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This Thursday night in Paris, after the final show on the haute couture schedule ended, an altogether different show took place at the Louvre. Jordan Roth presented Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty, a cycle of three live performances in which he uses fashion as a conduit for his impressions of the world’s largest museum.
It was a first-ever moment for Roth, whose fearless embrace of outré style and affable theatricality have gone a long way toward building a persona beyond his career as an acclaimed Broadway producer and philanthropy-focused impresario. To him, this “narrative fashion performance” doesn’t represent a reinvention so much as an evolution; he describes it as “an artistic practice that is synthesizing so much of my professional, creative, and emotional life so far.” With the support of six dancers and music by Thomas Roussel, his work was part of the larger programming for La Nuit de la Mode, an evening that marks the last celebration of the blockbuster “Louvre Couture” exhibition (even though it runs through late August).
A few weeks earlier, we find each other in a remote wing of the building, inaccessible from the museum, where we will be joined by Laurence des Cars, director of the Louvre since 2021. Roth will spend the next week rehearsing, but has arrived at our meeting dressed très chic in a Dries Van Noten ivory top with sculptural pleating, a black straight skirt and pointed heels from Saint Laurent, and a small bag adorned with a Claude Lalanne bronze flower.
So, what to expect? “We are taking static, solid icons and exploring them through fabric and emotion and movement, which is the vocabulary of fashion,” Roth says. “Clothes speak very loudly to my body and tell me how they want to be moved.”
Consider how most of us visiting the Louvre will find ourselves enthralled by any number of ancient artifacts and masterpieces, or else the architecture itself. Roth has transposed all of this into three themes—red, wings, and pyramid—and translated them into digital images to be projected onto white garments of his own design.
The red theme is centered around John Galliano’s empress gown from the Christian Dior spring 2005 collection, currently displayed in the Napoleon III apartments as part of the exhibition. Wings entails some 50 wings from across the collections, from the obvious Winged Victory of Samothrace and Raphael’s depiction of Saint Michael to small Egyptian amulets. Pyramid takes a cue from the changing sky above I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid structure, as well as painted skies by the likes of Andrea Mantegna and Hubert Robert.
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Of course, at the Louvre—specifically, in the Cour Marly, a soaring sculpture garden where Roth will be surrounded by formidable marble horses and other statues created during the reign of Louis XV—the bar for a debut is set rather high. “Don’t come to the Louvre if you’re not going to bring your A-plus game!” he says. Still, he adds, “while the performance is ambitious in scale and scope, what it really is is a walk.”
That walk has been some two years in the making. Roth has had an ongoing friendship with Olivier Gabet, who was the director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (with all its marquee fashion exhibitions) before being appointed director of the Louvre’s department of decorative arts in 2022. Despite the Louvre not having a fashion collection, Gabet mounted “Louvre Couture” with some 65 statement looks and dozens of accessories within the decorative-arts galleries.
Des Cars needed no convincing that Roth’s idea would fit right into that show: “I was mesmerized by the series of images and possible performances,” she says. The three of us are in her office, where Candida Höfer’s photograph of the Salle des Cariatides hangs behind her desk (very meta). “I had never seen anything like this, directly inspired by the Louvre—the collections but also the decor, the staircases—and I knew this is exactly what we are looking for: a new look, something exciting, but at the same time always relevant.”
Having just announced an all-important architectural competition for the Louvre’s renovation—a project announced in January by President Emmanuel Macron—des Cars says the museum’s cultural programming is not only an enjoyable part of her job but essential. And lately it seems the Louvre has been flexing its own version of soft power in all directions, from loaning Chardin’s stunning Panier de fraises to Dior for Jonathan Anderson’s menswear debut to opening a new, on-site boulangerie that now allows visitors to leave the museum with a baguette or loaf of sourdough emblazoned with a dusting of flour in the shape of the pyramid.
“When you touch something here in the Louvre, it has consequences,” des Cars says. “But you need very much to be curious, to practice your curiosity. Of course, the building is very important, but what is it good for if you don’t have a soul, if you don’t have a vision?”
As for Roth’s vision, one could point to his unforgettable 2019 Met Gala look by Iris van Herpen as the catalyst for this moment. The custom cape featured a trompe l’œil pattern of an opulent velvet stage curtain, which revealed a second trompe l’œil of the full theater when Roth extended his arms. Ever since, his rising profile—especially on social media—has led to a kind of metamorphosis, where a lifetime of collecting and wearing fashion has opened up a stage that is entirely his.
He also seems to be building upon certain legacies. Fashion designers such as Hussein Chalayan, Viktor Rolf, and Kunihiko Morinaga of Anrealage (among others) have all developed ideas around performance pieces, altering clothes in real time. Modernist Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Danse seems like an antecedent, too; ditto the ever-shifting identity explorations of Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun.
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For des Cars, Roth speaks to her broader vision to “reopen the Louvre to artists.” Of course, creatives have long used the museum to study and copy works, but before that they had studios and residences on the premises. (In 2023, the Louvre revived that tradition by inviting Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton to do a residency.) “A museum needs artists because they are the best ambassadors,” des Cars says. “They see things that we do not see. What artists bring to museums is the ultimate proof of life because they remind us that a piece of work that is 5,000 years old is yours if you look at it and make something out of it.”
How does Roth feel about the artist label? “Well, it’s one thing to be called an artist—it’s another to be called an artist by the president of the Louvre!” he replies merrily.
Then, after a thoughtful pause, he continues: “What we are given the opportunity to practice seeing, as we experience art, is ultimately to see ourselves, to understand ourselves as full beings. The work of seeing yourself is an artistic practice, and to then be validated for engaging in that artistic practice is a blessing.”
