Paris Puts 40 Years of Fashion on Show Beyond the Runway
Paris fashion week is not only on the runway. Two of the city's museums are opening their archives to show where the clothes came from.
Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris's museum of decorative arts and design, is staging "Look: 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum". Palais Galliera, the city's fashion museum, is staging "A Wardrobe of One's Own: Dissident Femininities in the 19th Century". Both are on view as the fall 2026 women's season brings buyers, designers and visitors to Paris WWD.
At Les Arts Décoratifs, the anniversary show fills the central nave with 40 looks from 40 past shows. The nave is the museum's long central hall. It is a tight edit. Forty outfits stand in for forty years.
That history starts in 1986. France's Museum of Fashion Arts was created that year to give an official home to clothing collections stored at Les Arts Décoratifs since the 19th century. Bénédicte Gady is director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The museum lists "Look ! 40 ans de mode au musée" as running from September 30, 2026 to April 4, 2027.
Across town, Palais Galliera looks further back. "A Wardrobe of One's Own" traces how women adopted elements of menswear after the French Revolution. Trousers, tailored coats and short hair all appear as practical choices and as public statements. The museum dates the exhibition from September 26, 2026 to February 14, 2027 Palais Galliera.
WWD, the American fashion trade paper, groups the season's Paris exhibitions in an article titled "Three Must-see Fall Fashion Exhibitions in Paris". It presents them as evidence of how clothing reflects culture, identity and creativity beyond the catwalk.
The wider calendar stretches beyond Paris. W Magazine, the American fashion magazine, lists Sofia Coppola's 'Marie Antoinette' exhibition at Versailles and Azzedine Alaïa's first U.S. retrospective among its "13 Must-See Fashion Exhibitions this Fall" for Paris, London, New York and Milan in 2026-2027. Les Arts Décoratifs has form here. Its "Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams" was shown in Paris before moving to the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
What makes this stand out is the pairing. One show celebrates the museum itself. The other asks who was allowed to dress how. For fans, this means a chance to see the work up close, with time to look at seams, cuts and cloth.
