Inside the Louvre’s first-ever Couture exhibition, featuring treasures from Versace to Dior | CNN

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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 that the late German fashion designer. Running until July 21, the exhibition includes 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 featured in this landmark spectacle – the first fashion exhibition ever held at the Louvre – with designs often hidden among the museum’s nearly 100,000 square feet of rooms and galleries .

Although this is the first time the Louvre has featured fashion, clothing is omnipresent in its galleries, from Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker” to Turban’s nude and denigrated “Grand Odalisque.”  What is worn – or not worn – has always been a central element in the creation and reception of art.

“It is very important for the Louvre to continue to open up to new generations and to make its own small contribution to the understanding of today’s world. That’s exactly what this exhibition does,” said Laurence Des Cars, president of the museum, 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 galleries themselves. Visitors are invited to stroll – or wander aimlessly, as the French saying goes – through the museum and discover its less popular collections.

“The Louvre is much more than the ‘Mona Lisa,'” said Olivier Gabet, the museum’s director of art objects as well as the exhibition’s curator.

While the 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,” Gabet observed. From Lagerfeld to Alexander McQueen, designers have long been inspired by the richness of the collections on display at the world’s largest museum. Some, like Christian Louboutin, shared Gabet’s childhood memories of days spent in his rooms. Others, like Yves Saint Laurent, were great art connoisseurs and collectors themselves. For Gabet, the personal relationship between the designers and the Louvre was the starting point of the exhibition.

It’s a connection embodied by the Dior silhouette that opens the exhibition, Gabet said. Titled “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-embedded Dolce & Gabbana dress inspired by the 11th-century mosaics of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello, Venice. A spectacular silk Dior dress with a Sun King motif is staged in front of a baroque portrait of Louis XIV himself.

Iconic pieces such as Gianni Versace’s 1997 metallic mesh dress – previously featured at the 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” exhibition – are also on display. The garment took two of the atelier’s seamstresses more than 600 hours – or 25 days – to sew by hand and is adorned with Swarovski crystals, gold embroidery with Byzantine crosses and Versace’s signature draping inspired by ancient Greek dresses Greeks.

The dress inspired Kim Kardashian’s Gold Versace gown at the 2018 Met Gala and Donatella Versace’s iconic “Tribute” collection that same year, which included five of the original models: Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Helen Bruni .

Sometimes designers’ references to objects in the Louvre are literal. Karl Lagerfeld’s 2019 collection for Chanel, for example, featured a striking embroidered jacket whose pattern was taken from an 18th-century blue and white chest by ebony 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.

Glamor can even be found in the Middle Ages, with armor-style dresses transforming models into modern Joan of Arcs. French actress Brigitte Bardot was famously styled by David Bailey in a 1967 Paco Rabanne chain mail tunic, which is featured in the exhibition alongside a Balenciaga 3D-print weave dress.

More often, the broad sweep of history serves as recurring inspiration for designers, such as Italian Renaissance paintings for Maria Grazia Chiuri at Christian Dior, medieval tapestries for Dries Van Noten, or 18th-century specialties discussed by John Galliano and Christian Louboutin.

With Paris Fashion Week just around the corner, “Louvre Couture” offers a source of inspiration for designers and visitors, illuminating the ongoing dialogue between art and fashion.

“The exhibition is not here to say that fashion is or is not art,” Gabet concluded. “Fashion is about creation. The artistic culture shared between great designers – this is the leitmotif of the collection. »

And that’s just the beginning of the conversation. In March, the famous Parisian museum will welcome hundreds of guests for the Grand Dîner, An event that is already being called the first French Met Gala.