Paris To Host Its ‘Met Gala’ At The Louvre

Paris wanted its own ‘Met Gala’, a glamorous and iconic event attracting all the world's media, and now it has. The ultra-chic event will take place on 4 March, on the fringes of Paris Fashion Week. The exceptional setting will be the Louvre Museum and its sumptuous Marly courtyard. This historical setting will be the venue for the ‘grand dinner’ charity event, to which 300 hand-picked celebrities, journalists, designers, and patrons will be invited.

This is the first evening of its kind organised by the Louvre, and complements its exhibition ‘Louvre Couture. Objets d'art, objets de mode’, which opens on 24 January and runs until next summer.

Covering an area of 9,000 square metres, visitors will be able to admire around a hundred exceptional fashion models and some thirty accessories representing the most iconic fashion houses, from Chanel to Dior, Saint Laurent to Hermès. It will pay tribute to every era, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the baroque opulence of the Second Empire.

The exhibition will be curated by Olivier Gabet, curator general of heritage and art historian. He explained to the press that the retrospective was intended to highlight the relationship and similarities between classical art and contemporary luxury fashion.

The Louvre is thus opening up to fashion for the first time, and the French-style Met Gala dinner will be used to fund future editions of the exhibitions and the museum's cultural missions.

Visa Infinite will support the evening. Nearly thirty tables have already been booked for the dinner, which can already count on raising around one million euros, a sum set to increase considerably as the gala evening progresses.

The Louvre may be the latest museum bastion to open its doors to luxury fashion, but the relationship between these institutions and the world of designers is not a new one, and today represents a further opportunity for fashion houses to confirm their status and heritage value. This winter, Paris is presenting several major exhibitions celebrating art and fashion, including the retrospective dedicated to Iris van Herpen at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the exhibition devoted to the creations of Azzedine Alaïa at the Palais Galliera and ‘Du Cœur à la Main: Dolce & Gabbana’ at the Grand Palais.