Louis Vuitton (Q1744)
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French fashion house and luxury retail company
- Louis Vuitton Malletier
- LV
- Louis Vuitton Maletier SAS
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Louis Vuitton |
French fashion house and luxury retail company |
|
Statements
1896
designer
2023
creative director
2023
guest menswear designer
consultant
2002
menswear designer
2008
2014
design director
senior womenswear designer
freelance designer
2001
bag designer
design team member
commercial commissions
“His eyes are 3D. One is looking at spreadsheets and the other one is looking at culture. And when he blends them together, he gets this three-dimensional understanding of how the world is working and how it’s going to work. And we do that too: We have precognitive conversations.” So said Pharrell Williams (Louis Vuitton Men’s Creative Director) of Bernard Arnault (LVMH’s founder and CEO) toGQlast month.This week that precognition is playing out as 2024’s edition of Art Basel Miami—and the wider Miami Art Week—opens for business. Since Arnault got on board with Miami-born developer Craig Robins 15 years ago, they have seen Magic City emerge as both a luxury hotspot and point of convergence for everyone from crypto whales to contemporary artists. Factor in Miami’s cultural intersection with Latin America, and the result is one of the US’s most dynamic and cosmopolitan urban hubs.This collection was in part designed to ride that wave. Following his debut pre-fall mission toHong Kong, Pharrell Williams steered the Volez, Voguez, Voyagez Miami-wards. Even without a show this season, the narrative was clearly defined. The first section was signified by the skyline and sunset backdrop, and framed around a notion of traveling by transatlantic liner from France to Florida. The beach-backdropped second part cut much looser, representing a day-to-night resort wardrobe for the LV man once disembarked.Another focus of Williams’s precognition here seemed to be the upcoming exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style ”at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Williams, who is a co-chair of that show’s opening Met Gala, has made the sartorial space-taking that is dandyism a pillar of his practice since he landed at Vuitton. Here he pushed his trademark tailoring silhouette—cropped boxy jacket and kicky pants—across lush moire evening and day suiting with a dramatically and distinctly 1920s, flaneur-inflected twist. Double breasted kimono-sweaters and shawl collared robes made for a convincingly louche dandy’s alternative to fully constructed jackets in evening looks that came accessorized with pearl button details and an oyster-shaped clutch bag. Details were inspired by upholstery and included quilted leather, a new “denimbellish” fabrication, needle-punched flock monogram finishes, and a boat-themed “regatta” monogram. The season’s moire signature was extended to denim and a punchy green alcantara blouson.
6 December 2024
“I think if you don’t put yourself in aesthetic danger every season, you’re not playing the game of fashion.” Nicolas Ghesquière made that memorable remark on a recent episode ofVogue’s The Run-Throughpodcast. It was a fitting summation of the often exquisite Louis Vuitton collection he presented tonight in a show that capped off his 10th-anniversary celebrations at the house.Ghesquière was off on another time-traveling trip, this one to the Renaissance, an era he said he feels personally connected to, having grown up in France’s Loire Valley with its centuries-old chateaux. The collection opened with a group of jackets—all puffed sleeves, pulled-in waists, and peplum hems—but the biker shorts and chunky leather sandals they were worn with brought them back to the here and now. So did the supple construction of what would have been in the past very ponderous coats.He liked the idea of developing the architectural shapes he prefers but with a lighter hand and a fluidity in make. “The game,” he explained, “was to work with the two ateliers—there’s flou and there’s tailleur—and we break boundaries. It’s a contraction, to build these clothes with as much detail and structure, letting go of gravity somehow.”Subsequent looks married breeches with roomy blouson jackets and/or drop-waist ribbed knit dresses, and Ghesquière challenged his team to cut coats that look and feel more like blouses. “The lightness of the silk fabric is very alive,” he said. “What I really wanted is that you couldn’t put a name on these pieces.” The day/evening divide would’ve been slippery too, but for the lavishing of embellishments, like the cabochons dotting loose-fitting tops worn with his take on the transparent pantaloons that have become one of the season’s breakout trends.The stars of the show came at the end. They were a trio of unstructured jackets featuring paintings by the French artist Laurent Grasso from his seriesStudies Into the Past, on which he inserts modern celestial and atmospheric phenomenon into works rendered in the style of the Renaissance greats. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting artistic collaborator.Ghesquière mentioned one more challenge he’d set himself: the creation of a “generational” bag, meaning, it seems, an everyday sort of style with a casual cool in contrast to the preciousness of the clothes. Pictured in Look 1 and 2, it follows the rules of his game: Where most LV bags are structured, this one has the “soft power” he was after.
1 October 2024
“It went from black, to dark brown, to brown, to light brown, to beige, a little bit of gray in there… and light beige, and then finally to white… It was a homage to human beings.” So said Pharrell Williams after this blockbuster of a Louis Vuitton menswear show that encoded the house’s complex kaleidoscope of design output within a wider narrative that required no code at all to decrypt.Williams said in a preview that it was the imminence of the Paris 2024 Olympics (“when the world will be watching”) that first inspired the shape of this show. However it was another imminent event, France’s snap elections, that gave tonight’s presentation a special piquancy. The blue, green, and black check that took off most prominently around 70 looks in was based on a pattern used in luggage created for Air Afrique, the pan-continental airline that operated from the 1960s until 2002. The name was recently revived as a vehicle for diasporic discussion and design here in the French capital by a group of creatives including Lamine Diaoune, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko, and Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, all of whom worked on this collection alongside Williams. He said: “They all have a reverence for our homeland, the homeland of the species. The way they think about things is so beautiful…And you know, all the colors come from black.”From look 1 to look 66 the color of both the collection and the skintones of the men wearing it progressed broadly as laid out by Williams in the opening quote. Then, from look 67 to the close, that linear evolution switched to become more adjacently mixed, blended, and various: multicultural. This pattern was reflected in garments that returned to Williams’s episodic expressions of camouflage, which here included pixelated renditions of python skin or the map of the world with Africa at its center. There was a version of the house damier whose paler brown checks were overprinted on leather or overlaid in jacquards with multicolored seeds of pigment. Two soccer ball panel leather looks referenced the global game.We were in the grounds of UNESCO House under a sky full of low, shifting clouds which threatened but never delivered rain. Skittish gusts of wind worried the flags of the world raised behind the 15-meter diameter UNESCO globe. Very broadly, the collection was divided between two paradigms of character, the diplomat and the student.
As a vehicle this allowed Williams and the LV mens’ team to explore multiple sub-genres of menswear, into which were inserted multiple layers of meticulously crafted detail. These however, were often themselves semi-obscured upon first look both by the sheer scale of this show and that instinct for camouflage. As Williams said: “The intention here is to not be so loud, but to be very intentional in the details. We live in a culture that zooms in and zooms out. So I wanted it to be that when you zoom in the stitch and fabric is unlike anything you’ve ever seen or felt before. And when you zoom out, you understand that we love the world.”
18 June 2024
This season the Big Dog at Louis Vuitton menswear turned the maison into aniche à chien. Alongside a barking selection of LVers-branded dog accessories—among them, a bowl, harness, poop-bag holder, collar, and a magnificently OTT Louis Vuitton dog house—Pharrell Williams and his studio unleashed a pedigree collection of menswear and human accessories too.This lookbook starred many good boys. The fun came in spotting the various dog-related details that came inserted within the menswear. These included an intarsia shearling jacket and sneaker patterned with Dalmatian dots, dog crest shirting, loafers with bone-charm collar detailing, a double-dog portrait silk souvenir jacket, dog portrait bandanas, many best-in-show rosettes, and an ingeniously conceived “meta houndstooth” that replaced a dog head for the more traditional chickenfoot element. Dog-sized berets were worn alongside man-size equivalents, and bone shaped bowl trunks and multiple dog luggage tags—in paw print or portrait designs—were sprinkled amongst a collection of bags that included freshly fabricated Keepalls and Messengers and a new four-pocket Cargo Hobo design.It wasn’t all about dogs. Feline pattern jumbo slippers and loafers made for an inclusive gesture while the backdrop to all that puppy product was a menswear collection that more broadly expanded Willams’s specific take on contemporary dandyism. The rosettes gestured to the ceremony of the dog show, which proved a bridge into looks referencing British menswear tradition. These references included a sleeveless cricket jersey, LV-tweaked argyle pattern tailoring, and some Fair Isle knitwear. Williams’s favored boot-cut silhouette was nicely developed in a house emblem denim bleu de travail full look, while the broader postmodern Ivy League wardrobe was present and correct.Williams’s closest previous canine collaboration probably counts as “Drop It Like It’s Hot” back in 2004, so why go so hype on hounds right now? LV’s Big Dog was not made available to explain, although it’s a well-established fact that in times of financial stress many pet owners will prioritize their animals above almost everything else. Whatever the reason, this collection will doubtless get tongues—and tails—wagging.
31 May 2024
Louis Vuitton has staged a decade’s worth of Nicolas Ghesquière’s destination shows in architectural marvels the world over. This year, the designer chose the Hypostyle Room of Antoni Gaudi’s Park Güell, a roofed hall whose mosaic ceilings are a Gaudi signature. The Park Güell was conceived as planned community, but was canceled mid-construction by World War I and was christened a park instead, and has since become one of Barcelona’s main tourist attractions alongside the architect’s masterpiece the Sagrada Familia.Park Güell’s phantasmagorical vibes are in keeping with the era-mashing, time-traveling codes that Ghesquière has established at Vuitton in his 10 years at the brand, but the location was a bit of a red herring. His new cruise collection was indebted to Gaudi only insofar as it was inspired by Spanish characters of all stripes. In a pre-show interview Ghesquière mentioned the great painters Velazquez, Goya, and Zurburan, the legendary filmmaker Luis Bunuel and the award-winning 2022 film by Rodrigo SorogoyenAs Bestas, as well as the upcoming America’s Cup in Barcelona, of which Vuitton is the main sponsor.“I wanted to respect the place we are,” Ghesquière said. “I love that this country is evocating a certain groundedness and some rigor, and in the meantime it’s about freedom, it’s about youngness, it’s about an extravagance somehow.”That push-pull played out in the collection, which began with a parade of tailored, mostly neutral looks, all worn with straw gaucho hats and mirrored racing shades. Ghesquière said that the first and third exits were modeled on the sailor’s traditional vareuse—note their wide collars—but their broad shoulders and upside-down triangle shapes borrowed equally from the 1980s silhouettes of his youth. “It’s quite dressed up, there’s nothing casual about it,” he said. By the end, though, the strictness of his jupe tailleurs and coat dresses was replaced by the voluptuous drape of silk skirts and trousers, their chiaroscuro folds of silk nodding in the direction of the Spanish masters he referred to. The ultramarine of a one-sleeved bubble dress was particularly gorgeous.In between he proposed horsey touches like glossy riding boots and jodhpurs with deep faux fur cuffs, and riffed on polka dots and ruffles, though there was nothing so commonplace as a flamenco dress. No reference to Cristobal Balenciaga either.
Though he was Spain’s greatest designer, and Ghesquière headed up the house for nearly a decade-and-a-half, he has closed that chapter. Instead, a deconstructed white lace skirt was reconstructed with wire hooks in the style, he said, of a fellow Spaniard designer Paco Rabanne. (Ghesquière’s friend Julien Dossena, who currently designs Rabanne, was in the audience alongside their mutual friend, designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi, and LV A-listers like Jennifer Connelly, Regina King, and Sophie Turner.)Other experiments, like the silk and wool dresses he dunked in boiling water, shrinking just the wool, owed less to the setting than they did to Ghesquière’s own process-oriented approach and preference for worked surfaces. One thing that Ghesquière and Gaudi share for certain is a flair for the audacious.
23 May 2024
Since the beginning of his tenure at Louis Vuitton 10 years ago, Nicolas Ghesquière has shown his cruise collections in destinations far-flung from the house’s Paris base—everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Palm Springs to Kyoto. More recently he’s started bringing his pre-fall offerings on the road too. This year’s show happened today in Shanghai at the Long Museum West Bund; it was his first show in China.Ghesquière took the occasion to collaborate with the young Chinese artistSun Yitian. Her cartoonlike animals—a leopard, a penguin, a pink bunny with LV fleur de lys, like stars, in his eyes—decorated an A-line car coat, shifts, and miniskirts, as well as bags and shoes, lending them the collectible quality of previous hookups with the likes of Yayoi Kusama and his friend the editor Grace Coddington.At the fall show he staged in Paris last month, Ghesquière revisited and renewed his signatures. Nobody seeing this collection would mistake it for anyone’s but his either. That’s an asset likely to serve him and Louis Vuitton well as fashion lurches through a once-a-decadevibe shift. A challenging global marketplace has some designers grasping for a new style; Ghesquière, in contrast, seems assured of his.After Sun’s hyperreal creatures’ entrances came a long series of florals, some on what looked like gently draped jersey, rendering them feminine and sporty at once, and others embroidered on utility vests and knee-grazing board shorts for a tougher vibe. A cropped zip-front shirt conjured memories of an iconic surf-themed collection, and patchwork shell jackets, motocross leathers, and baggy sarouel pants could’ve been winks at his back catalog as well.Ghesquière has been a pants maestro since his Balenciaga days, but here he was more interested in skirts, showing many fluttering, tendrilly versions, sometimes longer in back than in front and other times worn over short trousers. To conclude, he scaled back the prints and embellishments but not the drama, showing a trio of voluminous bubble dresses in what appeared to be white, platinum, and black silk duchesse. These were about silhouette, not surfaces, and they had a subtle but unmistakable wow factor.
