The inaugural Le Grand Diner du Louvre kicked off at the world’s most famous art museum last night and Carla Bruni showed up in perhaps the most fitting outfit of them all. She wore an exhibition-worthy vintage dress that she modeled back in the 1990s.
Bruni took to the Louvre in a black and white design from John Galliano’s fall 1995 collection. The elegant column dress featured a floral motif that spiraled throughout the piece. Bruni accented her archival gown with velvet opera gloves and diamond jewelry by Chopard.
Bruni, one of Galliano’s original muses, debuted this dress on the runway during Paris Fashion Week in 1995. The model and former First Lady of France sported dramatic face makeup and coiffed hair when sauntering down the catwalk. For her reunion last night, she went with simple tousled waves and a more natural beauty look.
Of course, vintage fashion is everywhere on the red carpet these days (the 2025 Oscars after-parties were practically a lesson in fashion history), but few can say they’ve already worn said vintage fashion nearly three decades prior. Naomi Campbell, another Galliano muse, pulled a similar stunt at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. She wore a Karl Lagerfeld-era Chanel dress that she had modeled 28 years prior.
The fall 1995 show was a pivotal point in the history of Galliano’s eponymous brand. The designer presented the collection inside of a pared-back warehouse in Paris’s Pigalle district. Just a year later, Galliano’s brand came under the ownership of LVMH as he started his much-adored tenure at Dior. The presentation was basically Galliano’s final act as an independent designer before thrust being fully thrust into the fashion mainstream. He was appointed at Givenchy the same month, a job that would lead him directly to Dior.
It’s Galliano’s work from his time at Dior that celebrities tend to wear these days (and Maison Margiela, which he departed in late 2024). But surely Bruni and her stylist Clement Lomellini pulled a few strings with Galliano himself to find this two-tone dress. Famously, models aren’t allowed to keep the pieces they wear on the runways, and this number was likely sitting somewhere in Galliano’s archives. Who better to give it new life than the model that first wore it back in 1995.
