Dressing like an artist? There is an art to that

LENS, France – 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 Ms Annabelle Teneze, director of the Musee du Louvre-Lens, a satellite in Lens, northern France, of the famed Musee 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, Ms Teneze 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,” Mr Gabet said in an interview, “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 opened at the Louvre-Lens on March 26 and runs till July 21.

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

Ms Teneze and Mr 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,” Mr Gabet said. “The perspective is different.”

The Art Of Dressing opens with a large colour photograph from 1998 of five models in the Yves Saint Laurent Room, a space in the National Gallery London dedicated to Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens which was restored in the mid-1990s. In the picture, each woman is dressed in a Saint Laurent outfit inspired by an artist, such as the Piet Mondrian dress from 1965 and the Vincent 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,” Ms Teneze said during a tour of the exhibition before the opening. “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,” Mr Gabet said, pointing out self-portraits by French artists Eugene Delacroix in 1837 and Edgar Degas in 1855.

Before then, as the exhibition shows, artists often portrayed themselves as Saint 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 favoured by 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.

It was shocking in the 19th century when some women artists donned pants in the studio – as evidenced in French painter 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,” Ms Teneze said.

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,” Ms Teneze said.

Thinking about androgyny led Ms Teneze and Mr Gabet to look at gender identity and cross-dressing in art and fashion.

In the show, there are some expected icons, such as 19th-century French female writer George Sand who, like Bonheur, preferred to wear men’s clothing. Sand is depicted at her nattiest in a sepia-toned portrait by Delacroix from 1834. And American visual artist Andy Warhol, 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 French painter Louise Abbema’s Sur le Lac au Bois de Boulogne. The 1883 landscape features her in a gentlemen’s suit and her companion, French actress Sarah Bernhardt, in a pale pink gown, in a row boat on a park lake. The curators said they wanted to spotlight long-forgotten female artists, such as Abbema, 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 French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle and her friend Marc Bohan, the French 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 her 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, Ms Teneze said.

When museumgoers leave the exhibition, they pass along a zigzag wall of full-length mirrors inspired by the decor from a fashion show by the late 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?’” Ms Teneze said. “Like the exhibition, it’s a reflection of ourselves and our relationship with clothes.” NYTIMES