On 24 January, the Louvre will open its doors to ‘Louvre Couture’, an exhibition set to offer a “new perspective on decorative arts through the prism of contemporary fashion design”. On 4 March, the world’s most-visited museum will also play host to ‘Le Grand Dîner’, a ritzy fundraising gala taking place on the second night of Paris Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2025. While it will not be the first time that the museum plays host to fashion and pop culture’s A-list (the museum’s courtyard La Cour Carrée is the de facto fashion week home of Louis Vuitton’s womenswear spectacles), comparisons are understandably being made between the debut event and the Met Gala.
The moment feels like a landmark in the bleeding of boundaries between the institutions of fashion and fine art — particularly with respect to their increased commercial interdependence. While, in recent years, significant attention (not least by us) has been paid to the many means by which fashion houses have sought inroads into the comparatively rarified fine art space, the opening of the Louvre’s exhibition brings due focus to the flip side: how fashion became a solid business bet for world-beating museums.
The Met
Before digging in, it bears noting that as a curatorial paradigm, the fashion exhibition isn’t exactly novel. There are a number of acclaimed institutions that have long upheld a commitment to platforming fashion, such as London’s V&A, which has held a permanent fashion collection since its founding in the 1850s; Belgium’s MoMu in Antwerp and Modemuseum Hasselt, two pioneering exhibitors of avant-garde style; the Kyoto Costume Institute in Japan; the Palais Galliera in Paris, one of 14 City of Paris museums; and, of course, the Costume Institute at the Met.
It is impossible to explore how the contemporary fashion exhibition became a significant commercial venture without first acknowledging the significance that the Metropolitan Museum of Art played in its genesis, with the pop cultural appeal of the genre boosted in the early ’70s under the curatorial remit of former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland. “She really prototyped the current paradigm for commercial fashion exhibitions by deciding to curate monographs of living designers’ work,” notes Jeppe Ugelvig, a New York-based curator and fashion historian. “Vreeland’s first exhibition was ‘The World of Balenciaga’ in 1973,” he continues. “She essentially crossed a barrier into a promotion logic that many people at the time found very problematic, but which has since become a kind of modus operandi. You now see it completely streamlined at the Met under [now editor-in-chief] Anna Wintour, but also in many other institutions, where the lenders of objects are also the sponsors; and where sponsors find exhibitions to be perfect opportunities to engage their target consumer audience.”
Big brand bucks
Since then, there has been no shortage of examples of brands — in particular storied high fashion and luxury houses — using exhibitions in clouty cultural edifices to assert their pedigree. From Giorgio Armani’s watershed show at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 (rumoured to have cost the designer $15 million) to blockbusters at London’s V&A (such as ‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ or ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’), such exhibits are indicative of “a growing focus from houses and brands to be understood in this cultural context”, explains V&A exhibitions director Daniel Slater.
Of course, the benefits of staging these showcases are hardly unilateral. For the museums, such exhibitions have come to represent major windfall opportunities, not only for the luxury sponsorships they invite, but also for the access to the marketing machines that big-name fashion brings in tow. “Fashion brings publicity,” Ugelvig says, “and publicity brings audience numbers, particularly crowds that may not normally visit a fine art exhibition.”
He continues: “These exhibitions also offer ways to enter media contexts and conversations that museums may not be very used to finding themselves. They also engage a donor list and a sponsor list that may be harder to access when you’re trying to stage niche fine art exhibitions.”
Booming ticket sales
The V&A has served as a blueprint for the trend, Slater notes. “The model of fashion exhibitions now prevalent around the world has its roots in the V&A of many decades ago — but it’s become a part of our identity, and mimicked by so many others, because we’ve never settled on a single ‘model’ for how a fashion exhibition should be done,” he explains.
The success of the V&A’s fashion programming is most starkly evident looking at ‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’, the 2015 exhibition that originally debuted at the Met’s Costume Institute four years prior. Over a 21-week run, the show drew close to half a million visitors, making it the V&A’s most-visited spectacle of all time.
While certainly outstanding, it isn’t an isolated success. “Since 2020, V&A exhibitions falling into the fashion category include ‘Fashioning Masculinities’, ‘Bags: Inside Out’, ‘Africa Fashion’ and ‘Naomi: In Fashion’, and the combined visitor figure for these exhibitions is roughly three-quarters of a million,” Slater says. “Against other exhibitions staged across these years (those not falling into the fashion category), this approximate 750,000 figure represents around 40 per cent of overall ticketed exhibition visits. Fashion exhibitions are certainly important to the V&A — but they’re also hugely important to our audiences.”
The rampant success of fashion exhibitors like the V&A and the Met has precipitated a boom in more traditional fine arts institutions leaning in. Some, such as M+ in Hong Kong, have invested resources in curating, producing and staging their own exhibitions. Take last year’s monograph on the life and wardrobe of prolific Chinese socialite and Pierre Cardin muse Madame Song for example.