18 April 2024
An editor turned up at Nicolas Ghesquière’s 10th anniversary Louis Vuitton show in Paris wearing a full look from his fall 2014 debut—the only thing missing was the Petite Malle mini-trunk bag he launched that season. “It still works,” she said of her outfit, “it doesn’t look dated.” A group of women had gathered around her marveling. The A-line leather jacket, round-collar blouse and sweater vest, and black patent pants were instantly recognizable in a way not many other designers can claim. But then, few designers working at Europe’s top brands now were in their jobs 10 years ago. Amidst the churn of creative directors today, a decade is some kind of record.At that first show in March 2014, Ghesquière left a typewritten note for all of his guests. Back then he wrote about the “immense joy” of a fresh start. Tonight in a similar letter placed on all 4,000-or-so seats—a huge crowd that included many of the company’s employees—he said, “this joy is still here. Ten years later, this evening is a new dawn.” The synchronicity of the two messages was not unintentional. Ghesquière was definitely looking back at key pieces from his Vuitton oeuvre. As strong as his design language is, the references were easy enough to spot, even if his reinterpretations were far from line-for-line.The jackets heavily embroidered with metallic threads and embellished with cabochon stones recalled the frock coats of the Louis XVI collection for spring 2018 he presented in the medieval part of the Louvre. Sparkling skirts that bubbled below the knees seemed to be a callback to spring 2021, a pandemic-time show he staged without an audience. And the swirling asymmetric hems of the spectacular fringy evening numbers evoked the deconstructed scuba-suit dresses from his resort 2017 show in Rio.Over the years, Ghesquière has made the house’s savoir faire and its roots in travel the pillars of his work. Both were themes here, as seen in sculptural minidresses photo-printed with classic trunks, and the glam-leisure of plane-ready tracksuits and jackets with techy performance-wear details. The latter also reflected his longtime affinity for sci-fi. All of the Nicolas Ghesquière elements were here, and yet it didn’t come across as nostalgic in the slightest, a relief and a delight after a season in which many veteran designers were working on repeat. The remarkable thing about Ghesquière is that even when he’s looking back, he manages to conjure the future.
5 March 2024
The day after Pharrell Williams’s first rodeo for Louis Vuitton—that extravaganza of ashowon Pont Neuf last June—the studio he leads began work on this collection. Now that you can begin to join the dots, it appears that he is taking the house (via anocean crossing) on something of an odyssey. The four LV trunks wheeled down the runway tonight strongly suggest he’s still en route to somewhere, but for fall ’24 his LV caravanserai moved into what is home territory for Williams: the USA and its heritage of Western wear and workwear.Speaking to the press during a post-show howdy, he said: “When you see cowboys portrayed you see only a few versions. You never really get to see what some of the original cowboys looked like. They looked like us, they looked like me. They looked Black. They looked Native American.”The native peoples of what became the United States were respected and represented in tonight’s telling via participation and acknowledgement. The house said that artists from the Dakota and Lakota tribes contributed to the accessories; these included hand-paintings and beautiful desert flower embroideries on several versions of the Speedy bag. The opening and closing music was co-composed by Williams and Lakota “Hokie” Clairmont and performed by a group named Native Voices of Resistance, who along with the models and the studio team took a bow with Williams at the end. Amongst the models was Lakota musician Gunner Jules, who carried a painted Keepall above his hand-tooled Goodyear welted cowboy boots, jeans, LV cowboy buckle belt, and patched shearling jacket.Still, though: American history is so fraught, freighted, and subject to fiery debate in the battleground of contemporary cultural identity. The year Louis Vuitton founded his start-up workshop by the Place Vendome, 1854, was also the year of the Achulet massacre, the First Sioux War, and the capture and re-enslavement of Anthony Burns in Virginia. Williams said: “We’re expressing ourselves from a place of love, no judgment. Just think about telling your story and telling your people’s story as best you can and doing it candidly and with love—that’s the overwhelming feeling.”The storytelling achieved by the studio and artisan teams of the house though the execution of their craft under Williams’s direction was often outstanding. Lace shirts were embroidered with lasso-throwing cowboys and denim jackets with yellow desert flowers.
Chaps in leather or denim—possibly a first for the house—were embroidered in saddlery patterns or fringed and flowered. Suiting—including the collarless Pont Neuf jacket that is becoming a Williams LV emblem—and denim was riveted with turquoise, which was also tooled into belts, collar tips, bolos, jewelry, and bags.
16 January 2024
A swarm of illuminated drones hovered high above Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour at Pharrell Williams’s first Louis Vuitton menswear pre-fall show, etching momentary patterns in the sky. First they synchronized to illustrate a rising blue wave pushing a riderless white surfboard; as the wave broke the surfboard transformed into a traditional junk boat of the kind that has plied these waters for centuries. Maritime theme established, the drones scattered to reform in the designer’s LV Lovers motif.Anson Lo, Sho Hirano, Dylan Wang, Stray Kids’s Felix and Rauw Alejandro, 600 VICs, and around 200 Hong Kong fashion students (watching on a nearby big screen) were invited to see a collection that contained many complex currents of its own. Theme-wise, the main dialogue ran the characters of dandy-sailor (at the beginning) and earthier surfer (towards the end). Among the many super-enjoyable elements at the wavier end were intensely mustered Hawaiian-style prints on Aloha shirts and short sets, jacquard suiting featuring LV icons, and a whole arsenal of accessories including a ukulele strap. A suede short and shirt set in red was garlanded with wire-edged flowers you could arrange according to your mood. There were beaded shorties, wetsuits and ponchos in neoprene, friendship bracelets and necklaces, rattan hats, and fisherman’s sandals—and a surfboard too.Around and also sometimes within this fun frothing churn of luxury surfology Williams’s LV lexicon began to take shape. Pearls as milky as moonlight tipped denim rivets, topped buttons, etched pinstripe on seersucker, and were the precious pixels that traced the florals, waves, and fish on a closing baseball jacket. The LV initials resembled the grid of a fishing net in the silky jacquard of the first suit and the chambray separates that appeared later. The collarless not-quite rattan coat in the same milky tone as its pearl buttons, the high-waisted double breasted jackets and breaky pants, the wide shorts (most prominently in a tufted denim), and the baseball jackets all pointed to a core wardrobe that combined broad wearability and high materiality. Neptune, god of the ocean, was inserted into one of those Aloha prints as a join-the-dots easter egg for Pharrell-philes.Accessories provide the tide that propels Louis Vuitton, and they were given due prominence this evening.
Tweaked versions of the Speedy and a new chest bag were amongst the models printed in bicolor checkerboard versions of the damier design, taken from the archive’s original design and retaining its first hand-brushed identifier. Those LV Aloha prints landed here too, as did some beautifully woven raffia pieces and a new scuba-effect version of the damier checkerboard. The shoes that kicked sand on the runway included a sleek-looking new model named Cobra, 3D-printed in TPU, that was patterned with a fine mesh finish and aerodynamically set air vents.At the end of it all, those drones made for such irresistible content that some in the 1,200-strong crowd shifted from their spots, apparently to gain an improved shooting position. This current then swirled against the finale’s massed wave of models. At its peak was Williams, in a jaunty sailor’s hat and a pearl-buttoned double breasted white suit with authentically bell bottomed pants. Encountering this human turbulence, Louis Vuitton’s menswear captain didn’t falter, but hand-shook and high-fived his way onwards down towards the end of his palm-fringed waterside runway. He had steered his sophomore show smoothly into the magnificent port of Hong Kong.
30 November 2023
For his show today, Nicolas Ghesquière swapped the great museums of Paris for its greatest avenue, the Champs-Élysées, and the new Louis Vuitton space under construction there. Though new is perhaps not the right word. Most recently a bank, the imposing building was made for the 1900 Exposition Universelle as a hotel to house international guests visiting the world’s fair. The Grand and Petit Palais and the Gare D’Orsay (future home of the Musée D’Orsay) were all built for the same occasion. “In temporality it’s so coherent with the story of Louis Vuitton,” said Ghesquière in a preview.But it’s not just in temporality that it’s aligned. As anyone who’s passed by the building recently knows, travel is woven into the house’s DNA—its scaffolding is decorated to look like a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk.Ghesquière has his own romance with travel—he talked about the “enigmatic experience” of checking into a hotel—and he also understands its challenges. “Vuitton is a luxury brand but it’s about function, it provides a service: to travel better. Mobility is important in clothes,” he said. A few months ago at his resort show on Italy’s Isola Bella he was storytelling about “mermaids of the lake, transforming into something else,” so it was startling to hear him talking about something as mundane as packing.Of course, there was nothing prosaic about what came down the runway, which was custom-built by James Chinlund to look like the inside of a hot air balloon. Day-to-day is not Ghesquière’s style; in fact, more and more his clothes at Louis Vuitton bear the handcrafts of couture, but the clothes here were designed to be as light as possible. The long flowing skirts at the start were made from layers of mousseline and charmeuse, and the bomber jackets and silk blouses paired with them had a similarly breezy feel. Punctuated by a hip slung leather belt, it was a silhouette Ghesquière has never considered before, and potentially agenda setting. There were others: off-the-shoulder corseted tops made by Vuitton’s bespoke Atelier Rare et Exceptionnel worn with high-waisted tapering pants and suspenders; a shirt built like a sail trailing a wispy train underneath a simple black A-line skirt; a fully beaded jumpsuit with the loose fit of a slip.At the end he showed a group of jackets whose workmanship has to be seen up-close to be appreciated. Though they looked to have been made in tweed bouclé, it was a far finer material laser-cut to give it a slightly ruffled texture.
Extraordinary is the right word for it.
2 October 2023
“IF YOU WANT IT, YOU CAN HAVE IT; IF YOU NEED IT, YOU CAN HAVE IT.” The Virginia choir Voice of Fire was singing loud about the subject of its Pharrell Williams composed song: “Joy (Unspeakable).” But as the tempo rose and their white and off-white “Damouflage” robes shimmered in the light, and Williams came out in his top-to-toe green pixelated Damier duds, and we stood and whooped as he walked down the golden Damier covered cobbles of Paris’s oldest bridge, well, what we specifically wanted and what we specifically needed was Joy in certain very particular (and probably Damier-covered) forms.“We started small!” joked Louis Vuitton CEO Pietro Beccari straight after a show that was doubtless amongst the “biggest” Paris has ever seen by any metric. It was Beccari, fresh into the job, who appointed Williams to succeed the late Virgil Abloh. In his notes Williams dedicated the show to his predecessor: “This moment is dedicated to the giant before me. To our brother in spirit.” And that was only fit and right.Williamstoldus beforehand that this collection was all about LoVe. In order to spread that message, the show also became an awesome demonstration of power. Guests were ferried up the Seine in Bateaux Mouches as the sun went down then dropped under the Pont Neuf, which happens to run directly from the front door of the Louis Vuitton headquarters. As we climbed up onto the bridge it became apparent the company had taken it over entirely. Beyond the richly unctuous accordion classics (“La Mer,” “La Vie En Rose”) meant to convey the cheesy allure of Paris amorousness, you could hear the sirens and horns: the traffic was nuts.The guests you will have already seen on countless posts: also nuts. Beyond the celebrities it was telling how many other fashion designers were there (Stefano Pilati even walked), and how many former fashion partners from Williams’s history of collaborative dabbling in this space previously. Nicolas Ghesquière was in attendance, of course. By excluding almost nobody (sworn corporate rivals apart) Williams and Louis Vuitton were building the broadest of churches from the off.After a great deal of schmoozing—because when you take over the Pont Neuf as a runway you may as well get value for money—we settled in for the show as dusk petered out towards darkness. The spotlights beamed, the percussion boomed, and the first looks broke cover.
These were heavy on that Damouflage in first accessories and then garments, including an almost (but not quite!) Chanel-style knit jacket, a great long netting-zhooshed duster coat, jacquard suiting, and a leather bomber. Every kid raised on Minecraft, and every older dude who sees camo as a go-to, is going to react to these pieces. Soon enough the blocky checkerboard pattern gave way to more organic shapes that looked vaguely like a reference to Williams’s 2009 Keita Sugiura forest camo jacket (made with Moncler and launched with Sarah Andelman at Colette).
20 June 2023
In three weeks and one day, Pharrell Williams will make his Louis Vuitton menswear debut. The most anticipated show of the season, if not the year, the superstar musician, producer, singer-songwriter, and brand builder’s arrival at Louis Vuitton marks a new phase in fashion’s relationship with celebrity. Until now the industry has capitalized on adjacencies, à la the name in lights collaboration we just witnessed with Donatella Versace and the pop phenom Dua Lipa at the Cannes Film Festival.Williams has been handed the keys, and as show time on June 20 approaches—the date was moved from Vuitton’s usual Thursday slot to Tuesday, the opening night of Paris men’s week—fashion watchers and LV collectors alike are wondering how Williams’s vision for the house will diverge from that of his friend and predecessor, Virgil Abloh. In this regard, this pre-spring lineup is a useful reminder of the late designer’s signatures. It’s the work of the design studio that Abloh built.Tailoring was one of Abloh’s rubrics. His shows typically opened with a suit and it was a category he grew more confident in as his time at LV went on. Here we got a single breasted two-piece in a camouflage pattern that close inspection revealed to be formed from a world map. For the most part, though, suits were downplayed in favor of more logo driven luxury street- and sportswear of the sort that he played such a large role in popularizing in the 2010s: large scale Damier checks printed with an Epi leather-like texture on matching shirt and pant sets, camouflage fleece sweatpants and vests with supersize LVs worked into the pattern, and monogrammed denim pieces that looked seared.Oxidized was the word used in the press statement. The collection, it explained, “centers on the culture of the bonfire as a universal symbol of unification: a place of illumination that draws us in and connects us. At the cusp of a new era at the maison, the bonfire likewise serves as a beacon of transition—the eve of a new dawn.”But there was room for other ideas and themes, among them a jacket, t-shirt, and shorts printed with “flyers” embedded with messages (“a trunk for six bottles and a suitcase for dolls,” “rework, remodel, repeat,” etc.) and art graphics, and another jacket picked out with pearl embroidery that reads “calligraphy and a violin case.” What it refers to isn’t clear, but the notion that it might hold a hidden meaning seems central to its appeal.
