Next week the iconic Rei Kawakubo will unveil her retrospective at the Met Museum (after one of the best red carpet events ever) on May 4. And next year the invisible man himself, designer Martin Margiela, will also debut his retrospective in Paris, which was announced in January.
However, never one to be outdone, Dior announced today that it will mark its 70th anniversary with a full-on exhibition at Les Arts Décoratifs. The show will feature more than 300 dresses across 32,000 square feet. It’s the Paris-based museum’s largest exhibition ever and is sure to draw a large crowd.
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“Rarely has there been a fashion exhibition of this kind. It will go down in history,” said Olivier Gabet to WWD, museums director at Les Arts Décoratifs. The exhibition will open July 5 and run until January 7, 2018. What can attendees expect to see? The usual suspects: glamours gowns worn by Princess Grace of Monaco, Charlize Theron and other stars. Oh yeah, there will also be a lavish space inspired by the Hall of Mirrors at the Château de Versailles.
Massive retrospectives featuring the work of iconic fashion designers is nothing new. After the success of designer Alexander McQueen’s posthumous exhibition, Savage Beauty, at the Met Museum in Manhattan and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, many living designers have seen the opportunity to show their work in museums as a chance to reach a broader audience.
“I would hope to teach some of those people a new aesthetic, that there are different ways of looking at beauty, other values that can be valid,” Kawakubo explained to BoF in a recent interview.