it spills out into the workplace. It’s time we take a step back and not only recognize it, but also appreciate what people are dealing with.

2025 was another tough year for doctors. Many had to continue to battle misinformation while simultaneously practicing medicine. How does medical misinformation fit into season two?

I wouldn’t say it’s just mistrust of medicine. I mean that theme definitely shows up in The Pitt, but people are also just confused. They don’t know where to get their information from. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what the right decision is.

There’s one specific scene in season two that, again, no spoilers here, but involves somebody getting their information from social media. And that again is a very real theme.

In recent years, physical and verbal abuse of healthcare workers has risen, fueling mental health struggles among providers. The Pitt was praised for diving into this reality. Does it return this season?

The new season of The Pitt still has some of that tension between patients and health care professionals — and sometimes it’s completely projected or misdirected. People are frustrated, they get pissed off when they can’t see a doctor in time and they may act out.

The characters who get physically attacked in The Pitt just brush it off. That whole concept of having to suppress this aggression and then the frustration that there’s not enough protection for health care workers, that’s a very real issue.

A new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, joins the cast this season. Sepideh Moafi plays her, and she works closely with the veteran attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. What are your — and Robby’s — first impressions of her?

Right off the bat in the first episode, people get to meet this brilliant firecracker. Dr. Al-Hashimi, versus Dr. Robby, almost represents two generations of attending physicians. They’re almost on two sides of this coin, and there’s a little bit of clashing.

Sepideh Moafi, fourth from left, as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the new attending physician, huddles with her team around a patient in a fictional Pittsburgh teaching hospital in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

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Part of that clash is her clear-eyed take on artificial intelligence and its role in medicine. And she thinks AI can help doctors document what’s happening with patients — also called charting — right?

Yep, Dr. Al-Hashimi is an advocate for AI tools in the ER because, I swear to God, they make health care workers’ lives more efficient. They make things such as charting faster, which is a theme that shows up in season two.

But then Dr. Robby gives a very interesting rebuttal to the widespread use of AI. The worry is that if we put AI tools everywhere, then all of a sudden, the financial arm of health care would say, “Cool, now you can double how many patients you see. We will not give you any more resources, but with these AI tools, you can generate more money for the system.”

The new installment also continues to touch on the growing corporatization of medicine. In season one we saw how Dr. Robby and his staff were being pushed to see more patients.

Yes, it really helps the audience understand the kind of stressors that people are dealing with while they’re just trying to take care of patients.

In the first season, when Dr. Robby kind of had that back and forth with the hospital administrator, doctors were immediately won over because that is such a big point of frustration — such a massive barrier.

There are so many more themes explored this season. What else should viewers look forward to?

I’m really excited for viewers to dive into the character development. It’s so reflective of how it really goes in residency. So much happens between your first year and second year of residency — not only in terms of your medical skill, but also in terms of your development as a person.

I think what’s also really fascinating is that The Pitt has life lessons buried in every episode. Sometimes you catch it immediately, sometimes it’s at the end, sometimes you catch it when you watch it again.

But it represents so much of humanity because humanity doesn’t get put on hold when you get sick — you just go to the hospital with your full self. And so every episode — every patient scenario — there is a lesson to learn.

Michal Ruprecht is a Stanford Global Health Media Fellow and a fourth-year medical student.