Lifestyle
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.
Sunday Puzzle
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This week’s challenge
Today’s puzzle is a tribute to Mimi. Every answer is a familiar two word phrase or name in which each word starts with the letters MI-.
Ex. Assignment for soldiers –> MILITARY MISSION
1. Pageant title for a contestant from Detroit
2. One of the Twin Cities
3. Nickname for the river through New Orleans
4. Super short skirt
5. Neighborhood in Los Angeles that contains Museum Row
6. Just over four times the distance from the earth to the moon
7. Goateed sing-along conductor of old TV
8. American financier who pioneered so-called “junk bonds”
9. Little accident
10. Land-based weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal
11. In “Snow White,” the evil queen’s words before “on the wall”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Benita Rice, of Salem, Ore. Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?
Answer
Notre Dame –> Renovated
Winner
Chee Sing Lee of Bangor, Maine
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from James Ellison, of Jefferson City, Mo. Think of a popular movie of the past decade. Change the last letter in its title. The result will suggest a lawsuit between two politicians of the late 20th century — one Republican and one Democrat. What’s the movie and who are the people?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 23 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced.
A landmark is a landmark because it tells you that you’re home now — the piece of earth you’ve chosen to inhabit saying, “You’ve made it back, congratulations.” We identify our cities with their landmarks, and because we identify with our cities, we identify with the landmarks too. They are us and we are them, mirroring each other through eternity. A city like New York or Chicago, with the Chrysler Building, the Bean, etc., has landmarks that exist in the world’s popular consciousness. But L.A.’s most cherished landmarks belong to us and us alone, a secret you’re let in on if you live here long enough and pay attention.
The Fashion Nova baddie in horizontal sprawl off the Vertigo, for example, is an emblem for those in the know. Our twisted version of a capitalist guardian angel, patron saint of spandex in a cropped matching set. Welcome to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Fashion Nova. Merging on the 110 South from the 10 East while the sunset burns and traffic thickens is a miracle in more ways than one, and in the spirit of compulsively performing the sign of the cross when you pass a church on the freeway, this billboard is deserving of its own acknowledgment.
It may not be the landmark L.A. asked for, but in Sayre Gomez’s painting “Vertigo,” you begin to understand why it’s the one we deserve. At the opening for “Precious Moments,” Gomez’s solo show at David Kordansky, the room was vibrating. A game of energetic ping-pong unfolded underneath the gallery’s fluorescent light, beams of identification, recollections or stabs of grief bouncing off each piece in the exhibition. People were seeing hyperspecific parts of a city they love reflected in a hyperspecific way — for better and for worse. Recognition has two edges and they both happen to be sharp. Gomez twists the knife deeper for a good cause: He wants you not just to look but to really see.
In his work exist iconic signs of beloved local establishments — like the Playpen — the blinding glint reflecting off downtown’s skyline, telephone poles regarded as totems. The line to see Gomez’s replica of L.A.’s graffiti towers, “Oceanwide Plaza,” snaked through the gallery’s courtyard. Once inside, at least three graffiti writers whose names were blasted on the replica pointed it out proudly, even gave out stickers to take home. The truth can be beautiful and it can be ugly — in this case it’s both — on the flip side showing up in the form of smog, tattered flags and an abandoned graffiti tower that starkly represents the pitfalls of capitalism and greed, a neon arrow pointing to the homelessness crisis.
Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave.
— Sayre Gomez
In the main gallery, I was stuck on “Vertigo.” On the 12-foot canvas, my eye went to the place out of focus: the thin strip of billboard in the background featuring a young woman with sand-dune hips, patent knee-high boots and long black hair laid up on her side, wearing cat ears and a tiger bodysuit as flush as second skin. The model made the kind of eye contact that felt dangerous — might cause an accident if you’re not careful. “#1 Halloween Destination … FASHION NOVA,” it read. I knew her, anyone who has driven through the two main arteries of Los Angeles knows her. The black-and-white smiley motif of the Vertigo, an events space, sat right next to her face, just happy to be there, it seemed, above a painted sign that says “Ready to Party?”
The sky was the color of cotton candy, but the stale kind that’s been hardening in a plastic bag for days after the fair. Something rancid about it. In the foreground of the painting was a car encampment with a tattered floral sheet woven through the windows, cloth tarps and couch cushions creating a shield against the elements. Small plastic children’s toys lined at the top of the car — dinosaurs and dump trucks and sharks — creating their own shrunken skyline in front of the Vertigo, signaling that young kids likely lived there. It’s less juxtaposition for juxtaposition’s sake and more an accurate reflection of the breakneck duality of living in a place like L.A.
Even angels exist within the context of their environments. Our Fashion Nova baddie hangs off the Vertigo, a building that has used its ad space as physical clickbait and political posturing for over a decade. It’s promoting the kind of fast fashion brand that’s been regarded as a case study on the industry’s environmental impact. In the years the billboard has been up, it’s looked over dozens and dozens of car encampments like the one depicted in Gomez’s piece.
