Inside the Louvre's First-Ever Fashion Exhibition. Plus, an Interview With Olivier Gabet

The Louvre Museum is shaking things up thanks to its first-ever fashion exhibition. "Louvre Couture" is now happening in Paris and marks a major moment of breaking tradition for the storied French institution. Inside its hallowed halls, visitors can see couture pieces from 45 fashion houses in total, including the likes Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace and many more. Director of the Louvre Museum's Department of Decorative Arts Olivier Gabet spoke to L'OFFICIEL in an interview to offer an inside look at the new exhibition in the City of Lights.

Read on for the full conversation.

L'OFFICIEL: 25 years ago, you did your first internship at the Louvre. Did you think you would return as director of a department?
Olivier Gabet: I am happy to come back after having explored many fields and several forms of art, notably in Decorative Arts (Olivier Gabet was director of the Museum of Decorative Arts from 2013 to 2019, editor's note). This way we had of mixing was a very good school.  

L’O: What are your challenges at the Louvre?
OG: This exhibition is one of them. The Department of Art Objects concerns approximately 33,000 objects whose dimension is, I wouldn't say more precious, but endowed with another dimension. The time of museums is long, it isn't the time of fashion or contemporary art which goes faster and faster. Respecting this length and, at the same time, coming from time to time to awaken it with more eventful, more unexpected things, is a challenge. Maybe people will say that fashion is very superficial and it has no meaning at the Louvre. I don't think so. The challenge is to reactivate very old collections that people look at without really looking at them. Painting, antiquity, and archaeology are very important things because they are very statutory, they define the identity of the Louvre, but we must also show current events that are part of a very long history. Our role is to show our visitors that if we are passionate, they can be too.

How the Idea for the Louvre Museum's First-Ever Fashion Exhibit Happened

L'O: How did the idea for the exhibition come about?
OG: The idea is quite old. When Laurence Descartes was appointed to the Louvre, I was still at the Arts Déco and we said to ourselves that at some point we would have to do something between the two museums. We worked together on the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. She is a remarkable woman whom I have affection and a lot of admiration for. And then, against all expectations, I was appointed to the Louvre. The Louvre is not a fashion museum, the national fashion collections are kept at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and that will never change. However, our vocation is to present contemporary creation. We do it with painters, photographers, writers, and choreographers. So why wouldn't we do it with fashion, which is one of the most exciting things in the creative field today?

I changed my approach a bit and suggested borrowing frankly modern and contemporary pieces directly from the fashion houses without going through institutions, apart from the Alaïa Foundation and the Saint Laurent Museum which have this very special status. The oldest piece in the exhibition by Cristobal Balenciaga dates from 1961, we also have a Paco Rabanne dress from 1967, and then the chronology goes up to today. I am aware that for the world of fashion, the Louvre Museum takes us to the past, but with a much more contemporary dimension, with fashion houses that are either very young or very established, with the desire to bring them into the art objects department through bridges such as work on materials, the know-how of the crafts, and inspiration. Laurence Descartes found this idea risky but exciting. In any case, I had no desire at all to put 18th-century dresses in 18th-century rooms; it has already been done, not at the Louvre, but elsewhere.  

L'O: What was the modus operandi? First the object, then the fashion, or the other way around?
OG: The exhibition takes place in the department's rooms. It was necessary for there to be a sort of historical stature because chronology remains something fundamental. That being said, the Louvre being a vast museum, you don't start at point A and end at point Z. So we proceeded by entity. I'm not saying that we have the perfect chronology, but anyway, we have the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the 18th century. So we have a framework that gives visitors the freedom to have several entrances. The second important thing concerned "obligatory marriages." Before starting, I had ten works in my head that I saw here and there. I said to myself "I want Jonathan Anderson for here, John Galliano for that, Karl Lagerfeld or Maria Grazia for..." I had very fixed ideas before realizing that this systematism is not very interesting in an exhibition. Fashion isn't there to document art objects, and art objects aren't there to illustrate fashion. What we wanted was to really be in a relationship, and for people to say to themselves, "there is no one thing more important than the other." Take the Renaissance, which is quite vast, it reminded us of Viktor & Rolf, Alexander McQueen, Maria Grazia Chiuri, and Iris Van Herpen who do not talk about it in the same way.  

How the Exhibit Is Laid Out and What's Inside

L’O: Tell us about the scenography of the exhibition.
OG: We owe it to Nathalie Crinière. With her, we presented Dior in 2017 at the Musée des Arts Déco, as well as the Schiaparelli and Barbie exhibitions. For me, she is the scenographer who perceives, with the greatest finesse, fashion and its relationship to art. We wanted to imagine a kind of stroll that makes you want to rediscover the Louvre's art objects and that allows you to see fashion in another context.  

L'O: Are all these silhouettes haute couture?
OG: No. That was the big question. At first, I said to myself: “We’re at the Louvre, so we’re going to work with haute couture.” It worked to a certain extent. Firstly, because today we’re witnessing a sort of breaking down of these hierarchical boundaries. I was on the haute couture committee for a few years and I know what the rules are, and it’s good to respect them. But at the same time, we’re at the Louvre, and what counts is as much the know-how as the aesthetic and artistic wearing. Jonathan Anderson, up until now, doesn’t do haute couture and yet, I believe that, increasingly, he’s quite capable of it. So this sort of hierarchy didn’t seem very relevant to me. In addition, there’s a whole generation that’s extremely interesting–Pieter Mulier, Louise Trotter, Matthieu Blazy, Jonathan Anderson, Erdem too–who are leading us towards something very exciting. And in this moment of crisis that the world is experiencing, I think that this exhibition comes at a good time. Some houses are more represented than others, some are not there. We are in the relevance. The important thing is to show that the museum is a place of freedom and that fashion expresses this creative freedom today. The Louvre is the museum of style where we learn the history of art.

L'O: What is luxury, and what isn't?
OG: What is no longer the case is excessive consumption. Museums preserve many luxury objects from the past. Interesting, special things with sophisticated materials linked to historical moments. We are often the exception. But 80 percent of our works don't tell the truth. We tell a certain truth, but it isn't a very exhaustive and very fair panorama of the history of the world. When we return to our roots, luxury is what sets us apart, it is a question of style, originality, and artistic creation, and not of overconsumption, of permanent turnover, it's something settled. Apart from a few rare people who buy an entire collection, many people, like us, have two, three, or four items of clothing that fit them very well because they treated themselves by buying a nice shirt or a nice sweater. That is luxury today: Buying yourself a nice item of clothing. It's a story of style, freedom, and originality. That's why this generation that is coming to the helm of these big houses is very exciting. The first ones who are going to relax a little on these questions of communication, embargo, or "we don't want to be next to so-and-so", are going to win. I'm sure of that.

The "Louvre Couture: Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces" exhibition is open from January 24 to July 21, 2025 at the Louvre Museum in Paris. See more details at the art museum's website.