In all, about pieces of couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories dating from to the present day are sprinkled throughout the Decorative Objects department on the first floor of the Richelieu wing. At press time, organizers announced that 30 tables already had been auctioned off, meeting the fundraising goal of 1 million euros. At left, a metallic knit and organza couture look by Rabih Kayrouz, fall When I arrived, in , [Louvre president-director] Laurence des Cars and I spoke a lot about all the programming we do around contemporary creation.
It also makes sense because we have longstanding ties with fashion, whether through shows staged here by houses like Louis Vuitton and Dior or acquisitions and renovations that have been supported by the private sector, notably LVMH and Kering.
That said, the Louvre exists a bit above the fray. But fashion can change how people look at us. It was very precise. But we do have 32, art objects, among them works left to the Louvre by Madame Carven, pieces that belonged to Jacques Doucet and a beautiful diamond box that belonged to Yves Saint Laurent. When you look at that, and the birth of haute couture, and how collecting allowed all these designers to consolidate their social status, there are deep cultural, societal, sociological reasons for us to do this.
So our question was: how did designers look at the works in the Louvre, draw inspiration from them, reinterpret them? When you take a step back, fashion is everywhere you look—in Antiquity, in Babylon, in Athens, in Venetian painting and French sculpture, absolutely everywhere. The idea was really to follow the chronological order of the collections by blocks, from Byzantine to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Empire, the Second Empire, etc.
That way, we could show that, in his final couture collection, Karl Lagerfeld was inspired by an 18 th century blue and white lacquered commode. Sometimes, the interpretations are freer, as with Versace, but you can see that designers are interested in moments in the history of objects.