29 May 2023
Over nearly 10 years, Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton grand tour has taken him to a John Lautner house in Palm Springs, Oscar Niemeyer’s Niteroi Museum in Rio, and Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in San Diego, among other architectural wonders of the 20th century. His resort show tonight was to happen in a different kind of place: the terraced gardens of Isola Bella, a tiny private island in Lake Maggiore that has belonged to Italy’s Borromeo clan for 500 years. “There are beautiful places to go in Italy,” Ghesquière said, “but the lakes are so mysterious.”Ferrying the likes of Catherine Deneuve, Oprah Winfrey, and Cate Blanchett, plus 1,000 or so other guests to the spectacular venue was quite the feat, but not even the powerhouse that is Louis Vuitton can change the weather. The rain was coming down in sheets, and plans for a sunset show and after-party en plein air had to be scrapped, though an earlier show was staged to create these images.It would’ve been magical to see these clothes walk through the gardens, with their tropical fruit trees growing in the shadow of the Alps. The lake produces its own climate and Ghesquière was much inspired by the watery surroundings. “We started with the idea that the girls were coming from the water, like mermaids of the lake, and they’re transforming to something else,” he said. The explanation tied together a collection of many distinct proposals. Ghesquière tends to think freer and looser when he’s untethered from Paris, but this sci-fi fantasy had the dreaminess of a fairytale.It started with scuba gear featuring fin-like collars and water droplet embellishments. A pair of diving jackets were elaborately printed in a way that conjured both Hokusai waves and the creatures that might be living underneath them. He mixed neoprene tank suits with lavish courtly robes, and paired mermaid-scale sequin skirts with naval jackets. The baroque headgear was custom-made for the show by an atelier in Rome that works for the opera and movies. This was the French house’s first-ever show in Italy (a timely choice given its new CEO Pietro Beccari is Italian) and Ghesquière wanted to pay tribute to the country’s patrimony of craft.Then the mermaids found their sea legs. Just over three weeks ago, the designer and his Louis Vuitton teams were in Seoul for a pre-fall show that put the accent on street-ready, sporty-glam silhouettes that seemed tailor made for that flourishing city.
Here, his everyday pieces included brushed cashmere sweaters in soft pastels that he described as Italian colors, “button-downs” and “jeans” in embroidered lace and sumptuous brocades, and classically cut coats that topped sequined floral dresses inspired by the island’s plantings.“By the end the mermaid becomes a flower, but maybe not a flower that exists,” Ghesquière said. That notion produced a group of long dresses in more of those pastel shades that qualified as real news for the designer, who has typically shied away from gowns on the runway at LV. They were delicate and bold simultaneously, a mix of silk, georgette, organza, and lace from their softly draped bodices and pouf sleeves to their sculptural, swingy hems. Who needs mysterious lakes when you have the power of imagination? Who wants quiet luxury when you can have a couture-level cape with water droplet beading or a quilted damask jacket featuring wyvern, unicorn, and other legendary creatures? A captivating, transportive show.
24 May 2023
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while: South Korea’s atmosphere suits me,” Nicolas Ghesquière shared in a statement just ahead of Louis Vuitton’s pre-fall show, which unfolded in Seoul on Saturday evening. Eschewing the city’s palatial gardens and more obvious venues, Ghesquière set his stage on Jamsugyo, a humble pedestrian path that hangs beneath the Banpo Bridge, where commuters cross between the city’s north and south banks. A submersible structure, it disappears under the river during the summer monsoon. “It’s a feat of civil engineering that creates the illusion of disappearance-reappearance,” Ghesquière added. “For Seoulites, it’s a living monument. It’s an inspiring place to stage a show.”Ghesquière has often noted his fondness forThe Host, a 2006 horror film by Bong Joon-ho that stars his dear friend Doona Bae, in which the Han River is a principal player. As in that film, a sense of unease flitted down the promenade in the hour leading up to the show, as guests shivered in their seats, defenseless against the frigid wind blowing in from the river. There were no heat lamps and a shortage of blankets, as men and women in monogrammed leather began hoarding them in stacks. Very like Ghesquière to blend the trappings of luxury with the grit of the street.The scenography was entrusted toSquid Gamedirector Hwang Dong-Hyuk, who showered projections of amber light that flickered like moving water over the naked bridge. The thrum of distant drums and whale sounds—or monster sounds—further lent to a sense of disquiet, until Hoyeon Jung opened the show to a high-octane Korean garage rock song. There is always the urge to pander to the locals with an inauthentic nod to their traditional dress or other gimmicks. Ghesquière smartly resisted that temptation and continued to revisit the house codes he has spent the last decade refining. “Just like this very symbolic bridge, there’s a back and forth, intersecting passages, a mix of moments,” he said.As with the bridge, there was an aerodynamic nature to the hooded tops and bodysuits that clung to the frame à la Irma Vep, and those elements of sport played well with the simple strong colors and silhouettes that harkened back to Ghesquière’s early days at the house.
With all the fuss over quiet luxury of late, there was a share of it here in the pinstripe and quilted leather suits, the mod lambskin coats, and muted versions of the LV logo—a micro-monogram as a checkerboard print pant, a crepe wool bodysuit that plunges toward the navel worn with a horsebit belt. A hint of sparkle and flou remained, notably in the closing passage of elevated loungewear which included a striped twill Mandarin collar shirt embroidered with glimmering crystal beads and tied with a swinging belt of metal monogram flowers.“Like a kind of diplomatic journey, a Louis Vuitton caravanserai that comes to South Korea to recount various chapters in its history,” as Ghesquière put it, the show read like a dialogue between Paris and Seoul, which has become a pivotal player in the global luxury market and where the big houses are currently waging a turf war. Much like Dior, who took its pre-fall collection to Mumbai last month, Vuitton is intent on upping the stakes in turning the pre-season into an extravagant destination that equals resort. As the fountains along the Banpo Bridge went off for the finale, sending jets of water arching into the Han River as Hoyeon Jung walked past a front row filled with K-pop stars, one felt that Louis Vuitton had made its claim quite succinctly.
29 April 2023
The concept for the fall Louis Vuitton collection came to Nicolas Ghesquière after returning home from traveling last year, when the world was finally opening up again. “What is French style?” he said. “It’s an ambitious question, but being at Vuitton you have a certain responsibility because the name of the brand is so strong in the world.” His idea, he explained, was to ask the young designers in his studio for their takes on the subject. “Since they’re so international, I was curious to know what would they think.” Unsurprisingly, they all came back with “very different things.” They don’t call it Frenchje ne sais quoifor nothing.Today’s show was staged in a ballroom of the Musée d’Orsay, its Beaux-Arts decor providing a counterpoint to the ambitious Philippe Parreno and James Chinlund designed installation, which reproduced a cobbled Paris street, down to honking cars, barking dogs, and clicking heels, all courtesy of the sound designer Nicolas Becker.During his tenure at Vuitton, Ghesquière has explored the surreal and the sci-fi. This was a collection that was in touch with the street, softer and more down-to-earth, but no less haute than usual. A close-up look at the clothes revealed mind-boggling details: The camel coat in look 14 may appear to be wool, but it’s actually leather, first embossed, then printed. The pinstripes on a pair of leather jeans, meanwhile, were painted by hand and then stitched with sequins, and thousands upon thousands of tiny metal coils, orcannetilles, were required to achieve the three-dimensional embroideries on the spider-webby dresses.So, what did the design studio come back to him with? What is French style in the end? It’s the Tricolore, which the studio reproduced on a blue, white, and red quilted GO 14 shoulder bag, and leather gloves. It’s the Opéra Garnier, which (this is a guess) inspired the light-upPhantom of the Operamasks. And it’s the Cinq à Sept, which is a local colloquialism for an affair, that was alluded to here with a series of sumptuous dressing gowns, pajama tops, and plush faux fur shorts.Of course, from his perch in the top echelons of fashion, Ghesquière has had his own impact on French style over the last couple of decades—not just French style, but global style. That the “French girl look” that the entire internet is searching for often boils down to a strong shouldered jacket and skinny pants is because he’s been finessing those essentials for all these years.
The surreal and the sci-fi are no less “him,” but because these pieces are hooked to real life, they resonate more powerfully. Also very desirable: a finely embroidered slip dress worn with a chunky hand-knit scarf thrown over the shoulder and boots.Asked if he came to a conclusion about French style, Ghesquière shook his head. “No. Every season we try to answer that question, but without saying it. This season the difference is we own it. But French style belongs to everyone.”
6 March 2023
Rosalia jumped on the roof of a vintage yellow car and performed in a super-puffer and XXXL track pants, and Colm Dillane came out on stage in a green bucket hat with the whole menswear team. In between, there’d been a Louis Vuitton menswear collective composite of an event, collaged from Colm’s ideas, the styling contributions of Ibrahim Kamara, a set conceived by the Gondry brothers—and a film by them which went out on LV channels, though was not seen by the audience—in a tent in the Cour Carrée du Louvre.Attention grabbing communication combined with cult item creation is the giant luxury brand game these days. That’s not just the case with the Louis Vuitton menswear department, of course, although this brand has entered a phase of taking special care over what’s to be done about creative continuity since the tragic loss of the man who uniquely convened such a vast global community around it.Bringing in Dillane with his can-do, cheerful, collaborative personality, and his Brooklyn self-taught anything-can-be-done hustle is one measure of the company’s will to keep the flame of Virgil Abloh’s legacy burning. In the official phrase, Dillane was “embedded” within the maison—that is, working with Abloh’s remaining studio team. Along with Kamara, they actioned his ideas about re-doing classic menswear suiting and respecting the universal language of track suits, hoodies, and trainers at the same level—and with witty, surreal messaging and references to Black culture to go with it.Another possibility is that the naive name and hand-drawn artwork of Dillane’s own brand, KidSuper, had a bearing on it. His multicolored child-like paintings of people and domestic interiors were hyper-elaborated into Vuitton patchworked tracksuits and jacquarded onto a suit, formal coat, and a souvenir LV Keepall.The link there is that Abloh always spoke about the importance of remembering and cherishing the child within the adult—a symbol to him of hope. And that turned out to be the trope that was conjured up again in the set for this show—rooms in a house in which a child had grown up to be a man.As Rosalia sang, models could be seen behind her rummaging through a Louis Vuitton trunk to find packed-away childhood toys. Program notes detailed the idea of millennial rites of passage, teenage bedrooms, and early memories of playing on computers.
When the models emerged onto the runway at the perimeter of the set, they were wearing mash-ups of classical cuts, suits with twisted middles, and—it being the trend of the season—several long slim tailored coats. Dillane’s input included faces patchworked in leather in neutral colors on LV monogram casual wear, backpacks, and a bucket hat.The collective nature of the show—some of this, some of that, and a lot of individual items to chat about—made it hard to read as a coherent narrative. Above and beyond that, the maison’s superb ability to innovate wildly luxurious techniques was in no doubt. What might happen next with LV remains to be seen. Dillane’s graffiti in yellow on a gray topcoat seemed to say that: “Blurry Vision of a Bright Future,” it read.
19 January 2023
Editor’s note: This collection was originally presented in March 1998 in Paris and has been digitized as part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document historical fashion shows.In the 1990s many heritage houses got makeovers as fashion increasingly corporatized. The trials and triumphs of John Galliano at Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen at Givenchy, for example, have been well documented. Marc Jacobs also ended up in Paris at a storied maison, but his remit was different. He was tasked with creating something from nothing—a ready-to-wear collection for a leather goods and accessory company which had never had one before. “When Bernard Arnault asked me if I’d do it, it took me just about five seconds to say yes,” Jacobs recalled in a 1998 interview withThe Financial Times.“Design is always subjective but quality is objective and that’s what attracted me to Louis Vuitton.”It so happened that Jacobs’s debut, for fall 1998, coincided with Martin Margiela’s for Hermès. The press dubbed this occasion “The Battle of the Bags.” In so doing they made more noise than either designer, both of whom went in for different variations on simplicity. Jacobs’s collection had an American in Paris vibe. There was almost a Puritanism to his spare shapes and limited palette. “The collection of 50 outfits was so achingly hip, so New York minimal that its impact was severely muted,” wroteThe Guardianat the time. “The clothes contain the sort of inverted snobbery that makes a secret society out of status. More shocking than Jacobs’s understated approach was the fact that there was only one bag in the show, and it (like the clothes) had no visible logos. In introducing an entirely new category to Louis Vuitton’s offering, Jacobs was starting at ground zero, and he translated that notion into designs as elemental and clean as the geometry of a trunk, an iconic LV piece that the designer referenced in a statement he contributed to the “Backstage News & Notes” feature that ran in the July 1998 issue ofVogue,which is reprinted below.“Marc on Vuitton”“I think people were expecting a lot of monograms. It’s impossible to please everyone, but we started at zero—this was a company that had never done clothing before. The clothes were contemporary, classic, luxurious, a backdrop for a luggage company—utilitarian and practical. Was it too utilitarian for the French? Well, you know, one of the first Louis Vuitton trunks was gray and flat so it would be stackable.