Others have instead opted to host travelling shows, a model that allows them to reap the benefits of almost-guaranteed ticket sales without having to invest resources in collection-building or curatorial infrastructure. An example is ‘Thierry Mugler: Couturissime’, a 2019 exhibition initially produced by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal — where it was the most-visited exhibition in Canada that year — and that later travelled to Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs and New York’s Brooklyn Museum to huge success.
The runaway success of these shows should also be of note to anyone fretting over the current luxury downturn. Bucking suspicions of a growing disinterest in luxury fashion, it’s a testament to the strength of our collective yearning to engage with it — even against the backdrop of pricing hikes that limit access to luxury goods to an increasingly narrow minority. When savvily executed, exhibitions offer a key physical and emotional touchpoint for potential brand consumers, both new and pre-existing. “It’s a curatorial model and exhibition culture that’s filled with excitement, sex, fantasy, desire and magic,” Ugelvig notes. “That feels accessible, and isn’t that hard to sell.”
Culture’s shifting sands
The lucrativeness of fashion-related exhibitions hasn’t just materialised out of thin air. It’s a consequence of various perspectival shifts in culture at large. On the one hand, there has been a growing appetite for more interdisciplinary approaches to creative practice, characterised by more porous definitions of art, fashion, architecture, design and beyond.
It’s an ethos that underscores the National Portrait Gallery in London’s approach to its recent swell of fashion-related programming, which includes ‘Vogue 100: A Century of Style’ and the forthcoming ‘The Face Magazine: Culture Shift’. “Fashion and portraiture go hand in hand, and we can see from the success of past exhibitions that those which explore themes of fashion, photography and cultural impact really appeal to our audiences,” says Rosie Wilson, the gallery’s director of programmes, partnerships and collections.
Similar goes for Tate Modern, which will be opening its monograph of boundary-pushing artist and style icon Leigh Bowery on 27 February. “We wanted to do a Leigh Bowery show because his approach to self-styling and performance feels really legible to a younger, born-digital generation of artists and creatives,” says Tate Modern programme director Catherine Wood. “Bowery’s approach to making art was really beyond categories — he used his body, his skin, his gestures as a form of living painting and sculpture that pushed costume beyond ‘fashion’ to something truly experimental and often outrageous.”
Beyond this interdisciplinary inflection in how culture is perceived and consumed, however, there’s also the simple fact that fashion has boomed into a veritable pop cultural titan. “While the fashion industry and fashion system used to be a relatively small, insidery business that had limited pop cultural appeal, since the rise of its media culture in the ’70s, it’s become something that a lot of people can relate to,” Ugelvig says. “Whether it’s fashion’s relationship to celebrity or to music, fashion is pop culture. And in that sense it has replaced the role of fine art. Looking back at something like pop art, there was a proximity between the media and fine art that felt very organic, and thus saw people streaming to these exhibitions. Nowadays, contemporary art, to many, feels quite niche, specialised, a little bit obscure as a cultural form. Fashion has really eclipsed art as a form of mass culture and mass entertainment.”
What are the opportunities for brands?
The benefits for museums staging fashion exhibitions should by now be pretty apparent, but questions around what opportunities exist for brands around such exhibitions remain. For houses that are able to firsthand sponsor major institutional exhibitions of their own archives — as is the case with, say, Dolce Gabbana’s current exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais or the V&A’s forthcoming Cartier showcase — the boon lies in plain sight: it offers brands the opportunity to present its story in a venerable context, one that by its very nature alchemically transforms displayed pieces into cultural artefacts and objets d’art.
Similarly, brands whose pieces are featured in major fashion exhibitions may also get a boost. In ‘Louvre Couture’, pieces by Jacquemus and Demna’s Balenciaga will be featured alongside couture masterpieces by Gabrielle Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Jean Paul Gaultier. Meanwhile, at the Met, Andrew Bolton — the Costume Institute’s curatorial lead — has made significant efforts to incorporate the works of emerging and independent talents in its exhibitions, with brands like Conner Ives, Vaquera and Wales Bonner as recent fixtures.
While the exact format and guestlist of Le Grand Dîner du Louvre remains to be revealed, there’s also the strong possibility that the event will offer similar red carpet opportunities to the Met Gala — especially since it’s set to take place during Paris Fashion Week — bringing with it the brand visibility and talent sponsorships that naturally entail.
Still, it would be remiss to imply that opportunities for brands around fashion exhibitions are, as stands, open-ended. A key limitation of most blockbuster fashion exhibitions is their relative conservative remit. “They have a tendency to narrate fashion’s own history through a lens that’s very corporate and very ‘masters only’,” Ugelvig says. “This has a lot to do with sponsorship pressures and publicity expectations. If you need to get a lot of foot traffic, a McQueen show or a Mugler show will always be a safer bet than an original, thoroughly researched exhibition of experimental fashion practice.”
As corporatised as the fashion exhibition landscape may be, the fact it is experiencing a boom time when there’s so much talk of a luxury slump is telling of an enduring appetite. Even if the access on offer is to ephemeral cultural experience, rather than to actual product. After all, a Chanel 2.55 flap bag may feel increasingly inaccessible to most, but at least a ticket to look at the original 1955 prototype is priced within reach.
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