Jordan Roth Combines Fashion, Theater and Choreography For Performance at the Louvre

Jordan Roth is well aware that the Musée du Louvre is home to a number of winged creatures, including the headless Greek statue Victoire de Samothrace, whose two-thousand-year-old stone wings are displayed at the top of the monumental Daru staircase. But it was in the Cour Marly, under a vast glass roof housing the treasures of French sculpture, that this personality of another kind took flight on the evening of July 10, on the occasion of the first Nuit de la Mode organized at the Museum. A New York producer and Broadway star, this collector of couture pieces and regular front-row catwalk performer unveiled three performances of his “Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty.” Entering the museum during his lifetime, not as a mere visitor but as a work in its own right, was one of Roth’s dreams. He had been working on the project for two years, and had found a rehearsal space north of Paris to his disproportion: a huge studio at the Cité du Cinéma.

“It had to be as big as the Cour Marly,” explained the producer-performer a few days beforehand, regularly revealing what his work would look like in his Instagram posts. The watchwords: “transformation”, “transcendence”, the way fashion accompanies you in this process, and “fabric, emotion and movement.” This great devotee of the dancer Loïe Fuller and the American choreographer Martha Graham has imagined a performance in three acts, beginning with a white dress onto which is projected the image of one of the dresses on display in the Louvre exhibition devoted, at this very moment, to the most beautiful haute couture creations installed in the halls of the Decorative Arts department. Act II: after a highly cinematic appearance, set to music composed with conductor Thomas Roussel and recorded in his studio, Roth is clad in immaculate wings (much larger than those of the Victory of Samothrace), onto which are projected details of works in the Museum. “This work was imagined in conversation with the treasures and architecture of the Louvre,” explains Roth, referring to the Dior dress by John Galliano, but also to other wings — sculpted, embroidered, forged, painted — and skies from paintings and frescoes preserved in the former Palace of the Kings of France. Act III: the ethereal hero of the Cour Marly, whose pleated dress evokes that of ancient statuary, Roth is installed by half a dozen assistants on a podium, where a mechanism causes a spectacular ascent to the heavens, transforming the dress into the Louvre Pyramid. The large audience is delighted.

If you look closely, you’ll see designer Iris van Herpen and jewelry designer Elie Top, as well as Françoise Dumas, the discreet but highly influential event organizer, Vogue stylist Michael Philouze and sound illustrator Michel Gaubert, in a large, young crowd, all wearing evening gowns, designer shoes and loosely-knotted ties. Olivier Gabet, Director of the Decorative Arts Department, who initiated the “Louvre Couture” exhibition, was also keen to attract this audience to the museum. He first met Roth a few years ago in New York, when he was Director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the other cultural institution housed in the world’s most visited palace complex. Today, he remembers it as “an apparition,” and keeps in touch with this colorful and singular character, who will provide “indispensable assistance” for the exhibition dedicated in winter 2023 to the avant-garde and technophile Iris van Herpen.

When they later talked about the “Louvre Couture” exhibition, Roth immediately mentioned a project combining fashion, theater and choreography, “full of very convincing scenarios,” which he eventually presented to the Museum’s president, Laurence des Cars, a personality who, according to Gabet, is “fearless.” Like him, she was won over by the fact that the Louvre was at the heart of the project, as well as by the imagination and “demanding, rigorous and highly committed” personality of this unusual contact.

The result was to be discovered on this fine summer’s evening, before the motionless eyes of the famous Chevaux de Marly and other mythological creatures — nymphs, Dido, Neptune, Diana — sculpted in white marble. Roth had promised us: with this performance, thought through to the last detail, he would not disappoint us with, in his words, “Haute Couture art.” But if fashion is sometimes accused of being frivolous and ephemeral, this astonishing American was playing with a regal idea of eternity.

Originally published in Vanity Fair France