Last night, 400 guests from the business, art, and fashion worlds gathered in the extraordinary Crystal Palace in Paris for the highly anticipated inauguration of the magnificient Fondation Louis Vuitton. French President François Hollande was received by Bernard Arnault, President of the LVMH group, and Antoine Arnault and Natalia Vodianova, Sidney and Katia Toledano, Anna Wintour, Pierre Bergé, Lauren Santo Domingo, Karl Lagerfeld, Nicolas Ghesquière, Raf Simons, Kris Van Assche, and Phoebe Philo were among those who arrived at the Bois de Boulogne to celebrate the occasion, many of them in straight from the runway Louis Vuitton and Dior.
A dozen years and some $135 million in the making, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is like no other museum in the world. Entirely private, supported by LMVH and Bernard Arnault, it will showcase contemporary art in a remarkably distinctive structure. Designed by Frank Gehry, the museum even outshines his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. “The original idea was to build a place in movement. It’s like a cloud; it changes,” said the architect of the building’s exterior, notably the enormous panels of milky glass that resemble the sails of a ship.
Last night, guests previewed the inaugural exhibits, which featured rooms of work dedicated to Ellsworth Kelly, Tarek Atoui, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Olafur Eliasson (the Fondation opens its doors to the public on October 27), and President Hollande spoke admiringly of the power and importance of the museum. “The foundation is a gift to France,” he said.