, ,

Along the Gold Thread

c

From the Maghreb to Japan, a fabulous journey through time and space, to discover the mysterious and fascinating origin of gold and its marriage with textile arts.

The most precious and noble metal in the world, an object of desire, a symbol of wealth and splendor, a sign of elegance and refinement… Discovered nearly 7,000 years ago, gold has never ceased to fascinate men. The material par excellence of all know-how, experiments and traditions, it has been used since Antiquity for the creation of jewelry, adornments and weapons. From the fifth millennium BC, it embellished the first luxury fabrics dedicated to men of power. Over the following centuries, skilled weavers and artisans—Roman, Byzantine, Chinese, Persian and then Muslim—deployed the most ingenious techniques to create true artistic fabrics where silk or linen fibers intertwine with gold blades and threads.

From the first ornaments sewn onto the clothing of the deceased to the flamboyant dresses of contemporary Chinese artist Guo Pei that punctuate the entire exhibition, from the gold-woven silks of the Indian and Indonesian worlds to the shimmering kimonos of the Edo era, the exhibition unfolds the thousand-year-old history of gold in textile arts. In a dialogue combining scientific discovery and artistic perspective, it reveals the dazzling beauty, diversity, technicality, and richness of costumes from a vast region stretching from the Maghreb to Japan, via the Middle East, India, and China.

February 11 – July 6, 2025

MUSEE du QUAI BRANLY – JACQUES CHIRAC

37 quai branly 75007 Paris

/by
, ,

Objets d’art, objets de mode

If we have known since Paul Cézanne that “the Louvre is a book in which we learn to read”, this inexhaustible source of inspiration has not escaped one of the most vibrant worlds of contemporary creation, that of fashion. Increasingly, studies and monographs devoted to the great names of fashion do not hesitate to trace aesthetic genealogies that place these personalities in a historical and artistic perspective.

The rhythm is not only that of ruptures, more or less radical, nor of seasonal change, it is also that of echoes and reminders. The threads that are woven between their work and the world of art are almost infinite, and the history of art as expressed by the Louvre, in the depth of its collections and the reflections of taste, is a terrain of influence and sources just as vast.

Faced with the encyclopedic immensity of the Louvre, the method proposed here is to place this multiple subject in the light of the history of decorative styles, crafts and ornament, through the galleries and rooms of the Department of Decorative Arts. The textile presence is fundamental, but more focused on decorations and tapestries than on clothing itself.

On nearly 9,000 square meters, 65 contemporary silhouettes, accompanied by around thirty accessories, are displayed in a close, unprecedented, historical and poetic dialogue with the masterpieces of the department, from Byzantium to the Second Empire. So many remarkable loans, granted by the most emblematic houses, from the oldest to the most recent, from Paris and elsewhere.

The aim here is not to sprinkle the Department of Decorative Arts with fashion pieces, but to arouse or highlight proven connections, its collections having sometimes been shaped by the generosity of men and women of fashion, from Jacques Doucet to Madame Carven.

In terms of the history of art and fashion, there are countless complicities, often adopting common methods, knowledge of the oldest techniques, visual culture, the subtle play of references, from the museum’s catalogue raisonné to the fashion moodboard. Another way of looking at art objects through the prism of contemporary designers.

January 24 – July 25, 2025

MUSEE DU LOUVRE

/by
, ,

The MET in Louvre

Dialogues of oriental antiquities

The Department of Oriental Antiquities hosts ten major works from the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York, currently closed for comprehensive renovation work. The Louvre was thus able to design with the Met an unprecedented dialogue between these two collections which will take place within the permanent rooms of oriental antiquities.

Dated between the end of the 4th millennium BC and the 5th century AD, the Met’s works, exceptional guests, introduce remarkable correspondences with the collections of the Louvre, that is, together they form a pair brought together for the first time on this occasion, or that they complement each other due to the specificities linked to the history of each of the two collections. From Central Asia to Syria, often passing through Iran and Mesopotamia, these collection dialogues allow us to (re)discover these multi-millennial works and the stories to which they bear witness in a different way.

February 29, 2024 – September 28, 2025

MUSEE DU LOUVRE

AILE Richelieu et Aile Sully, niveau 0

BOOK YOUR TICKETS

/by