Tackling the Fashion of Sports in Paris

In the pool, on the court, and flying through the air, looking good ups your game.

F or a few days, I’m here in the Old World, starting in Paris and then heading to Maastricht for the European Fine Art Fair next week and Amsterdam for the Frans Hals retrospective. Paris is on the verge of the summer Olympics, so the city, which is always lovely, seems to sparkle in look and mood. A restored Notre Dame opens in December after the terrible fire in 2019 gutted it and nearly toppled it.

Early in February, farmers and truckers clogged main roads into Paris, enraged by President Macron’s crackpot climate program. They hoped to show bloated plutocrats that they could put them on a diet of grass clippings. The government took steps to make them less enraged, and roads are open to deliveries of oysters. All in the cause of ensuring peace and delight as long as I’m here and, as far as the bloated bureaucrats are concerned, when the Olympics come to town. The French are unperturbed on the coming onslaught. The games start on July 28, on the eve of their traditional one-month summer vacation.

There’s a giant Mark Rothko retrospective on view at the Vuitton Foundation. The Hotel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde is a new museum that opened in splendor in 2021. It was long the headquarters of the French navy, but, during Louis XVI’s disastrous reign, it was the Garde-Meuble. That was the headquarters for the king’s decorators and the design center for the French aristocracy. It’s open now as a showplace of high establishment taste from the 1760s until 1793, when heads started to roll like bowling balls on Saturday night. It’s gorgeous. And the Bourse, once the headquarters of Paris’s stock market, is now a gallery for the contemporary art collection of billionaire François Pinault.

Setting the stage for the Olympics is Mode et sport, d’un podium à l’autre, which athletically flows from the tongue in French but in English means “Fashion and Sport: From One Podium to Another.” It’s the engaging, educational, new exhibition at the Louvre’s Museum of Decorative Arts. I know next to nothing about sports or sports fashion, but fashion is art as well as heritage. I enjoyed it.

In eleven smartly arranged galleries, Fashion and Sport takes us from around 1800, when sports disciplines began to be codified, to today, where high style reigns on the playing field and the ice rink, in the pool and in the air, on horseback and, for the oyster-and-tart-prone like me, in the viewing stands.

The exhibition begins with a grand entrance and begins at the beginning. A group of ancient Greek pots decorated with athletes from the earliest Olympics establishes a core dilemma. Sports are about performance, and early athletes performed naked. The jockstrap — and there’s a thing called the jillstrap, too — wasn’t developed until the 1870s. How to reconcile competition and performance on the one hand and, on the other, a snappy look? A poster for the 1924 Olympics, held in Paris, depicts tanned, toned but naked athletes, except for garlands for modesty.

The freedom from restraint bolstered performance, unless the game was jousting on horseback. Jousting-wear was ceremonial or formal clothing tweaked for riding. For tennis, which dates to the Renaissance, players wore day clothes suitable for their class, though over time, if tennis was on the agenda, players tended to wear white. Riding, archery, hunting, and fencing started as utilitarian activities but, among the rich, evolved into sources of pleasure and then ways to compete. Wool and cotton replaced silk for comfort and resistance to dirt. Women riders started to wear knickers for modesty in the event of a fall. Though invisible under riding skirts, knickers paved the way for women’s trousers decades later.

The exhibition combines sports fashion on mannequins or mounted in cases with video clips and, here and there, paintings. But paintings are too formal and static for what is, after all, a show about action. Corsets disappeared for many reasons, but among them was the popularity of cycling starting in the late 19th century. A riding corset on view must have felt like an instrument of torture. At the waist, it’s about as large as my watchband. Organized, competitive sports teams in British boarding schools led to color-coordinated team jerseys. Jockstraps, originally made for bicycle-riding delivery boys and men starting in the 1870s, when bad roads jostled the organs, navigated in hardened form to cricket, fencing, hockey, and other sports with flying objects.

A gallery on swimming shows us how slowly women’s fashion changed compared with men’s. Into the 1910s, women’s bathing garments restricted rather than promoted swimming. Accompanying seaside resort vacations starting in the 1870s were drownings, but it took decades and Gertrude Ederle for the pared-down women’s bathing suit to emerge. Men wore bathing shorts and shirts starting in the 1870s and, by the ’80s, only shorts. When Ederle swam across the English Channel in 1926, she wore a bespoke two-piece suit not available on the market. Swimming then became a sports craze for women, with accompanying beach pajamas, and, starting in 1946, the bikini.