It was very practical; I mean, there’s method to all this madness. Also, originally there was no monogram on the outside. Then Vuitton was copied so much he changed it to a stripe. Then a check. Then initials, which, by the way, were inspired by Japanese art in Paris at the time. I’m an expert on all of this now.Vuitton is a luxury brand—it’s functional, but it’s also a status accessory. I decided status would be done my way, which is to say invisibly. That means the Vuitton logo is embossed on a messenger bag, white on white. For me that’s what status is: It’s absolutely not about another century or about decoration in an obvious way. The idea that everything has to be the same in fashion, that everyone has to follow one trend, that there is one kind of status is wrong. You can’t compare a beaded dress to a simple cotton raincoat.Also, I don’t think of Louis Vuitton as French necessarily. It’s international. I see Vuitton bags in airports all over the world. You look atHello!magazine and there’s John McEnroe in a white shirt, jeans, and a raincoat and carrying a Vuitton bag. That is the sexy, glamorous image of what Louis Vuitton should be.”
1 January 2023
A year after Virgil Abloh’s passing, no menswear artistic director has been announced to replace him. But if the appointment is in a holding pattern, Louis Vuitton is a brand in motion. That’s the message this collection seems designed to convey with its theme of the desert race. In a bit of cross-LVMH synergy, Dior Men was in Egypt over the weekend. Here, the idea of the desert was conveyed with a sand-filled set that by the end transformed into a blooming oasis.The slideshow opens with a motocross jacket, the Vuitton name split by a front-zip between the Ts; sport shorts; and what look like over-the-knee compression socks. The outfit is a literal nod to a racing uniform, with the kind of playful logo manipulation that Abloh made one of his signatures. The collection quickly moves beyond motorsport references, spanning categories from sharp tailoring to casual travel wear, but it definitely leans into reinterpretations of the iconic brand name.On denim separates the monogram looks seared into the fabric as if by the “scorching desert sun.” Elsewhere, it’s embossed on suede, printed on silk-blend shorts and shirts, and woven into jacquard knitwear layers. The most charming development is the introduction of speaker man, a cartoon reimagining of the models who carried massive speakers strapped to their backs in the spring 2023 show in June. It’s a sweet tribute to Abloh’s DJ bona fides.Where does the Louis Vuitton men’s collection go from here? The race is a potent metaphor, suggestive as it is of competition and rivals and of going around in circles. The driver’s seat has been open for long enough here that the industry’s attention has turned elsewhere, but with another menswear runway season just weeks away in January, could an announcement be imminent? We’ll be watching.
5 December 2022
We were back in the Cour Carrée for Louis Vuitton. Nicolas Ghesquière invited his longtime friend French artist Philippe Parreno to create an installation, and together with the Hollywood production designer James Chinlund (ofThe Batmanfame) they created a set that felt a little as if a spaceship—a distant cousin of theNopeUFO, perhaps—had landed in the heart of Paris and the aliens had set up a fun fair for locals to see the special attraction.“It’s the first time I designed a collection in dialogue, in correspondence, with someone,” Ghesquière said at a preview, adding that Parreno’s sculpture was in fact “kind of a flower, a carnival flower.” Its massive proportions inspired the supersizing that happened on the runway. The cloche clés key holder that accessorizes many of the brand’s bags was enlarged, as were its Vachetta leather luggage tags, and the wallet that Ghesquière wears on a chain attached to a belt loop became a portfolio that the models clutched to their hips. All clever ideas.Something similar was happening with the clothes. You might recognize the giant zipper pulls on HoYeon Jung’s opening look from the fall 2015 jeans that fashion types still proudly wear seven years later, a grail item if ever there was one. “Louis Vuitton is not anymore a leather goods company; it’s a fashion company also, and we’re very proud, after all these years, of this result,” said Ghesquière.As for those zippers, Ghesquière reported that they’re the largest ever manufactured, and the process of zooming and exaggerating one element of a garment led to the scaling up of other parts as well. Which explains the hyperbolic neckline and hips of Jung’s crop top and skirt, and the oversized straps dangling from the inner hems of vests and jackets, like sportswear panniers.Something deeper was at work than just proportion play, though. Ghesquière said he was using scale to disrupt the codes of femininity. “‘Pretty tough,’ that was something we were talking about, and ‘threatening beauty.’ The idea was to look at something pretty, something sweet, and to see in those elements what strength they have,” he explained. Can a bow be threatening? An Edie Sedgwick baby doll with a bit of tulle and lace? Debatable, but the spirit of the collection, with its easy-walking boots and utilitarian external pockets, feels right for this moment.Ghesquière’s fabric development was impressive. The tweed of a minidress, for example, was first printed, then embroidered.
“There is always that game of what is real and what is manipulated,” he explained. And the party pants were woven first with elastic to give them their wavy, three-dimensional texture, then printed. The lace tights, made on a Raschel machine and then studded with crystals, were something new too. “Being with Philippe and working through the eyes of an artist,” Ghesquière said, “sometimes I had the feeling we were a little childish. I think I was maybe more free to break some boundaries for myself.”
4 October 2022
This slideshow includes 11 images from a second showing of this collection in Aranya, China on September 16, 2022.The marching band of Florida A&M University, out of Tallahassee. A procession of athletic French LV flag wavers. And Kendrick Lamar in his crown of thorns, sending his lyrical incantation to the absent-presence of Virgil Abloh from his seat beside a conceptual Yellow Brick Road runway which swooped around a courtyard of the Louvre: “Virgil, how many miles away?”If this was Louis Vuitton’s final celebration of Abloh and his legacy— the first collection and show to have been seen through wholly without him—then the brand’s powers that be, and all the people who worked for Abloh, did a spectacular all-round job. It wasn’t at all mournful or—worse—forcedly upbeat. Rather, it was a collective collection, designed by the people who worked all the long hours with him, cementing the profound and irrevocable social change that Abloh succeeded in normalizing at the very top of the fashion establishment.Behind it was the concept of play—which tracks back to what Abloh once described as “the untainted vision of a child, not yet spoiled by societal programming.” Free play is where he believed creativity happens. As a multi-disciplinarian and collaborator across so many fields and across continents—DJ-ing, graphic design, furniture design, animation, music, film, museum curation, and more—he recognized no boundaries.The team that had worked with him at LV learned from all those “everything is possible” lessons and ran with them. Amidst a humongous set built to mimic a magnified kid’s train set, and surrounded by huge inflatable balls, they tenderly utilized the childhood codes Abloh played with. Paper planes landed all over a black suit as a kind of 3-D embroidery. Folded ‘paper’ hats were reproduced in luxurious white leather. A coat was decorated with the contents of a toolbox, scissors and all. The zig-zaggy pinked hems of shirts and jackets winked towards kids’ craft kits. The LV flower symbol was hand-crocheted in multicolored wool all up the sleeves of a denim jacket.If this sounds naive, that’s giving the wrong impression. If anything, Abloh’s team pulled out all the stops, proving their knowledge of the luxurious, couture-grade techniques Louis Vuitton is capable of.
There were white leather bomber jackets and a coat with grand molded 18th-century French motifs, a rich array of flower and thistle embroideries and jacquards, and a finale of sparkling sequined French Impressionist fields of poppies and wild flowers.At the end, the studio team—Abloh’s creative army—followed the marching band to wave goodbye to an era that has been transformative, both for them and for the image of what Louis Vuitton can stand for on the global stage. Tomorrow is another day; there will surely be an announcement of the next creative director soon. Big shoes to fill. But this is certain, there can be no turning back on the wealth of equality and openness that Virgil Abloh brought to this industry.
23 June 2022
What happens next at Louis Vuitton men’s is the biggest open question in fashion. Since Virgil Abloh’s sudden passing last November, the men’s artistic director role has gone respectfully unfilled, while the collection schedule just keeps rolling on. The spring 2023 show in Paris next month promises to be a closely watched event; it’ll be the first show following what functioned as a pair of memorials, one in Miami just days after Abloh’s death, and the other in Paris in January.Abloh had made a practice of lookbook reveals for his LV pre-season lineups; there’s only a handful of other men’s brands in the habit of doing so. Pre-seasons, for him, provided a chance to extrapolate on the heritage label’s famous logo; and the sensibility of the clothes was more casual than on his runways, where he often focused on tailoring and silhouette building. But if his intentions during the pre-seasons were micro, their impact was inevitably macro. The pre-spring collection he showed a year ago was a showcase for his second collaboration with Nigo. When the Japanese streetwear pioneer was named artistic director of LVMH sister brand Kenzo in September, many saw Abloh’s hand in the hire.According to the press notes circulated with these pictures, Abloh “conceived” the idea for this pre-spring lineup, and it was subsequently “carried out by the creative teams and collaborators with whom he continually worked at Louis Vuitton.” The collection looks of a piece with his previous pre-seasons here, emphasizing the house monogram and prioritizing playful off-duty sportswear over tailoring, though there are some neatly cut trim suits. The PR materials note its “coming-of-age theme” and go on to explain that the 43 looks are divided into two archetypes: the music student and the concert goer.Music was Abloh’s abiding preoccupation, the source from which so many of his ideas, relationships, and influence flowed. The music student/concert goer distinctions are somewhat nebulous, but the clothes are unmissably Abloh-esque. Picking up on the angel wings of his posthumous fall show, butterfly intarsias decorate knits. The tie-dye that was one of his go-to motifs returns on denim and fleece. And there’s also a midlayer garment—which is what he called the distinctive harnesses modeled on the red carpet by Michael B. Jordan and Timothée Chalamet—only here it’s scaled way up. As for the logo, the bolded treatment looks like the puffy letters of graffiti.
As prolific and hard-working as Abloh was, there are likely brand icons to iterate on indefinitely. The really big question moving forward is just how Abloh’s successor, whenever they are named, will find their way through or around them to develop a language of their own. It won’t be easy. Last Friday, a Louis Vuitton and Nike “Air Force 1” by Virgil Abloh exhibition opened in New York, and next month nine editions of Abloh’s Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1s will be released; they’ll top $2,000 retail and most are expected to sell via pre-order. Maybe this will put the challenge of living up to Abloh’s legacy in perspective: A size 9 Nike AF1 combining the LV monogram and damier check is on offer at the resale site Tradesy. The asking price: $199,999.98.
23 May 2022
At Louis Vuitton tonight, the person on my right saw superheroines. The one on my left saw the Amazons of Greek mythology, female warriors who matched men in strength and agility. Nicolas Ghesquière himself used the word goddesses.Has he ever been as audacious? If so, it’s been recently, in his two post-pandemic Paris shows. Together with today’s in Southern California, they form a sort of trilogy, starting in the 19th century, making a pitstop in the ’90s of his own post-adolescence, and zooming off into a utopian future. At all three Ghesquière has set out to break down dress codes and build up complex silhouettes we haven’t seen before. At a preview he said, “I think we’ve all been going through a lot these last couple of years. I think we are in a moment when there are a lot of possibilities. So I guess I’m taking my part in that. I feel very free.”Ghesquière has made a tradition of staging his cruise shows at architectural marvels: John Lautner’s Bob Hope House in Palm Springs, Oscar Niemeyer’s Niteroi Museum in Rio de Janeiro, I. M. Pei’s Miho Museum outside Kyoto, and now the Louis Kahn-designed Salk Institute in La Jolla. Kahn’s masterpiece, the Salk’s monumentality is matched by its humanity. But Ghesquière was as switched on by its setting as by its Brutalist concrete. “The guest of honor for the show is the sun,” he said poetically. “The elements are invited.”This was a collection about playing with those elements. He chose metallic fabrics and embellishments that reflected the setting sun, some as glassy as mirrors, and other materials that offered protection from it, wrapping long swathes of linen, for example, around the head and across the body. Other pieces lifted design details from water sports; the airbrushed colors of half tops and boxy short skirts apparently came from jet skis. Ghesquière is a designer whose collections are minutely pored over and studied, and some of these gestures looked like callbacks to earlier seasons, only amplified, maximal where he used to be minimal and streamlined.The show began and ended with a bang. The opening dresses, one more voluminous than the next, were cut from robust jacquards (he compared them to molten lava) that looked like they really could’ve repelled enemy fire. The effect was almost stately, but for the soft-soled sneakers they padded out on. At the finish came a trio of jackets with enormous sculpted collars as shiny as armor perched above tinsel sleeves.
These were extraordinary: imaginative and otherworldy. Ghesquière was firing on all creative cylinders here, creating a positive feedback loop. You left wanting to be one of his Amazon superheroine goddesses.
