Louis Vuitton: The Trunk Show

Paris Fashion Week ended with a grand party on a stairwell. Or at least that’s what it looked like walking into the Les Arts Décoratifs wing of the Louvre on Wednesday night for the opening of a major exhibition on Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs. There were hundreds of people just standing there, crammed on the marble stairs leading into the show, presumably because drinks were not allowed inside.

The artist Takashi Murakami, who collaborated with Mr. Jacobs on a ridiculously successful line of handbags a decade ago, was trying to make his way through the crowd. Lee Radziwill took a tour of the neighboring Jean-Paul Goude exhibition, which was otherwise empty. Miuccia Prada glided by, wearing a jewel-encrusted broadtail suit. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, with a buzz cut, fended their way into a V.I.P. room.

There, Sarah Jessica Parker, who flew into town just for the show, asked, “How is Marc ever going to top that?”

She was speaking of the Vuitton show that morning, which included a custom-made locomotive that pulled onto the runway, where it discharged its passengers, the models.

Dianna Agron, of “Glee,” had her hair up in neat pins and was talking to Gwyneth Paltrow, who still looked as good as she did at the Oscars, now wearing a black Vuitton pantsuit.

“Say hi to the kids,” Ms. Agron told her.

“Oh, I will,” Ms. Paltrow said. “They’ll be so thrilled.”

The exhibition, once seen, covers two floors of the museum, with the work of Louis Vuitton on the first floor (mostly trunks) and, separated by more than a century, the work of Mr. Jacobs for Louis Vuitton on the second floor (mostly handbags, shoes, clothes, collaborations and advertisements). Pamela Golbin, the curator, said that the idea was to contrast the work of the two men as it related to the great cultural shifts of their times.

In Mr. Vuitton’s case, it was the industrialization of the late 19th century that necessitated luggage for new means of travel. In Mr. Jacobs’s case, it was the globalization of fashion in the early 21st century that has made Vuitton a familiar label in almost every corner of the world.

“Each has a vision that has changed the industry as a whole,” Ms. Golbin said. “They were in the right place at the right time.”

The old trunks are marvelous to admire, especially a vitrine that includes piles of roughly 26 varieties of gray, striped and Damier checked canvas trunks, or roughly what the affluent traveler of 1882 would require for a holiday, back in the lovely days before checked-baggage fees.

The Marc Jacobs floor, as it relates to a living designer, is far more exciting. His collaborations with Stephen Sprouse, Mr. Murakami and Richard Prince are on display, as are 53 handbags fetishistically stored in an enormous wall-size box of chocolates.

The most revealing space of the exhibition may be the first room on the Jacobs floor, described as “Marc’s World.” It looks like a Tumblr page come to life. High-definition video monitors cover the walls, some showing still images of Barbra Streisand, Nicki Minaj, Rei Kawakubo and Mrs. Prada, and others displaying brief animations played on a loop: SpongeBob SquarePants, a campy scene of Bette Midler in “The First Wives Club,” Mr. Jacobs sticking out his tongue at a Vuitton show and a clip from the episode of “South Park” in which Mr. Jacobs appears as a doll. There is also the scene from “Some Like It Hot,” in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, wearing dresses, follow Marilyn Monroe on a train platform, which suddenly put Mr. Jacobs’s fall fashion show in a new light.

In the midst of all this is a 1930 version of Marcel Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.,” the Mona Lisa with a mustache, on loan from the Pompidou. It is basically a visual representation of the inside of Mr. Jacobs’s head, and it’s fascinating. You can actually hear Mr. Jacobs thinking (his voice plays on speakers throughout the show) as he describes his approach to designing a Vuitton handbag: “I’m in a position of being respectful and disrespectful,” he says. “I want to do something rebellious, and also to celebrate this icon.”