The Louvre Museum in Paris has launched its first-ever fashion exhibition, designed to draw a younger crowd to the world’s most visited museum.
The exhibition features around a hundred items of clothing by 45 top designers that have been placed alongside objects from the Louvre’s vast collection of decorative artworks, from chests of drawers to armor.
The exhibition titled, “Louvre Couture: Art and Fashion in Dialogue,” will run until 21st July 2025. The expo will bring together more than 100 different looks and accessories from 45 maisons and designers, ranging from Cristóbal Balenciaga to Marine Serre, showcasing the close relationship between contemporary fashion and decorative arts.
Louvre director Laurence des Cars said that the show demonstrated “a subtle and precise dialogue between creations from the 1960s to today and the collections of the decorative arts department, highlighting the deep connection between art and designers.”
“This embodies the core of our broader programming ambition: to continually reinterpret the Louvre’s collections for new generations of visitors with different cultural references,” she added.
Louvre Couture spans four major historical periods—Byzantium and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Grand Siècle and eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century. The exhibition is spread across the museum, from the decorative arts galleries in the Richelieu and Sully Wings to the Napoleon III apartments, pairing fashion pieces from 1960 to 2025 with historical furniture and objets d’art that inspired them.
The 18th-century period rooms are the most densely populated, featuring rococo-inspired looks by Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Nicolas Ghesquière that resemble the marquetry and gold scrolls seen nearby on Boulle cabinets and Louis XV chairs.
For the first time, the Louvre is displaying haute couture gowns and accessories from renowned fashion houses. This groundbreaking showcase reveals the connection between haute couture and decorative arts, featuring 65 garments and 30 accessories from iconic fashion houses.
Through period tapestries, 18th-century interiors, and Byzantine-era works, the exhibition bridges the worlds of fashion and art through a shared visual language, as per the reports.