She feels dubious, yes. But no less like ours.
Julissa James: I’ve lived in L.A. for 13 years now. For me, the city and the architecture of the city is less the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Frank Gehrys — there’s that — but other landmarks that signal, “Oh, I’m home.” The Fashion Nova baddie above the Vertigo has always been that for me. Your piece is layered and there’s so much more to it than just that, but that’s the first thing I saw and was like, “Whoa. I need to talk to Sayre. We need to talk about ‘Vertigo.’”
Sayre Gomez: It’s like L.A.’s Statue of Liberty. It’s the city of anti-landmarks, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s the Hollywood sign, which I think is so telling, because it’s the remnants of a real estate venture. The city is built by real estate schemes and 100 years later we’re feeling the effects of it. You’ve got empty skyscrapers and a massive homeless catastrophe. L.A. doesn’t really have real landmarks. It has anti-landmarks.
JJ: When did the Fashion Nova billboard above the Vertigo click for you as something that felt representative of the city, or something that you wanted to depict?
SG: My studio is in Boyle Heights, so I pass that billboard multiple times a week. This is my 20th year in L.A. and that building’s always been a big mystery to me. It was empty when I moved here before this guy Shawn Farr bought it and turned it into Casa Vertigo. I think he probably makes more money on it with the ad space than anything. I know nobody who has ever been there. Very mysterious to me. So that’s what I was drawn to.
(Paul Salveson from David Kordansky Gallery)
The Vertigo has always been mysterious to me. And that whole fashion industry is mysterious to me — the kind of shmatta, American Apparel-adjacent, or maybe coming out of the wake of that. These kinds of businesses, or the representations of these businesses, how do they function and how do they flourish? Is it aboveboard? What more perfectly encapsulates that than that building? It’s this weird thing you can’t quite figure out but somehow it has a lot of money and then it’s an event space, supposedly billed as that. Clearly it’s this big ad thing, and I’m very interested in the changing dynamics of capital. The capital of yesteryear, which was based on the brick and mortar, where things are being made in a specific location, maybe on an assembly line or in a specific way, to a kind of capital that is based solely on advertising or on viewership. These beautiful buildings acting as pedestals for some kind of ad space, you know? It becomes an anti-landmark for me. Something where I’m like, “Oh, there’s that thing again.”
JJ: It’s this gorgeous Beaux Arts building …
SG: It’s a Freemason building!
JJ: When I’ve talked to some people about the Vertigo, they’re like, “the Fashion Nova building?”
SG: They always have the woman in the same pose — same pose, different clothes. If you remember before Fashion Nova, they would have these provocative ad campaigns or provocative slogans. “Twerk Miley” was up, remember that? They did a Trump one: “TRUMP NOW.” They did one for Kanye when he ran for president. The 10 and the 110 are literally the crossroads of the city, so it’s really poised to be a special building. It has a special designation because of the location.
JJ: Talk to me about the process of doing this piece. Where did it start and how did it evolve?
SG: I was cruising around that vicinity trying to see if I could get a good vantage point to take photos of Vertigo. And then I stumbled upon this car — the car that’s in the foreground of the painting. Anytime I see an encampment that has kids’ toys, things that reference back to the lives of children, it hits hard. But I like to lay it all out there. I like to make things confrontational. I want it to be difficult. The painting isn’t based on a one-to-one photo [Gomez paints from a composite rendering of images he’s taken around town], but I knew that I wanted to use that car, and I knew I wanted to get the Vertigo building, and so I started just messing around with different iterations. I could never find a good angle to take a good photo of the building, so I just went on Vertigo’s website and I was like, “I’m just using these.” I switched the sky and put a more moody, atmospheric sky in.
JJ: Which I loved, because we know that feeling — you’re merging onto the 110 and you see a beautiful sunset. The euphoria of like, “L.A. is the best city in the world.” But you know what? What I found so interesting about your piece is that it was revealing to me about myself, but also about so many of us that live in L.A. and have lived here for years and have developed a jadedness. When I saw your piece, immediately I was like, “Oh my God, the Vertigo! The Vertigo! The Vertigo!” And then I was like, “OK, wait, hold on, there’s so much more going on here.” But the fact that my eye went to that first instead of the car encampment, the kids’ toys, brought up a lot of questions about my own relationship to the city and the things that we choose to see, the things that maybe we’ve seen so much of that we subconsciously filter it out. Why was it important for you to put these two things up against each other in this way?
SG: Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave. That’s what I’m doing in my work at large. I use the sunsets and the beauty to create a dialogue, to entice people to sort of look a little bit at how things are contextualized, how things act, what’s actually happening. I don’t make things in a vacuum. I was working on this show and I was going to really push this agenda of incorporating more of my experience with my kids into the work. That’s also a double-edged sword. I wanted to interject some levity, because the work can get so dark. I wanted to bring in some iconography from their world and things that they get excited about. When you’re juxtaposing that with really stark things, it becomes darker. I want to thicken the stock a little bit. Make things a little more complex.
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