Dressing Like an Artist? There’s an Art to That.

Fashion and art have long danced a pas de deux, with artists evoking dress in their work and designers referencing art in their creations.

But rarely are the two examined together by major art institutions, said Annabelle Ténèze, the director of the Musée du Louvre-Lens, a satellite in Lens, northern France, of the famed Musée du Louvre. “The intersection of art and fashion speaks to everyone. We all dress every day, which is an act of artistic expression, in its way. I thought, ‘Why not look at the history of this relationship, and show how it fits into our lives today?’”

Shortly after her appointment to the museum in 2022, Ténèze proposed the long-gestating subject to her colleague, Olivier Gabet, who leads the Louvre’s decorative arts department in Paris, and suggested they curate it together. “I thought it was a fierce and strong idea,” Gabel said in an interview last week, “because it can be read on so many different layers.”

The result is “The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist,” an exhibition of 200 artworks and fashion items that explores how these two creative worlds circle, intersect and inspire each other and, at times, meld into one. It opens at the Louvre-Lens on Wednesday and runs through July 21.

“The Art of Dressing” is the Louvre’s second exhibition that mixes fashion with art, after “Louvre Couture,” a show curated by Gabet that opened in January in Paris. For that show, Gabet set contemporary fashion and accessories among the museum’s art and furniture collections to reveal a dialogue between métiers and eras.

Ténèze and Gabet’s show at the Louvre-Lens goes deeper, addressing everything from the influence of Ancient Greece on modern attire to the expression of gender identity through clothes. “It’s a nice change to have the point of view about fashion from a museum that is not a fashion museum,” Gabet said. “The perspective is different.”

“The Art of Dressing” opens with a large color photograph from 1998 of five models in the Yves Saint Laurent Room, a space in the National Gallery in London dedicated to Rubens which was restored in the mid-1990s, in part through a 1 million pound donation from the fashion designer and his partner Pierre Bergé. In the picture, each woman is dressed in a Saint Laurent outfit inspired by an artist, such as the Mondrian dress from 1965 and the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” jacket from 1988.

Also on display are three looks by Saint Laurent that were inspired by Georges Braque, the celebrated Cubist artist who painted a ceiling in the Louvre in the 1950s. “We wanted to show that the couturier and the visual artist can be at the same level,” Ténèze said during a tour of the exhibition last week. “What better way to start than with Yves Saint Laurent?”

The exhibition also considers the clothes that artists wore and what their fashion choices reveal about their place in society.

“Artists of the 19th century decided to represent themselves in painting by wearing a black suit, which was the absolutely most bourgeois outfit of that period,” Gabet said, pointing out self-portraits by Eugène Delacroix in 1837 and Edgar Degas in 1855. Before then, as the exhibition shows, artists often portrayed themselves as St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, wearing a collarless tunic.

In stark contrast, however, is how artists actually dress when they work: often in paint- and clay-spattered coveralls, like the royal blue ones favored by the 20th-century Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely. His estate still had one of those garments 34 years after his death, and lent it to the curators for the show. (Linking back to the world of fashion, Tinguely’s coveralls are displayed near a 1984 Saint Laurent jumpsuit inspired by the classic French worker’s jacket, the bleu de travail.)

It was shocking in the 19th century when some women artists donned pants in the studio — as evidenced in Georges Achille-Fould’s 1893 portrait of her mentor, Rosa Bonheur, painting a landscape while dressed in brown trousers and a blue smock. “Women wearing pants was an act disallowed by society at the time,” Ténèze explained. And much later, too: Saint Laurent triggered social outcry in the 1960s with his tuxedo for women, one of which, from 1995, is in the show. “Because these artists fought social norms, we can dress more freely today,” Ténèze said.

Thinking about androgyny led Ténèze and Gabet to look at gender identity and cross-dressing in art and fashion. In the show, there are some expected icons, such as the 19th-century French female writer George Sand, who, like Bonheur, preferred to wear men’s clothing — she is depicted at her nattiest in a sepia-toned portrait by Delacroix from 1834 — and Andy Warhol, who, in a series of Polaroid self-portraits, transforms from man to woman through changes of dress and wigs.

But there are a few surprises too, such as Louise Abbéma’s “Sur le Lac au Bois de Boulogne,” an 1883 landscape featuring herself, in a gentlemen’s suit, and her companion, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, in a pale pink gown, in a rowboat on a park lake. The curators said they wanted to spotlight long-forgotten female artists, such as Abbéma, to revive interest in their work.

The show’s many threads come together when the curators celebrate the collaborations of artists and fashion designers, such as that of the French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle and her great friend, Marc Bohan, the designer at Christian Dior from 1960 to 1989. In the early 1980s, Saint Phalle created a namesake perfume with a bottle featuring a sculpted snake; in turn, Bohan made for Saint Phalle a shimmering gold pantsuit and headpiece inspired by her serpent to wear for the perfume’s launch event (which Warhol hosted). Both the suit and the perfume’s bottle and packaging are in the exhibition; the headpiece, sadly, is long lost, Ténèze said.

When museumgoers leave the exhibition, they pass along a zigzag wall of full-length mirrors inspired by the décor from a fashion show by the British designer Alexander McQueen, explained the exhibition’s scenographer, Mathis Boucher.

“We wanted visitors to look at themselves in the mirrors and ask, ‘Why did I put this on today? What am I trying to say with this outfit?’ Ténèze said. “Like the exhibition, it’s a reflection of ourselves, and our relationship with clothes.”

The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist
March 26 through July 21 at the Louvre-Lens in Lens, France; louvrelens.fr.