Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum

8 November 2026, by Dolla Merrillees

In this week's blog post, Costume Society member Dolla Merrillees reviews Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. The exhibition is on display until April 4th 2027.

Is fashion art? Does it belong in a museum? These two deceptively simple questions are posed by Bénédicte Gady, Director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in her introduction to the catalogue accompanying Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum. They go to the heart of a debate that has long shaped the relationship between fashion and museums: should clothing be understood primarily as a functional object, a reflection of social and cultural history or as an expression of craftsmanship and technical ingenuity? For Gady, fashion transcends these distinctions, embodying “a creative force at work” and “an artistic universe…that…invites us to dream.”

Today, fashion’s place in museums seems assured, as does its ability to draw crowds. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination attracted 1.7 million visitors, while MAD enjoyed similar success with Christian Dior: Couturier du Rêve (2017–18), which drew more than 708,000 visitors and became the museum’s most visited exhibition to date.  

As Sophie Lemahieu, curator of Look!, observes, fashion’s acceptance into museums has been “a slow process, but one that has borne fruit, to the point where museums of every kind are now interested in fashion, whether out of genuine scholarly interest or simply in the hope of attracting visitors.” Yet, as Lemahieu observes, the debate has shifted from whether fashion belongs in museums to how it should be presented and interpreted. The recent controversy surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s planned exhibition, John Galliano: Horizons, brings questions of curatorial responsibility into sharp focus. Are museums critically examining fashion’s history or merely perpetuating the myths and reputations of the designers they celebrate?

Against this backdrop, Look!, with its multiple meanings of looking, seeing and being seen, offers an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the museum’s evolving relationship with fashion. Drawing on forty years of exhibition history, it traces the diverse ways in which MAD has exhibited dress and, in the museum’s own words, “elevated it to an art form” since the inauguration of the Musée des Arts de la Mode in 1986, following the merger of the collections of the Union Française des Arts du Costume (UFAC) and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

Organised into three sections, the exhibition takes visitors on a circular journey, based on the idea that fashion, like the museum itself, is a collective endeavour. At one end, the focus is on the professions that bring a garment to life, from concept to the runway, including designers, seamstresses, pattern cutters, stylists, and photographers. At the other are the curators, registrars, conservators, exhibition designers, production teams and countless others who transform it from something made to be worn into an object to be acquired, preserved, studied and displayed. In doing so, the exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the largely unseen workings of a museum, revealing the complex processes and specialist expertise behind what visitors encounter in the galleries. 

Between these two worlds is a retrospective of the museum’s fashion exhibitions, each represented by a single garment. Among them are André Courrèges’ 1969 Space Age dress, featured in Harper’s Bazaar: First in Fashion (2020), and a French pair of stays (corps à baleines) dating from 1740–1760, shown in Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette (2013). What emerges is a continuous process of creation and reinterpretation, in which the museum becomes as much a part of fashion’s history as the designers who created the garments and the social and cultural contexts that shaped them.

Exhibition designer Marion Golmard and graphic designer Teddy Pouteau drew their inspiration from the design atelier and the conservation workshop. The scenography takes the dressmaker’s pattern as its central motif, at once the foundation of a garment and a reflection of the museum’s interest in the construction and materiality of dress. As Lemahieu explains, the exhibition seeks to highlight the “diversity of the collections beyond the garments themselves”, encompassing sketches, patterns, mannequins—including a wooden dressmaking mannequin used by Madeleine Vionnet in 1912—sample books and fashion photographs, all of which “form part of fashion’s heritage and contribute to the writing of its history.”
 

What becomes apparent at first glance is the continuity of certain curatorial approaches. Major monographic exhibitions devoted to individual designers have long been a cornerstone of the museum’s programme, from A-UN: Issey Miyake (1988), Balenciaga Paris (2006), Hussein Chalayan: Fashion Narratives (2011), Shocking! The Surreal Worlds of Elsa Schiaparelli (2022) and Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses (2023). Often developed in collaboration with designers and fashion houses, such exhibitions inevitably raise questions about curatorial independence and commercial influence. Lemahieu, however, insists that “freedom of interpretation is always guaranteed”, regardless of the financial support or loans provided from luxury houses. 

Alongside these retrospectives, more thematic exhibitions have explored fashion’s relationship with other aspects of culture and society, including Hair and Hair (2023), which examined the role of hair in shaping appearance and identity and Fashion and Sport: From One Podium to Another (2023). Others drew on the interdisciplinary nature of MAD’s collections, notably Women’s Work (2017), exploring women’s contributions to the applied arts and The 1980s: Fashion, Design and Graphic Design in France (2022), which captured the creative ferment of the decade. 

It is tempting, then, to reflect on what is missing while recognising that the museum’s exhibition history inevitably reflects the changing preoccupations and priorities of the past forty years. Despite the breadth of subjects explored, menswear, everyday dress and fashion beyond the Western canon have received comparatively little attention. So too have the individual histories that give garments their meaning: who owned or wore them, how they were acquired and how they entered the museum’s collection. Nor is there much scrutiny of the fashion industry itself, from working conditions and global supply chains to its environmental impact. 
 

Some of these omissions are echoed in Look! itself, particularly in the sections devoted to the design atelier and the museum’s behind-the-scenes activities. While the exhibition offers a fascinating insight into the skills and techniques involved, it tells us less about the people who practise them. The section on costume mounting, for example, reveals the painstaking work of creating bespoke supports that balance conservation requirements, historical accuracy and the presentation of garments, yet leaves us curious about the specialists whose expertise, so rarely acknowledged, makes this possible. I would also have welcomed more stories of the donors and private collectors whose contributions have so enriched the museum’s holdings, from the Vicomtesse de Bonneval, whose collection of more than 1,000 pieces was acquired by Ufac in 1949, to Loïc Allio, whose collection of several thousand buttons inspired the 2015 exhibition Unbuttoning Fashion.

Their stories could have brought a compelling human dimension to the exhibition’s premise of fashion as a collective endeavour. Instead, the result is a refined and highly polished, if curiously idealised, account, an impression reinforced by the predominantly white exhibition design, which allows the garments to take centre stage but lends the presentation an almost clinical quality. More broadly, this invites reflection on how fashion exhibitions might balance the celebration of artistic genius and technical virtuosity with the messier social and human histories embedded in dress, without diminishing either.

These questions of representation extend to the museum’s collecting practices. Lemahieu acknowledges that “like all museums, there are still gaps to be filled”, particularly in the representation of different social classes. Historically, MAD’s collections have favoured aristocratic dress and garments worn for special occasions, leaving everyday clothing largely unrepresented. “We must avoid repeating the mistakes of previous centuries,” she argues. “The aim should not simply be to build collections of haute couture.”
 

I asked Lemahieu to look ahead forty years: what should fashion museums collect today, in an age of mass consumption and globalisation, to help future generations understand how we dressed and lived in the early twenty-first century? She points to the museum’s acquisition of the yellow safety vest belonging to Ghislain Coutard, whose viral video helped inspire the Gilets Jaunes movement in 2018. An ordinary road safety garment became a potent symbol of political and social discontent, acquiring a significance far beyond its original purpose.

There is a particular irony in this acquisition. Eight years later, amid renewed protests over the cost of living and public services, luxury fashion houses barricaded their boutiques, while museums, including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, closed their doors on 24 October 2026 for fear of further unrest. The yellow vest may have entered the collection as an artefact of social protest, but the tensions it embodies—between fashion, wealth and inequality—remain as pertinent as ever.

Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum is on display at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris until April 2027.

Dolla recently reviewed the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation's current exhibition, also in Paris, which you can catch up with on our blog.