13 May 2022
All week long in Paris, there have been crowds of hundreds of kids outside the shows, screaming at the top of their lungs for celebrities. They go especially crazy for TikTokers, who older people in the audience wouldn’t recognize even if they sat in their laps. The world keeps spinning, as the Musée d’Orsay’s famous clock reminded us at Louis Vuitton today (it was the first runway show ever at the museum), and kids are making the culture.Time has been a subtext for Nicolas Ghesquière since the beginning of his tenure at Louis Vuitton. He’s made a practice of mashing up references and collapsing centuries in the process, most famously when he combined Louis XVI frock coats with running shorts and sneakers on a sub-floor of the Louvre that was once a medieval moat.This show wasn’t hooked to a particular era as much as it was to a time frame: Young adulthood. In prepared notes, Ghesquière called the collection “an excursion into a perceptible, fleeting, and decisive moment when everything comes to the fore, in all its innocence and insight. The impermanence and beautiful volatility of adolescence.” He conjured that state of being most straightforwardly with a trove of photographs by David Sims. The photographer came of age in the 1990s—like Ghesquière himself—and shook up the status quo the generation before him established by shooting his peers and other young people with avérité gritthat eventually becamethelook of that period. By applying and embroidering Sims’ images onto floral jacquard polos, some of that edgy spirit seeped in here.Channeling the sense of youthful experimentation he remembers, Ghesquière topped evening dresses with sporty rugby shirts or chunky sweaters wrapped around waists. This was the most charming grouping in the show, evoking how a teenage girl might co-opt her boyfriend’s clothes. He also played with androgynous tailoring, often in oversized shapes. If you suddenly see young women sporting old men’s ties this fall, you’ll know why. Other silhouettes looked delineated from Ghesquière’s more extravagant collection for spring, only here the pannier and bustle shapes were remixed in softer embroidered knit and tweed, which made them look more everyday. The randomness was part of the point. “Freedom is all,” he wrote, “without directive or impediment.”Tapping into nostalgia might’ve stirred up a kind of melancholy. Youth is fleeting, and so is freedom. Ghesquère has it differently.
There’s a lot riding on kids today, but in young people he sees “inspiring idealism, hope for the future, [and] for a better world.” In that sense he wasn’t really looking back, but looking forward.
7 March 2022
This slideshow includes 9 images from a second showing of this collection in Bangkok on June, 1, 2021.During his eight collection residency, Virgil Abloh turned the house of Louis Vuitton upside down and inside out. He made the exclusive inclusive. This afternoon in Paris apparently marked the final collection of that arc, and in the set at least it appeared to come full circle. The collection was named Louis Dreamhouse, and around the runway were scattered the upended elements of a house that had been hit by some enormous force of energy now spent.In one corner was a staircase (nodding toThe Truman Showset of season 4), from which some opening dancers, after some apparent security issue had been resolved, bounced up and down on hidden trampolines. An empty bed rested alongside the roof and chimney, from which a homey puff of steam emerged. On the other side of the roof was a long dining table, down which sat the Chineke! Orchestra musicians whose performance of a Tyler the Creator-composed piece contributed swooningly to making the show so moving. On the wall above them a stopped clock read the time as eight, on the dot.The collection unfolded on 20 dancers and 67 models. Abloh’s great gift as both designer and lightning rod—masterfully to navigate an elusive commonality of commodity and community in order to service the former and uplift the latter—was posthumously still very much alive, even when referencing death. The inclusion of a Jim Phillips-esque Grim Reaper graphic was a breathtaking detail from a man designing his own legacy while gazing upon his own mortality. Bags came shaped as bouquets. The closing four all-white looks, some featuring Leonardo-esque wings, required no interpretation.To focus overly on the merch at a show attended by his widow and so many friends that it acted also a form of memorial feels almost grubby. However Abloh did articulate himself very specifically through design, and here his instinct to cross-pollinate categories in order to erase boundaries was in full force: lushly magisterial suiting, both quirkily detailed and jewel-accessorized, played alongside the “streetwear” tradition this designer refused to tolerate being marginalized.Then there were the two tapestried looks, one on a topcoat, the other on an acutely waisted—almost Bar-shaped—parka, upon which were reproduced De Chirico’sThe Melancholia of Departure, a piece the artist created multiple versions of.
These, said the notes, were illustrative of the 2020 Abloh-termed concept named “Maintainamorphosis,” defined as “the principle that ‘old’ ideas should be invigorated with value and presented alongside the ‘new,’ because both are equal in worth.”Returning then to the “old,” it was back in June 2018 for collection 1, his very first for Louis Vuitton, that Abloh transmitted multiple references toThe Wizard Of Oz, all of them specific to Dorothy’s fever dream. Today, as members of Abloh’s design studio came out en masse to a standing ovation after his very last collection for Louis Vuitton, they stood within the inside-out of Abloh’s cyclone-scattered dreamhouse. What an irreplaceable force he was.
20 January 2022
Dispensing with the first question everyone will ask, yes, this Louis Vuitton pre-fall men’s collection was “completed and photographed” before Virgil Alboh’s passing on November 28. Abloh’s famous work ethic was much discussed in the many tributes that have been written about him since his too-early death.Who knows? He may have been quite far along on his fall 2022 collection, which would have been shown in Paris a month from now, in January. That’s not something we’ll know for sure until early next year, but there’s no mistaking the Abloh-isms here. From the dégradé Damier checks to the “destroyed” monograms, Alboh had his signatures, even amid the “normalcy” of pre-collections that, as he put it, “celebrate the idea of commercialism rather than deny it the way fashion tends to.”And so maybe the best way to examine Abloh’s legacy and to honor his memory is to look at the pieces here that deliver on that promised commerciality. The graffitied suits and workwear in treatments that include fil coupe, jacquard, and embroidery credited to Ghusto Leon, a Milan-based tattoo artist, look like future collectibles. Ditto the monogrammed shirts and shorts and a quilted bomber whose would-be DIY bleached effects could be achieved few places outside of a Paris atelier.The seemingly offhand rendered to the highest standards is a hallmark of Abloh’s Vuitton. So is his “boyhood ideology.” In the press notes, Abloh expounds: “What makes menswear? Boys do. I believe that building blocks stacked upon each other through our lives form the narrative of what defines menswear.” That sounds like another way of repeating one of his go-to refrains, that “everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself.”The teenager in this house identified the Damier check work shirt and jeans needle-punched with a mountain range as especially cool, and also appreciated the strangeness of the veiled beekeeper hat that accessorized an otherwise simple—Abloh used the termtrendless—black leather jacket and pants. The trainers got high marks too.Of course, Abloh set trends even when he officially wasn’t trying to. His harnesses—aka mid-layer garments—became regular sights on the red carpet, as this collection’s knee-length wrap skirts seem likely to. Meanwhile his eye for accessories helped normalize the man-purse, while simultaneously making that old-fashioned term positively obsolete. Virgil was definitely here: Busting convention and sparking change.
13 December 2021
Additional looks from Virgil Abloh’s final show for Louis Vuitton, held in Miami, on November 30, 2021, have been added to the end of this slideshow.“I feel like I’m writing a book with these collections. It’s one continuous logic about diversity and design,” said Virgil Abloh, talking from the Louis Vuitton menswear studio. “And it’s now synced up with my true thoughts about culture.” Abloh’s multilayered, multi-referenced filmmaking in the time of pandemic has taken him to a place of collective communication where he’s uplifting and materializing far more than clothes on a runway. “I’ve started to let my imagination run wild,” he said. “I try to create the world as I would like to see it in real life. Having something that’s pop culture and fashion, that’s an education and maybe opens minds. To me, that’s the North Star.”Questioning designers about where their inspirations come from is a typical fashion-editor gambit, while who copied who is the accusatory game of the internet. This time Abloh essentially took that on and checkmated it with his knowledge of Black music’s revolutionary creative methods of sampling: of how hip-hop and jungle evolved into rave through subcultures, countries, and time until the genius of the provenance is all simultaneously embedded, normalized, and erased in the mainstream. That’s where the vast Black cultural global fashion influence of tracksuits and sneakers comes from—uncredited. And it’s where, at the very top of the menswear establishment, it faces off with the in-the-know formalities surrounding the sartorial canon of the suit. “When it comes to the nuance of Black culture and design, how does it show up? How does that become canonized? I stand in a very privileged position to be able to educate on that.”Abloh named the collection and its film Amen Break—a perfect metaphoric illustration of how an original drum break recorded by the Winstons, a funk and soul group, in 1969 became the most sampled drum break ever. “I called the collection that because I think it’s so profound: this idea that something can be iterated on by so many artists in so many songs to the point where it melts away. They weren’t compensated for it, by the way. And people don’t know that the drum pattern in their favorite song was from a very specific soul song—and it’s a sampler that makes it possible.”
30 November 2021
The Louvre’s Passage Richelieu was decked out in dozens of antique chandeliers tonight. Collected over many months, they set the stage for what Nicolas Ghesquière described in his press notes as a “grand bal of time.” At Louis Vuitton, Ghesquière has been fascinated by the notion of time and the way fashion intersects with it and doubles back. He’s a master at colliding references and juxtaposing surprising elements to create anew. With the company celebrating the 200th birthday of the house’s founder—there are activations happening around the world all year long—Ghesquière had another reason to take up the subject.As company lore goes, the Passage Richelieu was used by Louis Vuitton for his meetings with Empress Eugénie, for whom he was the exclusive trunk maker. Eugénie might have recognized the panniered silhouettes of this show’s first few looks. The sumptuous, elaborately embellished dresses were girded at the hips in the 19th-century style, but where her gowns would’ve been weighed down with underskirts, Ghesquière’s dresses fairly bounced as the models made their way down the runway in open-toe satin wrestling boots.There were shades of Paul Poiret and Erté in these looks, with their finely beaded headpieces and art nouveau sunglasses. Only neither Poiret nor Erté would likely have encountered denim, and if they had, they never would’ve paired a beaded bias-cut slip dress with jeans, or cut a jean jacket with a tailcoat’s proportions. That’s Ghesquière’s time-traveling touch.The preponderance of capes stemmed from another strand of Ghesquière’s story this season: He’s designed Alicia Vikander’s costumes for the upcoming HBO Max series from Olivier Assayas,Irma Vep. The show, according to HBO, “reveals the uncertain ground that lies at the border of fiction and reality, artifice and authenticity, art and life.”Ghesquière, for his part, is interested in the uncertain ground between the past, present, and future. “I like the figure of a vampire who travels through the ages, adapting to dress codes of the era,” his press release read. One cape came in polka dots with a jaunty jabot; two others cut diagonally across the body looked like going-out tops for the club, not a ball; and a couple more, at “the threshold of couture,” were made from what appeared to be feathery frayed chiffon.A protester carrying a sign that read “Overconsumption = Extinction” made it to the end of the runway.
The magic of the ball was momentarily broken; reality was bumping up against the fairy tale. Still, this was peak Ghesquière, merging distant and recent fashion history with the relaxed codes of today.
5 October 2021
This is Nicolas Ghesquière’s second resort collection for Louis Vuitton without a destination show. A year ago in the early months of the pandemic he staged a studio shoot, but this time around he filmed a short movie at Axe Majeur, a sculpture park outside of Paris conceived by the late Israeli environmental artist Dani Karavan that rivals previous LV show locales in scale and grandeur, if not in distance from the house’s headquarters.An in-the-know local says of the place, “You feel like you’re outside time. You could be in some indeterminate future or some past utopia vision of the future.” Anyone familiar with Ghesquière knows that that description jibes with his career-long interests in sci-fi and outer space and with the time-collapsing fashion he’s made his métier at Vuitton. The monumental setting definitely befits a collection that was partly inspired by the nascent possibility of space tourism.In fact, Ghesquière said the prospect of public space travel inspired the collection’s anachronistic prints, which set an escalator, a basketball court, and a roadside motel, among other things, amidst alien landscapes. There were also parachute pleats on minidresses, pants with the padded quilting of spacesuits, and nods to the iconic vinyl of André Courrèges, the French designer whose streamlined Space Age creations of the 1960s still read as futuristic (and au courant) half a century later.Ghesquière is equally excited about the prospect of the reopening back here on terra firma as the vaccines have their desired effect, and the renewed enthusiasm for dressing way up that’s likely to come with it. “It’s a very optimistic, joyful collection,” he said. “There’s a jubilance to it.” This was reflected in the heraldic tailoring, a top and skirt aflutter with “feathers,” and a cocktail dress that glittered like a disco ball, a couture-level LV trophy. A group of silk blouses with cape-like backs that added softness to the structure of their accompanying pencil skirts and high-waisted trousers achieved a more everyday kind of chic lift-off.As the pace of business picks up Ghesquière said he’ll hold onto the more deliberate approach he adopted during the remote work of the pandemic lockdowns. “I hope the industry can be more conscious in that way.” But space travel is something the designer is full speed ahead on. He might not be on the first public trip to the moon, but he affirmed his interest.
“There’s many projects that want to take us to the edge of the atmosphere,” he said, smiling. “That would be great.”
15 June 2021
Here’s a headline for the hypebeasts: Virgil Abloh and Nigo have reunited for a second round of their LV² collaboration. The capsule collection brought together the luxury streetwear OG and his most successful disciple. “Me being at Louis Vuitton is directly attributable to work Nigo’s done in the past,” Abloh said at the time. “A collab project with him—it puts his work in the right context.” But when it launched last year in the early days of the pandemic, it was unclear if it’d be a one-off or a regular thing.In the interim, Abloh and Nigo decided they had more to say. “Being authentic to yourself, you can’t acquire it,” Abloh said on a call. “These are things you get with age and maturity. We’re not the youngest kids in fashion design in our space. As you get older and wiser, what does that look like in terms of fashion design? That’s why I wanted to do this project.”Abloh turned 40 last September, but even still there’s a young, playful spirit to this drop, with its more obvious nods to Nigo’s Human Made iconography and its sampling of Vuitton’s own famous monogram. The new LV Made logo replicates Human Made’s font, and the menagerie of wild animals—from the tiger rug detailing on totes and briefcases to the duck-shaped monogram bags—are riffs on the Japanese designer’s home codes. “The first season we did the unexpected by not employing a graphic look and feel,” Abloh said. “But since both of our careers have been championing this strain with fashion design, those graphic motifs take a more prominent space in this collection.”The Vuitton monogram gets a real workout here, most often in denim that's been camouflaged in the drippy shapes that are a signature of another of Nigo’s lines, Icecream. The familiar damier check, meanwhile, has been supersized and given the scalloped edges of postage stamps in a reference to the manner in which the collection came together between Tokyo, Paris, and Abloh’s Chicago homebase. “Nigo shipped his archive of cherished items to my studio and we worked on it basically by FedEx and Zoom.” The silhouettes are classic and straightforward, a mix of American workwear, English schoolboy tailoring, and Japanese kimonos, with the odd poncho thrown in, a trending shape.So, are Abloh and Nigo going to make this a regular thing? “Nigo’s a legend, to be able to create collections not as a one-off but as an evolving set of ideas it’s gratifying on a different level,” Abloh said. “But we don’t plan that far ahead.
