Here is some alluring news: the prestigious Museum of Decorative Artsbased on rue de Rivoli in Paris, has just announced that it is launching its first annual summer ball. The icing on the cake: it will be the talented American director Sofia Coppola (born in 1971) who will ensure the artistic direction of this event planned for July 6, 2025.
Scheduled to open haute couture week, this party will be a “celebration of fashion and the French Art of living”but also a way of “supporting the museum and the schools which train the designers and creators of tomorrow”, specified the institution in a press release.
A filmmaker who loves fashion and Paris
The choice of this “artist who knows how to create global universes, at the crossroads of fashion, music, cinema, art and design” was “obvious”.
Jean-Victor Meyers
“It’s an honor,” she said. Sofia Coppolawho recalled her love for French culture and for Paris, a city that she “considers” as her home. “second home”and a “particular source of inspiration”. The choice of this “artist who knows how to create global universes, at the crossroads of fashion, music, cinema, art and design” was “obvious”, declared Jean-Victor Meyers, president of the honorary committee for this gala.
Who says ball, says fashion. An area that the Francophile filmmaker knows well. She who had completed an internship at Chanel at 15 and was assistant to fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld always expresses this passion in his films, romantic dresses from Virgin Suicides (1999) to the flashy dressing rooms of the robbed stars of The Bling Ring (2013), including cult pieces (like Scarlett Johansson's transparent panties, her pink wig and her looks by Agnès b. or Marc Jacobs) from Lost in Translation (2003).
© Arthur Elgort / Courtesy Augustinus Bader
But the director especially made an impression with her very free reinterpretation of the 18th century aesthetice of the refined celebrations of Versailles in his daring Marie Antoinette (2006). Playing the last queen of France, the young Kirsten Dunst, frivolous and madly rock'n'roll, laughs out loud in a riot of champagne, decadent dresses, hairstyles adorned with feathers and pyramids of tangy macaroons. A mood board glamour which could serve as inspiration for the ball to come…
The future Parisian equivalent of the famous Met Gala?
The evening, which will take place in two stages – a hand-picked party, followed by a larger event open to talents from design and fashion schools – will celebrate the centenary of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts of 1925, which allowed the emergence of the Art Deco movement.
Inaugurated in 1905 in the Marsan wing and pavilion of the Louvre Palace, the Museum of Decorative Arts preserves one of the most important collections of decorative arts in the worldrich in more than a million and a half works, clothing, furniture and objects. Enough to compete, in Paris, with the famous Met Gala of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an annual charity ball (for the benefit of the museum and its wing devoted to fashion) where the stars parade on the red carpet in maddening outfits creators!
