Celebrities such as Natalie Portman, Cara Delevigne and Gemma Arteton flocked to a VIP preview of Paris’ Museum of Decorative Arts new exhibition “Christian Dior, dream designer” on Monday, in celebration of the fashion house’s 70th anniversary.

France’s first lady Brigitte Macron, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, were also present for the special preview of the exhibition and garden party celebrations.

The show traces the 70-year-long history of the fashion house, from the iconic designs of the founder, Christian Dior, through to those by Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and the first woman to hold the reins, Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Over 300 haute couture dresses designed in the period from 1947 to the present day are exhibited alongside sketches, photographs, accessories, letters, manuscripts, works of art and furniture that served as inspiration for the designers, creating a dialogue between the designs and their cultural context.

The exhibition’s curators, Florence Muller and Olivier Gabet, also director of the museum, brought together works from various different international museums and exhibition spaces as well as from the museum’s own collection, arranged in both a chronological and thematic way.

Paris’s Museum of Decorative Arts had previously held a retrospective on Dior in 1987 on the house’s first ten years of existence. This time, to fit works spanning the label’s seven-decade history, curators used the whole of the museum’s exhibition space – almost 3,000 square metres (32,300 square feet).

The exhibition will open to the public on July 5 and will run until January 7, 2018.