The ceiling of the swimwear gallery is decorated with silhouettes of swimmers and a wave-themed light-and-shadow show with the sounds of water splashes. Praise the Lord, the narcissist kook Lia Thomas is nowhere to be found, wet or dry.

Sportswear as a dedicated fashion line didn’t start until the 1920s. Jeanne Lanvin’s and Jean Patou’s couture houses in Paris opened sports departments then. The term “sporty look,” a contrived nonchalance, entered the English vocabulary and involved loose-fitting, casual clothes suitable for driving, light activity, and heavy petting. René Lacoste, then a tennis player, cut off the sleeves of his shirt for freer movement. Thus the polo shirt was born.

Fashion went crazy slowly and then fast and everywhere. Fashion for most sports started as practical. The gallery on the sport of flying was very fun, displaying a dozen goggles. High ski fashion emerged for the rich to enjoy Alpine vacations. Vogue started publishing a Vogue Sport edition in 1983. Tracksuit fashion went high-end.

Very little in the exhibition struck me as vulgar. Sports fashion is made for good bodies, a necessity in sports. A tracksuit with the word “juicy” written in sparkles on the butt was crude, rude, and best left to the Kardashians among us. Otherwise, sports fashion is for people with serious discipline and metrics for achievement.

Logos and branding accompanied the big money controlling and defining sports and especially the Olympics. Fashion brands and manufacturers are heavy funders of sports events. Jerseys announce the names of a favorite team or player. A hefty book in the museum shop, World’s Greatest Sneaker Collectors, reminds us that rich people find all the wrong ways to spend money.

There’s not a surface linked to sport that goes without decoration — soccer balls, tennis rackets, and bleachers are slapped with logos and team colors. Here and there I found old-fashioned idiosyncrasy, such as a bespoke surfboard. Even at its most excessive, sports fashion expresses perseverance, team spirit, and the shattering of boundaries.

The last gallery feels like an arena with a mock running track, a spectator stand for mannequins, and new fashion for every sport including skydiving. I loved it. Fashion and Sport is fun and serious. Interpretation is thorough and lively. The labels are in French as well as English, and the English versions are written with style.

The Met’s Costume Institute, which I like a lot, does some good exhibitions but also some overboweled ones coinciding with its annual gala, which reaches new heights — or lows — in decadence and conceit each year. Why doesn’t the Met just take the Louvre exhibition for its next gala exhibition? At least it’ll be extolling exercise and fresh air.

Also on view at the Museum of Decorative Arts is Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, a retrospective of the work of the Dutch fashion designer whose clothes draw from the flow of water, the look of plankton, and the Webb telescope. It has to be seen to be believed. I had never heard of van Herpen (b. 1984) and don’t follow cutting-edge contemporary fashion. In Ye Olde Vermont, where I live, we buy our clothes at hardware stores, with new lines in flannel and mostly remainders from old lines. Van Herpen’s fashion isn’t made for farm work, hunting, or changing the oil on the old jalopy, but it’s fascinating. Aquatic pieces display the mystery and metaphorical power of water. She’s inspired by jellyfish, shells, snowflakes, and blown glass. Don’t expect to sit while garbed, and God forbid that a lady should need to go wee-wee.

Van Herpen grew up in Wamel in the Netherlands, not far from Den Bosch, the hometown of Hieronymus Bosch, the Renaissance fantasy painter. There’s surely something in the water there. Lock up the pets before wearing a van Herpen outfit. A mom who wore one to a PTA meeting would surely be taken seriously.

Her designs, even in their dearth of flannel, are riveting, mercurial, and inventive. There’s nothing gouty, cold, or sullen about her vision. And American museums take note. The French know how to do art exhibitions. The line to get into the Louvre pyramid stretched as far as the Normandy beaches. The Museum of Decorative Arts has its own entrance and no line. The van Herpen exhibition was packed, the sports fashion show less so, but the permanent-collection galleries were mostly empty. I spent time alone with Napoleon’s throne, Second Empire day beds, and acres of scenic wallpaper.