As a purveyor of ‘how do you make things interesting’—that’s sort of my PhD.—it’s not a marketing event. This isn’t that. What I like is this artist-in-residence type of thing. I have friends, they can come to my studio, and if they see something they want to make, let’s do it.”
4 June 2021
A year ago, in the Before Times, Nicolas Ghesquière staged the last fashion show as we used to know them. Today he was back at it, only without an audience or the 200 choral singers who performed in that season’s special Es Devlin–designed set. But COVID restrictions aside, the Louis Vuitton creative director was certainly not hurting for supporting players.Ghesquière made a runway of the Louvre’s Denon wing, his models mingling with ancient Roman, Greek, and Etruscan sculptures to the tunes of Daft Punk’s mega-hit “Around the World.” The notoriously hard-to-get duo agreed to lend the song for the show weeks ago, he said, pre-breakup. He also divined a collaboration with the Italian design atelier Fornasetti, and its famous hand-drawn faces of women from antiquity peered out from all manner of clothes and leather goods. This was a show absolutely teeming with life, even though we were all watching from our laptop screens and smartphones.That was the point: “Since we are all in a motionless situation, we have to double our imagination of inventing an extraordinary journey,” Ghesquière said during a Zoom preview. That goes for the collection as much as the production values surrounding it. A year in lockdown has nurtured designers’ decorative instincts, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the collective turn to sweatpants and other home wear. In anticipation of a late 2021 reemergence, fashion has gone absolutely extroverted.Operating at high frequency, Ghesquière lavished attention on both silhouettes and surface treatments. Propelled by the concept of movement, he alternated between blouson jackets and cocooning capes on the one hand and elongated torsos punctuated with skirts that bubbled around the knees on the other. Nearly all the looks were accompanied by wedge-heel boots with a slouchy, swaggering disposition. Equally, though, this collection was a showcase for the LV atelier’s savoir faire: jewel-encrusted tunics peeked from under color-blocked parkas and bombers, and otherwise simple ’60s-ish dresses in A-line or sack shapes were minutely embroidered in graphic patterns and motifs. The closing pair of gladiator dresses were canvases for Fornasetti drawings of ancient statuary.“I wanted something impactful, something that conveys hope and joy for what’s coming next, and for people to have a good time watching,” Ghesquière said. “A moment of fashion.
” The video ends with the last model peering up at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Hellenistic sculpture dating to the 2nd century B.C. that has occupied its current spot in the Louvre since 1884. As Beyoncé made abundantly clear in the video she made at the museum with Jay Z., Victoire is a potent symbol. Here and there Ghesquière showed an understated peacoat, a quilted cape in a neutral shade of taupe gray, or a sturdy work jacket, but these were mostly foils for frocks of the gilded lamé sort underneath. This was a collection of Louis Vuitton trophy pieces for the coming-out parties we’re anticipating after a year in suspended animation.
10 March 2021
Nicolas Ghesquière photographed the actress Stacy Martin for this series of images. He’s stepped behind the camera for Louis Vuittion before. “It comes from my love for photographers,” he said of his turn as a lensman. “I wanted to understand the feeling they had when they were shooting. It’s fun, also, to build the picture itself and the story behind the picture. That’s my motivation: to share something that I see with people.”For pre-fall Ghesquière sees his friend Martin in a rarefied setting wearing his clothes in nonchalant ways. The shoot took place at a chateau in the French countryside, and at least some of the images are the designer’s impressionistic takes on movie memories—only Glenn Close’s Sunny von Bulow didn’t wear her ’60s shift over logo-printed athleisure with purple shower slides and a bright pink crossbody bag slung high on her torso.Ghesquière said he charged the LV studio with identifying his house signatures this season and that they came back to him with three distinct categories: energetic “vitamin” colors, romantic clothes, and twists on wardrobe essentials. “In this moment of confusion,” he said, “we focused on fundamentals.”The story behind these pictures is the unusual mixing and matching between those categories, and how that irreverent approach enlivened the resulting looks: Martin wears a romantic broderie anglaise top with bright blue track shorts in a photo Ghesquière says was influenced by David Lynch.Mulholland Drive,by the looks of it. In another image, a color-block windbreaker got paired with flower-printed jeans cut high through the waist and tapered at the ankles ’80s-style. Their pattern was repeated on an overstuffed sofa.Extrapolating on the high-low concept, a salopette dress in Oshkosh-style stripes came overprinted with interlocking chains that were echoed by the shoulder bag Martin carried, and a sporty puffer vest was cut in black leather that featured the classic LV monogram as its inner lining. It’s all “high” at Louis Vuitton, but this collection had a more low-key day-to-day aspect than Ghesquière’s ambitious runway shows, a casual sensibility that jibes with these shelter-in-place times while retaining the Vuitton polish. And Ghesquière’s pictures? Who wouldn’t want to shelter in that twisted chateau? Or hang out with a character of such insouciant charm as Martin?
2 February 2021
There are no accidents of timing in history and culture. Whether or not he had prior insight into how yesterday’s Inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden was being planned, Virgil Abloh’s launch of his Louis Vuitton collection today also resounded with the poetry and intellectual purpose of Black consciousness taking its rightful place. His sixth collection, named ‘Ebonics,’ came with a film directed by Josh Johnson that was powerfully centered on spoken word and performance, a call to radical thinking through the lens of menswear.Amongst the words delivered by Saul Williams and Kai Isiah Jamal were these: “Deconstruct the narratives... make spaces”; “Take down the walls, unravel the mysteries. Make it up to me.” And: “As Black people, as trans people, as marginalized people, the world is here for our taking, for it takes so much from us.”Abloh has mustered an educational encyclopedia of answers to the ineluctable questions that have been troubling all designers: over the point of fashion, of shows, of making clothes in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement and all the crises that blew up in humanity’s face last year. “We’re still reeling,” he said, in a telephone call from Chicago, before the film’s release. “We sat through so many heavy conversations in 2020, some so heated that things can’t be discussed anymore. But fashion can do this. Shows can do this.”There’s lot to unpack, from the Louis Vuitton baggage—some of it in the shape of carrier bags, potato sacks, an LV ‘Keepall’ in the form of a plane—to the symbolic reconfigurations of masculine archetypes, to the challenging of ownership of sources that Abloh built into the clothes. “There are a lot of stories mixing cultures,” he said. “And from that, a new language will be created.” Cool, considered, chic, and flowing with floor-length coats, easy slim tailoring, African draped wraps, kilts, and Western hats—styled by the deft hand of Ibrahim Kamara—it plainly makes for Abloh’s best collection for the house since he arrived in 2018.And his most autobiographical yet—an exploration of his African heritage and of what it means to be at the pinnacle of a career in Europe as a Black American creative director. “When I grew up, my father wore Kente cloth, with nothing beneath it, to family weddings, funerals, graduations,” he said. “When he went to an American wedding, he wore a suit. I merged those two together, celebrating my Ghanaian culture.
” Add LV patterns to the cloth, drape it, then pair and compare it again with tartan checks, and the result is indeed something new. So too, the diagonal green-on-white print on a leather motocross suit. “A memory of the wax print fabric my mom had around the house when I was growing up,” he chuckled. “She was the one who taught me to sew; and she had learned it with a tailor in Ghana.”
21 January 2021
Virgil Abloh, the chattiest of designers, has made words part of his Off-White design lexicon since the beginning. Until now they haven’t featured much in his work for Louis Vuitton, but this time around he had something to say, though he didn’t do so with the ironic distancing of the quotation marks that are his signature elsewhere. Here in this pre-season collection, an intarsia sweater instructs us to separate fashion from fiction, and a debossed leather jacket offers the sage advice: Don’t let your day job define you.Half a year ago when Abloh released his pre-spring line for Vuitton, he said the early months of isolation had him thinking about fashion’s role in the looming environmental crisis. Sincerity swapping places with bluster is a pandemic after-effect altogether more surprising. Being the opposite of irony, the quality of earnestness has never been considered cool. Abloh said this season’s statements also “come from quarantine and solitude.” Let’s see if he has enough influence to bring his peers over to his new way of thinking.Of course, the most important words in what Abloh describes as this “relaxed formal” collection areLouisandVuitton. His many experiments with branding logo-ing include embossing and debossing leather with the iconic LV monogram, and applying bright yellow rubber treads in the form of Ls and Vs to the bottom of bags—“making them super-durable,” he explained. Most interesting is the work the studio did around salt-dyeing fabric and leather in an oversize Damier check motif. Alboh first began experimenting with the Damier check while collaborating with his friend, the Japanese streetwear designer Nigo, earlier this year.On the subject of his fall 2021 runway show scheduled for next month, Abloh said it’ll follow the new model he established with his spring 2021 collection, which is now on view in Miami at Vuitton’s Design District store, meaning it will debut in Paris and then go on the road. In his usual way with words Abloh said, “We have a slogan in the studio: Don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.”
22 December 2020
Leave it to Nicolas Ghesquière and Louis Vuitton to deliver the virtual reality experience we’ve been waiting for all season long. When the gravity of the pandemic started to sink in earlier this year, the industry scrambled to come up with digital solutions for audience members prohibited from traveling. This month we’ve watched countless taped videos and livestreams, but none of them featured the kind of interactivity that even a Zoom call brings.Today’s LV show, the last on the official calendar, upped the stakes. Interspersed among the live audience in the freshly remodeled-by-LVMH La Samaritaine department store were 360-degree cameras that allowed viewers at home to swivel in their chairs, watch models coming and going, and see who did and didn’t score a better seat. It was almost like being there.“This season is very new in every way,” Ghesquière said days before the show. “The conditions that we’re facing are making us think differently. We came up with the idea of different degrees of presence.” In addition to the 360-degree cameras, green screens lined the walls and, in some places, the floors of La Samaritaine. Viewers of the livestream—the third way to watch and hear the show (there were live mics)—saw footage from Wim Wenders’s famous filmWings of Desire.Beyond the ’80s-ish silhouettes that have long been a touchpoint for the designer, the connection between the Wenders movie and Ghesquière’s collection, was angels, which have two wings, but no gender. “My question this season was less about one theme; it was about this zone between femininity and masculinity,” he explained. “This zone is highlighted by nonbinary people, people that are taking a lot of freedom dressing themselves as they want, and, in turn, giving a lot of freedom to all of us. I found it inspiring to explore what the items are that represent this wardrobe that is not feminine, not masculine. I wanted to zoom in on that section in between.”The show began with a look that combined a timely Vote tee (his absent American friends appreciated that) and baggy pleated chino pants cinched with a thick belt. It was emblematic of a collection that felt more spontaneous and street-ready than some of Ghesquière’s more recherché outings at LV. The duster coat, minidress, and trainer combo looked cool and true-to-life. Ditto the lapel-less suits in khaki or silver sequins, which were also worn with sneakers.That’s not to say some of these clothes weren’t worked.
The straight-up skater tees that he opened with were spliced and diced into elaborate techno patchworks by the end. Less obvious on camera were the expandable jackets, built with panels that can be worn in a fitted way for a feminine silhouette, or loosened for a more generous cut. Pants, too, were designed with excess fabric to shape-shift.Amidst the lockdowns, many wondered how the world-changing pandemic would affect not just the shows, but also clothes themselves. The short-term answer from this first ready-to-wear season back after quarantine is...not much. But the industry’s most forward thinkers—Ghesquière included—are rallying around the concept of genderless clothes. “I don’t know how the situation will change fashion and people’s perception of it,” Ghesquière added. “What I think is there is an acceleration in important subjects, like inclusivity.” Maybe it goes back to what he was saying about freedom; that’s certainly a sensation we’re all craving more of.
6 October 2020
*The images seen here are from Louis Vuitton's spring 2021 menswear show in Tokyo, Japan, on September 2, 2020. To read coverage of that event,click here. The review below corresponds to Virgil Abloh's initial showing of the spring 2021 collection on August 6, 2020 in Shanghai, China.“Really, it’s like documenting me and my motley crew of friends,” Virgil Abloh said on a call from Chicago yesterday, ahead of the men’s Louis Vuitton show that took place on a dock in Shanghai today. Abloh was discussing the many-stranded thought processes woven into the material and symbolism, and the all-Black collaborators—animators, musicians, and the stylist Ibrahim Kamara—whom he brought in during quarantine, his response to what he described as “these tumultuous times…this year of reckoning.”The event was an actual live old-normal “experiential” spectacular, held in front of local guests who were sitting in rows just as audiences always used to before April, not wearing masks. Models were also locally cast. “Gatherings are safe over there,” he noted. Yet neither the creative director, now at home in America, nor anyone from L.V.’s Paris headquarters had traveled to China. Only the clothes crossed continents. And this is where Abloh took up the story line, which began within the animationZoooom With Friends,a video populated with cartoon animal “stowaways” who’d jumped aboard L.V. shipping containers. They were last seen in July, floating away on a barge along the Seine at the end of the wildly popular YouTube project he’d commissioned from the Black animation director Reggie Know in L.A.Today the barge had docked, and the models were livestreamed walking from real shipping containers stacked on the Shanghai port, and a connected pontoon floating in the river. “Three or four weeks ago, Ibrahim Kamara and I styled and packed everything in Paris and sent it off as you see it.” There was an opening parade of men in turquoise overalls and matching bandana face masks holding aloft clouds and seagulls. Giant inflatables of the L.V. cartoon creatures lounged on the red-painted sea containers.
