“The Louvre is the greatest mood board in the world,” insisted curator Olivier Gabet, as he gave FashionNetwork.com a personal tour of “Louvre Couture”, the first fashion exhibition inside the planet’s most famous museum.

A fascinating display, “Louvre Couture” is a unique visual tour through the museum’s Department of Decorative Arts, to illustrate the close links between art, fashion and fashion designers.
 
Many of the couturiers from the 45 houses fashion represented were frequent visitors to the Louvre, so often that at times their works of fashion and accessories seem to walk right out of the oil paintings or tapestries; or look like they had lived in the opulent decorative settings for many decades.

Fashion visionaries like Karl Lagerfeld, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Azzedine Alaia or Irish Van Herpen, to name just a few, have all be regular visitors. As is evident from “Louvre Couture, Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces”, to give it its full name.
 

Part of the Louvre Couture’s strength is that it has already in the few days since it opened has begun luring hundreds more visitors daily to the northern wing of the museum, and its unique decorative rooms, allowing them to discover remarkable, sometimes overlooked objects.

And not just concentrate their time on the southern wing with its oil paintings, and the world’s most viewed work of art, the Mona Lisa. Taking fashionistas and style novices on a journey through 9,000 square-meters to discover over 100 exquisite works of fashion, placed amid unique craftsmanship and the rarest ornamentation. A useful pamphlet lists each fashion object making discovery easier.
 
Louvre Couture covers fashion from 1960 to 2025, all the works borrowed from fashion houses, ranging spatially all the way to Napoleon’s apartment, where creations by the likes of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto greet you. All are borrowed, except for three looks – a trio of early 18th-century ceremonial velvet capes of the Order of the Holy Spirit, founded by Henri II, and abolished in the Revolution. Who seemed to have found new friends among gilded works by Balmain and Schiaparelli.

Other designs just look naturally at ease, like a splendid silk faille Versace dress created by Donatella in a homage collection to Gianni’s prints. In this case, the golden foliage and acanthus leaves of the print fit perfectly with an uber grandiose Second Empire canopy bed. While Rick Owens 2020 split cocoon crepe dress from his Tecuatl collection, which blends Aztec and Egyptian elements, dovetails perfectly with its surroundings, given the Egyptomania that engulfed early 19th-century France.
 
At times, it’s hard to tell the fashion item apart from the objects: a Dolce & Gabbana box handbag in hand painted pine, looks almost interchangeable with a series of Sevres ceramic basins, while a Chanel Byzantine brooch blends in completely with mid 18th century Germanic snuff boxes.
 
Colors discovered in the Louvre leak into high fashion. A spring 2019 blue-and-white Chanel jacket embroidered by Lesage, has the exact same hues as 1742 commode by Mathieu Criaerd, while a curvaceous moiré dress by Jeremy Scott for Moschino echoes the curves of a Boullé table, and a golden pajama suit by Hubert de Givenchy – a famed furniture collector – boasts the exact same sheen as a bronze gold Boulle armoire.
 
Another key element is the skillful scenography by Agence Nathalie Crinière, like leaving an ottoman silk wedding dress by Yves Saint Laurent in a charming room of sculpted and gold-trimmed boiserie. As if a bride were having a moment of calm and reflection right before taking her vows.
 

 Nicolas Ghesquière’s 2018 silk and metal brocade frock coat for Louis Vuitton finds a happy space among a Louis XIV drawing room, as does an Alessandro Michele Flower Power-meets-Anatole France coat.

Other looks restore reputations, like Alexander McQueen’s widely panned 1997 debut show for Givenchy, which included a white high-collar general’s ceremonial suit, which could have been tailored for Napoleon Bonaparte, a portrait of whom hangs behind it.
 
Contemporary designers are well represented – Gareth Pugh, Marine Serre, Duro Olowu, and Jonathan Anderson with his glass pearl Bologna Dog on a trapeze dress. Or a heroic Dries Van Noten gents’ coat that seems made out of the outstanding Bruges Renaissance tapestries it stands among.
 
But one senses the stars of the show are often Gabet’s favorites – like Karl, Demna and John. Lagerfeld – with multiple Chanel creations, including his 2010 Paris-Byzantine Métiers d’Art collection – a major theme in Louvre Couture. Doubly so, as the museum plans to open a dedicated Byzantine division in the coming years.

Demna’s famed medieval collection, a knight in armor – made of coated resin –  takes pride of place in the Armory Room, while the phantasmagorical deranged madcap king by Galliano for Dior is such a clearly surreal interpretation of a great oil of the Sun King that it would be a pity to ever move it.
 
In a very real sense, the Louvre has been slow to embrace fashion. Keeping it always at an arm’s length, as an applied art presented inside the adjacent Decorative Arts Museum (MAD),  but never until this month inside the actual Louvre.

Asked if he considered fashion as fine art? Gabet raises an eyebrow, as if being posed a trick question, before responding by asking another question: “I think that separating and dividing creativity into different hierarchies is very old fashioned, isn’t it?”
 
And, yes, I suppose it is.
 
Louvre Couture is open until July 21.