Paris museum marks 40 years of fashion by exhibiting its own backstage, sketch to storage

An anniversary exhibition had to say something about four decades of collecting fashion, beyond another parade of beautiful dresses.

Exhibit the museum's own hidden machinery — sketches, toiles, storage boxes, morphological hangers, restoration labs — so the backstage becomes the show itself.

Galleries walk visitors from atelier worktables with sketches, moodboards and toiles, past runway projections in the Tuileries gallery, into conservation rooms with radiography, padded 'morphological' hangers and custom mannequins, ending in a room of the museum's own posters and catalogues.

On view 30 September 2026 to 4 April 2027 with 40 silhouettes and around 220 works from the UFAC and museum collections; among them an 18th-century hoop skirt, John Galliano's kimono, Guy Laroche's backless dress from the 1972 film 'Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire', and the 1945 Petit Théâtre de la Mode.

From 30 September 2026 to 4 April 2027, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris runs 'Look! 40 Years of Fashion', an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Musée des Arts de la Mode with 40 iconic silhouettes and around 220 works drawn from the Union Française des Arts du Costume (UFAC) and the museum's own collections.

The show follows a garment through its many lives instead of presenting finished looks. The opening galleries stage fashion as performance with runway projections, then move into a couture-workshop space where worktables and display cases trace the path from Pierre Balmain's drawings and Madeleine Vionnet's fabric-led draping to Maria Grazia Chiuri's layered moodboards, with textile albums, toiles and patterns exposing the architecture of cutting.

The final third opens the museum's normally invisible work: garments resting in boxes or on padded 'morphological' hangers shaped to their individual forms, restoration specialists combining handcraft with radiography, a sculpture-like mannequin shown unclothed to reveal the modelling usually hidden, and a closing room of four decades of the museum's own posters and catalogues.

It turns the museum's backstage — conservation, storage, mannequin-making — into the content, showing visitors what normally stays behind the walls.

The 40 silhouettes double as a history of the museum's own landmark exhibitions, making the anniversary self-reflective rather than a greatest-hits parade.

Garments are presented as archival objects with acquisition files, press cuttings and restoration records, not just as fashion moments.

It names the countless hands behind preservation, from the Lognon pleating house to today's conservation scientists.

An anniversary is a licence to open the archive: showing the unglamorous work that keeps garments alive made the museum's 40 years tangible instead of merely celebratory.

The exhibition is on view until 4 April 2027 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Attendance and critical response were not available in the source reporting.