And so proceeded the collection that stylistically circled back to reconfirm the spirit of everything Abloh has done at the house since spring 2019—beginning with classic-modern suiting and ending with the fractured tailoring and Magritte-like blue sky and cloud prints from last fall—but then springboarded it forward into what he described as “hypnovisualism”: affirmation of the Black imagination.
6 August 2020
This review was originally posted on July 8, 2020.In two days, Louis Vuitton will unveil a video teasingVirgil Abloh’s spring 2021 collection for the house. Today, on the eve of Paris Fashion Week Online, Vuitton is teasing his pre-spring offering. The images here reveal a green leather jacket somewhere between sage and basil, a mink jacket with an oil slick sheen, loose-fitting pants, sneakers, and a pair of exuberant bucket hats. Describing his mission this season and his work at LV more broadly, Abloh said, “We’re in a streetwear era, but I’m not satisfied with categories that are popular. I want to make a wardrobe. To me that’s doing justice to the history and craftsmanship and savoir faire of Vuitton.”What the images don’t reveal are Abloh’s pre-spring suits, which are leaner and neater than hisearly tailoringfor the house. Also missing: his new take on the mid-layer garment, which is a…cummerbund. If that sounds not as sexy as the glittery harnessTimothée Chalametwore to the Golden Globes in 2019, it’s not as predictable as you might think. Abloh has his cummerbunds accompanying not formal attire like tuxedos but more casual looks. “I’ve always wanted to come up with an accessory that I made my own, that wanders in my investigations,” Abloh said, “basically to come up with a new silhouette.” In army green, one cummerbund is slung below the hips of a model wearing elastic-waist trousers and a denim and shearling jacket; in a pastel crayon rubbing monogram print, another accessorizes a down jacket, button-down, and cigarette pants. Other novelties: “softer” monogram motifs and berets.As for his spring collection for Louis Vuitton, Abloh said the months of self-distancing and isolation got him thinking about the industry’s role in the problems facing our culture. “What does fashion mean now that we have this global pandemic that has us thinking more about our health and safety than clothes?” he asked. “The environment is the issue our industry needs to address. It’s such a heavy issue, but realized I could make an impact as a designer.” Watch this space to find out how he does it.
31 July 2020
“I looked somewhere that has been calling out to me for a long time, somewhere I hadn’t taken the time to go back to. It was like a reset to uncover one inspiration after another, to imagine the next steps and how to create and work within this new context. I took the time to explore my creative identity and prepare the future.” Confronted with the unknowns of the coronavirus and the crushing recession it precipitated, designers have been revisiting their past successes. Nicolas Ghesquière is among them, though the search for lost time is not only a quarantine pursuit for him.On his fall runway, with the then as-yet uncanceled Met Gala and its theme of “Fashion and Duration” still on the horizon, Ghesquière held up a mirror to his own work. (Louis Vuitton was this year’s Gala sponsor.) For this pre-spring collection, he followed similar guidelines—lifting cargo pants from one collection and frilly rococo collars from another, and reuniting with the blouson shapes of the 1980s he likes—with results that read more “everyday” than his runway outings typically do. That’s “everyday” in quotes because nothing here is quotidian.Additionally, running through the collection is a playing-card leitmotif. When asked, Ghesquière claimed “the tarot” as his favorite card game, “because it can be used in many different ways. And the cards are full of symbols.” Nonetheless, he made effective use of the clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades of the playing-card deck. They bear more than a passing resemblance to the elements of the Louis Vuitton monogram, which Ghesquière made the most of by hybridizing them and then either adding them as decorative details on bags, or supersizing them as color-blocked patterns on streamlined mini and maxi dresses.Emphasizing the more everyday, less editorial aspect of the collection: It was shot on location in Louis Vuitton’s Paris headquarters. A photocopier stands at attention in the opening shot, and exit signs and fire doors appear in the background of others. For Americans still working from home, the office is a “lost time,” indeed. Nostalgia, according to researchers, is a self-soothing mechanism for dealing with discontinuity. Ghesquière is on the same wavelength as all of us.
15 July 2020
“I wanted to imagine what could happen if the past could look at us.”Nicolas Ghesquière is the cohost of this May’s Met gala, and Louis Vuitton is sponsoring the Costume Institute exhibition, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” that the gala celebrates. Ghesquière took as his subject this season the exhibition’s theme: that fashion is a mirror of the present moment—but not any old mirror. At Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton, it’s a funhouse mirror in which eras, attitudes, and flashbacks intersect. And voilà: we flash forward.This season Ghesquière enlisted the costume designer Milena Canonero, a frequent collaborator of Stanley Kubrick’s, to create a monumental backdrop of 200 choral singers, each one clothed in historical garb dating from the 15th century to 1950. It was a mammoth undertaking, and quite beautiful. “I wanted a group of characters that represent different countries, different cultures, different times,” Ghesquière explained beforehand. “I love this interaction between the people seated in the audience, the girls walking, and the past looking at them—these three visions mixed together.” The time-collapsing sensation was heightened by the fact that the song the chorus performed was a composition by Woodkid and Bryce Dessner based on the work of Nicolas de Grigny, a contemporary of Bach’s who never found fame.Arguably, all of fashion is a synthesis of the past, but Ghesquière makes a closer study of it than most. He’s compelled by the anachronous. For spring 2018, he clashed 18th-century frock coats and the high-tech trainers of our contemporary period. Here, there was more in play: jewel-encrusted boleros met parachute pants, buoyant petticoats were paired with fitted tops whose designs looked cribbed from robotics, and bourgeois tailoring was layered over sports jerseys. Ghesquière seemed particularly taken with the visual codes of distance and speed—be it race-car driving, motocross, or space travel.The biggest jolts came from the collection’s sporty parkas, because they tapped into the language of the street. Seventy years from now, or 600, in atableau vivantof fashion, the early 21st century will be represented by these signifiers of our collective preference for the comforts and ease of performancewear. Ghesquière has long been applauded for his sci-fi projections into the unknown, but he’s just as resonant when he’s locked into the here and now.We asked him what his hopes are for the future. “What I want is everyone to be safe,” he said.
“This world can become a little more serene, that’s what I wish.”
3 March 2020
Earlier this week Nicolas Ghesquière posted a portrait of himself and the League of Legends player Senna in his Instagram feed. He has custom made an in-game Louis Vuitton “prestige skin” for her, as well as a League of Legends capsule collection for LV. Virtual reality is fashion’s next frontier, and Ghesquière is an eager pioneer. It jibes with not just his lifelong sci-fi obsession, but also the time travel narrative he’s made a central part of his Vuitton narrative. The future is here.Of course Ghesquière has plenty of IRL muses in his crew too, and for pre-fall he cast them in a series of “collaborations.” Jennifer Connelly, Sophie Turner, Léa Seydoux, and co. are the stars of imagined horror and sci-fi novels, as well as B movies for which Ghesquière has commissioned book covers and film posters and created LV looks for the performers to wear in them. Photographer Collier Schorr shot the images and a team of four international artists created the accompanying illustrations, with results that look intentionally—and quite satisfyingly—retro and lo-fi. Ghesquière says the book and movie concepts came first and the clothes second.“William Peter Blatty, who wroteThe Exorcist, gave us the rights to print the cover of the book. It started there,” he explained. “It’s such a great symbol for me to use a fiction and incorporate it into an outfit. I thought, what’s the reverse? To use the fiction as the illustration of the fashion. It’s a kind of a mirror effect in this action of representing them all in these different characters.” The Swedish pop star Robyn, for example, told Ghesquière about a dream of hers in which she meets a talking tiger. Voila:The Night Chaser, in which she wears a sequined camisole and motocross-inspired leather skirt. Giant purple cat claws clutch at her bare shoulders.Considering the ambitious look book concept, the pre-fall collection itself is highly individual, much more so than Ghesquière’s runway shows, which are bound by a singular narrative. But five years into his LV tenure, a general rule applies. Ghesquière is interested in anachronisms and clashes not just of time but also of mood or spirit. So,ExorcistT-shirts pair up with sequined cocktail numbers, and moon boots accessorize a classic ivory pant suit. The singular narrative has been replaced by multiple, more personal ones.
On that note, maybe these book covers will inspire some LV fashion fan fiction? Or, who knows, even a screenplay? Jaden Smith inLost Planet, a “nightmare techno-thriller where no microchip is spared”? It could be a hit.
23 January 2020
“I had a lot more time to think,” said Virgil Abloh, back at Louis Vuitton after taking a few months off for R&R at home in America. “This is show number four. When I got hired, it was me iterating with myself—which was obviously as the bearer of a younger Louis Vuitton. But this is a season where I wasn’t so interested in following my current trajectory, because that’s when it gets boring. You start making decisions based on something you did three or four seasons back. So I was like, hey, you only live once! I’m not going to use Louis Vuitton just to get comfortable.”What Abloh decided to serve up were his thoughts on male dress codes. “Something you haven’t seen from me before: the suit,” he said. “But with menswear, it can be like an automated track, so there are different breakdowns as the show progresses.”He said he’d been considering what work means today, “and what the metaphors are for that.” The spirit of the collection was calm, with a practical focus on exploring the possibilities of product; the setting was surreal with blue skies and white clouds and a runway populated by gargantuan models of tools used by Louis Vuitton craftsmen. “I went in and photographed their work benches, and blew them up.”Abloh, after all, is a solutions-based designer of systems by nature; he loves tools and questioning what can be done to adapt templates. Today, he started out with six variations on slim suits, with pale shirts and ties, accompanied by Chelsea boots. Every suited model was carrying a bag, some ergonomically curved on the inside edge—the miracle of Vuitton leather engineering turned to fit the flank of a body.What constitutes a business suit, though? If it boils down to wearing matching coordinates, then that could mean fitted shirts and narrow ties cut neatly from the same classic striped cotton. Suspenders could morph into conceptual leather body braces, vests could be cut down to become cummerbunds, and cummerbunds could convert into conceptual hip-wraps.Abloh’s real-life societal observations played into this collection. He studied “guys you see on the commute”—the legions of strap-hangers, with their nylon jackets over their business suits, laden with bags—and his new Vuitton backpacks, with multi-mini pouches set into them, are designed to reorganize that working-man chaos.Still, there is more to life than work—a realization that Abloh has had the opportunity to contemplate in stepping away from the frenetic speed he’s been operating at.
With his gift-with-invite, he sent guests a Louis Vuitton clock set to run backwards. We can’t get back time, he seemed to be saying, but we shouldn’t waste it. When a day’s toil is done, there are twinkling stars and blue skies with fluffy white clouds up yonder. That existential philosophy—materialized as eveningwear—completed the show.
16 January 2020
For a guy as collab-happy as Virgil Abloh—last month the Louvre released images of the collection he created for its Leonardo da Vinci exhibition—his Louis Vuitton tenure has been remarkably light on partnerships. Abloh says that’s intentional. “I wanted to start off without collaborations, so people could see my point of view on the brand,” he explains. But 18 months after his debut, LV’s artistic director of menswear is ready to commit. Abloh has exclusively shared withVoguethat he’s teamed up with his friend Nigo, the Japanese streetwear pioneer and founder of A Bathing Ape, on a capsule collection to be released mid-2020.“Me being at Louis Vuitton is directly attributable to work Nigo’s done in the past,” Abloh reflects. “A collab project with him—it puts his work in the right context. He inspired me to do what I do. I thought it was a full-circle moment.” Indeed, when Abloh was hired at Vuitton, Nigo called it “a victory for our team, the streetwear crowd.”There are no pictures of the collaboration just yet, but if Abloh’s latest collection for the Paris house is any indication, the capsule will be heavy on logos. For pre-fall, fanny packs feature supersize LVs in an unfinished embroider-by-numbers design and the familiar canvas monogram has been disrupted with what look like streaks of colorful tape, only rendered in inlaid leather. “Only at a house like LV can you take a quote-unquote student idea and make it trompe l’oeil into beautifully crafted versions,” Abloh says.As for the clothes, Abloh put his fingerprints on the famous monogram in any number of ways: enlarging it on a mink bomber and cotton separates, mashing it up with camouflage and jacquard, and quilting it onto lightweight puffer jackets. The surprise is Abloh’s new tailoring, which has a more to-the-body, even formal silhouette. “When I started at Louis Vuitton I was interested in relaxed luxury, oversized, [the idea] that luxury didn’t need to be stiff, and I’ve made that point,” he says. In other words, we should expect more of these streamlined fits on his fall 2020 runway next month. And the famous mid-layer garments, too. Abloh says they’re connecting with customers beyond the red carpet. “They reinforce my goal of defining a silhouette.”
