by
AFP
Published
January 8, 2018
French fashion house Christian Dior’s exhibition in Paris opened to record numbers, drawing more than 700,000 visitors, organizers said on Monday.
The six-month-long show, which finished on Sunday, was the most popular ever held at the city’s Museum of Decorative Arts, with visitors queuing for an average of four hours to see some of the luxury brand’s most iconic designs.
The exhibition “Christian Dior, le couturier de dreams” (roughly translated as “Christian Dior, Designer of Dreams”) was organised to mark the brand’s 70th anniversary and tells the history of the brand through around 300 haute couture dresses worn by stars from Marlene Dietrich to Rihanna.
Museum director David Cameo told AFP that attendance was an “absolute record” and the highest for a single exhibition in the museum’s 112-year history.
The event also attracted large crowds as Hollywood stars and top models who serve as ambassadors for the brand, including Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson and Bella Hadid, did not have to wait in line.
But not everyone was happy with the show, with French magazine Marianne slamming the venerable Louvre-next-door venue for selling out.
Museums are “show windows”
Writer Agnès Poirier accused the museum of being “a window into commercial brands disguised as art” and also criticised its previous partnership with toymaker Mattel to host a hugely popular Barbie doll show.
But Cameo told AFP that the large numbers of visitors would be a financial benefit to the museum, leaving it with a large surplus “which will help us re-equip our restoration studios and cover the costs of the renovation”.
In 2012, a retrospective of American fashion designer Marc Jacobs attracted more than 200,000 visitors to the museum, a record for a publicly funded museum at the time.
Following its success at Dior, the company plans to stage another fashion-themed show in March, tracing the days of the enigmatic Belgian-born designer Martin Margiela at Hermes.
It is one of two spring exhibitions dedicated to the creator in the French capital, which will also feature a retrospective of his work at the Palais Galliera Fashion Museum in March.
Despite breaking records, Dior’s show was far from the most popular of Paris’ art shows in 2017.
That title is held by the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Icons of Contemporary Art” exhibition, which attracted 1.2 million visitors.
The exhibition featured a selection of 250 paintings from a collection of collector Sergei Shchukin amassed before the Bolshevik Revolution, which had never before been shown outside Russia.
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