By James Mackenzie

PARIS (Reuters Life!) - French couture designer Christian Lacroix drew on his long interest in fashion history for a new exhibition at the main decorative arts museum in Paris showing how modern creations are influenced by the past.

The exhibition at Les Arts decoratifs, which opens to the public on Thursday and runs to April 20, marks Lacroix's 20 years in fashion and makes clear the debt he owes to the past.

"What I wanted to show above all, is that nothing is newly invented and behind every one of my creations, there's something that went before it," he told Reuters on Wednesday.

Les Arts decoratifs, reopened in 2006 after years of neglect, groups art and design from fashion, decoration and advertising.

The exhibition displays creations of Lacroix's alongside hundreds of items he picked out from the museum's own collection of gowns and robes from the 18th century to the 1930s.

"I wanted to give the people who come here -- it could be an old lady who used to work in a couture house, or a young girl who wants to get into fashion or a student working on history -- an unusual choice, a subjective choice of my own," he said.

Chosen according to themes like colour or technique, there are sections on the use of white or tartan, favoured textures like patchwork or distressed materials or themes such as "Hispanism" or "Liturgy".

"In big exhibitions, they normally show the big works and there's never any room to show more humble creations or anonymous pieces of clothing, even though they might be very beautiful," he said.

"Here I wanted to give a place for things like that, which might otherwise never get out of the museums."

Lacroix's work is often associated with a bold and even extravagant use of colours like red and yellow.

But he has always had a deep interest in the history of art and design, since his childhood in the ancient southern town of Arles and he had originally hoped to be a museum curator after studying the history of art at university.

"I had the impression of having passed through all those centuries and when I got to Paris, my treasure, the only thing that set me apart was the knowledge I had gained of painting and art," he said.

But Lacroix, hardly the only designer to plunder the past for inspiration, said he wanted to avoid creating a forbidding impression of design history and hoped to show the living tradition behind fashion.

"Art is not always the big things, Napoleon, great monuments, the pyramids or whatever. What I like is the street, ordinary things, daily life," he said.

"If this exhibition gives you a bit of a feeling of what girls passing in the street were like, the charm and glamour of past centuries, then I'll be happy."