9 January 2020
Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton is the last show of the Spring 2020 season, not just the culmination of a four-week trip across as many cities, but the beginning of a new decade. What did it tell us about where fashion is now and where it might go in the years ahead?Ghesquière has always had one foot in the future—few designers of the 21st century have been more influential—but his work at Louis Vuitton is deeply linked to the past. Last season he sent us to the pre-Internet 1980s of Beaubourg. Scroll back a few more seasons, and he was linking 18th-century frock coats and springy sneakers. This season, Ghesquière said he set the time machine to Belle Époque–era Paris.“It’s a part of French history that’s very interesting in art, as well as culturally, in terms of emancipation of women, and, of course, in literature with Proust,” he explained. It’s also a period that more or less coincided with the birth and rise of the house of Louis Vuitton. In the late 1800s, advances in construction and technology ushered in a new era of travel for the elite, to whom Monsieur Vuitton and his descendants catered with their monogram trunks.The Belle Époque references were many: the pouf sleeves of shirts; the iris boutonnières, each one different; the Gibson Girl hairdos, and all the Art Nouveau touches, from the proto-psychedelic swirls of a green jacquard coat to the painterly flowers on a trio of simple dresses to a terrific little leather jacket hand-painted with angelic faces. All that was missing were the panniers (funnily enough, those have been trending on other runways this season). Those less familiar with French history might’ve seen references to ’70s Biba, or even nods to Ghesquière’s own archive—the time machine is spinning ever faster. A famous French person—not Proust—once said,plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.Ghesquière seemed to be getting at something along those lines with the VHS bag that opened the show and the monogram totes decorated with stacks of old tapes whose names had been tweaked.The Terminatorbecame The Trunkinator, andThelma and Louisebecame Gaston and Louis (Gaston-Louis Vuitton being the third-generation head of the company). Louis’ Excellent Adventure was,bien sûr, a riff onBill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. You can see where this is going.
The clever time tripping provoked an animated discussion as guests made their way out of the show’s sustainably sourced plywood set through the centuries-old Cour Carrée, and past IM Pei’s famous 20th-century glass pyramid which, of course, glances back to Egypt’s, built about 5,000 years ago. Time, someone argued, is just perception. Where is fashion headed in the 2020s? Ghesquière knows. It’ll be much the same and completely different.
1 October 2019
Virgil Abloh, a year into his creative directorship of Louis Vuitton menswear, thinks it’s time to slow down and allow ourselves to appreciate the beauty of familiar things, to check in with a restorative childlike pleasure in the world.His show was originally planned to be held in front of Notre Dame, but the fire put paid to that. Instead, he shifted it to the cobbled streets and cafes of the Place Dauphine, to give his audience a chance to sit under trees on Louis Vuitton park benches or sip a glass of Champagne at outdoor tables and contemplate a gentle, unfraught collection of easy shapes, wide fluid pants, pastels, flowers, and couture techniques passing by. He’d sent a Louis Vuitton do-it-yourself kite-making kit to everyone in advance—his invitation to grown men to remember the fun of boyhood.It seems inconceivable that anyone as pressured as Abloh could have the time to pause and gather his thoughts, beyond getting the next thing done. He’s coming off an intense few weeks, even for him, opening his retrospective exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, showing Off-White men’s yesterday, and now his third Vuitton collection today. But he says he’d planned out his Vuitton direction of travel well in advance. “I decided I’m not shifting gears every season—I saw that as a potential trap before I started. I stand for diversity and the idea that luxury can be something wider in this era. So I’m going to continue down that line, and continue this feeling of the whole freedom of being a child, still learning. I’m changing my pace drastically.”Program notes pointed out that he’d chosen the idea of wild flowers—never segregated in nature—as a metaphor for diversity. He’d brought in a florist to decorate a jute harness and the inner brims of straw hats with fresh flowers. It didn’t read as a naive, bucolic narrative so much as one of this season’s connection points between popular handmade craft and the work of the skilled people who work at luxury goods houses. “There is an atelier here with 24 sewers, and that’s what makes it different,” Abloh observed. You sensed his relish in cultivating super-sophisticated effects, like flower embroideries climbing up tulle coats, and a couple of immensely luxe iterations of hoodies, made from minutely pleated chiffon. “I’m learning, and taking much more of a couture approach.”
20 June 2019
The historic TWA Flight Center, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1962, looks like a UFO grounded amid the 747s of JFK airport. A vintage newsreel, which Nicolas Ghesquière recently posted on Instagram, described it as “a modern marvel that will impress generations to come.”The terminal closed almost 20 years ago, but it still looms large in the public imagination. The producers of last year’s heist movieOcean’s 8staged a runway show in its sweeping lobby, and before that, it made an appearance in Steven Spielberg’sCatch Me If You Can. Next week, after a multiyear renovation, it will reopen as a hotel, complete with 500-plus rooms and an infinity pool. The Louis Vuitton Resort show that Ghesquière staged tonight was its unofficial coming-out party.Air travel has lost most of its luster since the heyday of Trans World Airlines (drive time to JFK this evening was 90 minutes, speaking of). Though this outing nodded to the 1960s, with its stewardess-short dresses and accessories that lifted inspiration from TWA’s iconic flight bags, Ghesquière’s LV collections have become era agnostic. The batwing sleeves and bubble skirts read as 1980s, but the board shorts and cap-toe combat boots said 1990s. The puffed-sleeve velvet tops? Space-age Elizabethan. It’s the Internet age, and Ghesquière has intuited that we’re all citizens of different decades at once.In the end, though, this was less about virtual time travel or airplane travel than it was about a destination. With his Resort shows, which tend to be more playful than his Paris collections, Ghesquière uses his venues as reference points. Just ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, his show at Rio’s Niterói Museum yielded a body-conscious, athletic lineup; last year’s Resort show, at Provence’s art-filled Fondation Maeght, was a toast to individualism and eclecticism. The big story here, Ghesquière said in a preview, “was getting back to the first feeling I had when I came to New York.” Like most newcomers, he was bowled over by the city’s Art Deco landmarks, bright lights, and famous round-the-clock energy.Though he played around with Wall Street pinstripes for pantsuits (as sharply tailored as ever) and shirtdresses (with an appealing everyday ease), this was a decorated, flamboyant collection, dedicated to resurrecting the disappearing art of dressing up.
Voluptuous swags of panne velvet were draped over the shoulders of going-out tops, tiny bustiers were studded with crystals, and the famous Chrysler Building bas-relief was picked out in geometric metallic embroideries on a zip-front jacket, as well as on jacquards. “As a foreigner,” he said, “I’m not afraid of the clichés.” Apropos of that, layered into the mix were souvenir jackets with skyline embroideries and nods to Gotham superheroes, like Catwoman-ish skullcaps.As a rule, the glitzier it got, the better it was. Prime example: Marte Mei van Haaster’s strass-lined capelet wings, which were more precious bauble than ready-to-wear and looked as if they just might’ve owed a small debt to Saarinen’s swooping, neo-Futurist lines.
8 May 2019
Nicolas Ghesquière, like a lot of us, has been thinking about the line that separates the digital and the real worlds. Last season, he landed on the side of the virtual. Today, at the final show of the Fall collections, he cast his eye to the street. Not just any street; at a preview, he called his new Louis Vuitton collection “geolocated.” The location he had in mind was Beaubourg, the famous Centre Pompidou in the fourth arrondissement, and the large square in front of it, which he described as a “melting pot of different tribes coming together,” and “a place where expression is free to be.”The idea for this collection was to re-create those various “tribes” or subcultures—before Instagram (and the Internet, more broadly) flattened experience and made us all look the same. It’s a daunting, even quixotic task for the creative leader of a renowned global brand to set for himself—after all, the goal is to get as many people in LV as possible. But Ghesquière seemed to relish the making of this collection, which he said came together in a very fluid way: “When I arrived, the question was: ‘Is Louis Vuitton only about basics?’” Apparently, the sales results are telling him no; customers are buying pieces that are expressive of individuality.The conjuring of those Beaubourg-ian subcultures began today with a re-creation of the Renzo Piano– and Richard Rogers–designed Centre Pompidou in the Louvre’s Cour Carrée—a museum within a museum. (Vuitton will actually donate a part of the set to Piano’s archive.) The models walked the perimeter, with its metal scaffolding and internal workings painted primary colors, in flat boots or thick-soled men’s lace-up shoes, their outfits not a melting pot but a mosaic of clashing textures, prints, punkish metal embellishments, face-framing ruffles (definitely not flat), and leather skullcaps.There’s been a lot of talk this week about bourgeois dress codes—we’ll soon be inundated with camel and culottes. But this was a different view of Paris, backward-looking, in some ways, to the 1980s, yes, but with less prescriptive results. LV clients with a sartorial streak might fancy the tomboyish tailoring. Craftier types will appreciate the quilted floral-print jacket and oversize vest, almost country-ish in their attitude, which qualified as the most surprising elements of the show. For the women who go to Louis Vuitton for its savoir faire with leather, it will be the Damier check pencil skirts.
Eclecticism was the collection’s virtue—and its audacity. Sitting at a café in the fourth arrondissement, or anywhere, you’re going to watch these clothes walk by, not stare into your smartphone.
5 March 2019
“Let’s behave like we want the world to be, and not get into the dead end we’re at now.” Virgil Abloh has brought the creative optimism of inclusivity to Louis Vuitton menswear. In a preview, he said that his main objective in dedicating his sophomore show to Michael Jackson was “not to make costume, but to take him as backdrop, to make a point about the humanity in his vision. I wanted humanity in the forefront.” He went on: “The bigger question for me here is why are we making clothes? This is menswear—but what makes men? That’s way more profound.”There was a New York sidewalk set from the “Billie Jean” video, a live performance from Dev Hynes—a lot going on. It’s a been a prerequisite to put on a majorly theatrical, globally impactful performance at Louis Vuitton ever since Marc Jacobs invented awesome immersive experiences as a vehicle for fashion at this house. Job well done, considering all the Instagram-generating buzz surrounding the show.There is so much goodwill around Abloh; his constantly everywhere fame; and his massive, interlocking networks of friends and followers, right through to the ranks of teenage boys who congregated outside the Vuitton show tent in the freezing Paris weather, pleading with the audience as they left for invitations, show notes, anything, as souvenirs of just being there. That is the revolutionary generational reach Louis Vuitton knew it was co-opting when the company hired Abloh: a 21st-century skipping of the old, excluding boundaries between luxury fashion and what kids—boys in particular—passionately care about.But it’s a bigger responsibility—and an ambition that Abloh has in his sights—to rise to the more difficult challenge of contributing something new to fashion. Before he arrived, the industry made its assumptions. “Yeah, you know, they thought it would be streetwear,” Abloh chuckled. But no. His aim is elevation, only seen through a new prism. And first, he’s tackling tailoring. “It takes an intense amount of time to do something subtle,” he observed.The opening looks showed him taking that seriously, in the sophisticated layers of gray suiting—long vests wrapped under blazers, fluid wide pants, a cropped bomber jacket on top of a tailored one. All of a piece, with bags to match. “I wanted this layered level of making, which is actually just beautiful but has depth to it,” he said.
17 January 2019
Luxury goods companies have staged Pre-Fall shows this season with the sort of enthusiasm and expenditures until now reserved only for Resort. Chanel installed itself at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli took his pre-collection all the way to Tokyo, and Coach descended on Shanghai. Of course, the social media impressions were ginormous.Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière, whose Resort show was held at the South of France’s Fondation Maeght last May, hasn’t put on a Pre-Fall show per se, but what he’s pulled off is just as major: a lookbook shoot lensed by his frequent collaborator, Collier Schorr, starring the likes of Alicia Vikander, Jennifer Connelly, Ruth Negga, and Laura Harrier. Fashion and Hollywood have long had a reciprocal relationship, but this shoot—conducted in New York over two days shortly before Christmas in what Ghesquière described as a tour de force of logistics—makes the synergies explicit. The cast includes 17 performers of one kind or another, most of whom are regulars in his front row. Oscar winners and nominees were photographed along with newcomers like Kelsey Asbille, Indya Moore, and Urassaya Sperbund.On a phone call from Paris, Ghesquière explained the impetus behind the all-star casting this way: “The more I work, the more it’s about their response for me. It’s inspiring to see the second life of the clothes. For an ‘in-between’ collection, for which we don’t do a runway show, I thought it would be great to have their point of view.” The designer and his longtime stylist, Marie-Amélie Sauvé, worked to put together looks that the women “felt were right for them.” Léa Seydoux wears a siren-y floral-print sheath with a plunging V-neckline; Kelela layers a plaid blanket jacket over a floral dress over contrasting floral pants; Doona Bae models an oversize checked sweater and animal-print skirt. The majority of the women carry handbags, what Ghesquière called “inversions” of styles previously seen on the runway.Without a formal show, Pre-Fall is Ghesquière’s opportunity to dig into items that performed well in the recent past and ideas that bear further exploration. The wedge-heeled boots, for example, are an elaboration of the best-selling Archlight sneaker he showed for Spring 2018 and very nearly as weightless. Zhong Chuxi wears a great-looking navy peacoat with the raglan shoulders and rounded sleeves of Ghesquière’sSpring 2019outing.
But it would be a mistake to say that this is a collection of basics, certainly not the way the items are put together, with clashing prints and offhand pairings, most often homey plaids and slick animal graphics.The juxtaposition of the rustic with the very urban is something new for Ghesquière, who has always had a sci-fi, futuristic bent. He even mentioned the Amish as a reference point. Though Vikander’s and Chloë Grace Moretz’s calico and lace dresses are far from humble, something of the frontier woman comes through in their belted silhouettes. “This vision of American culture, the pioneer—I love that this is exotic for us. It’s not reflected in French culture,” said the designer. There’s a timely synergy of a different kind to that. In May, Ghesquière is bringing his Louis Vuitton Cruise collection to New York. It’ll be the first time he’s put on a show stateside since 2002, a fashion eon ago, when he was the newcomer at Balenciaga.
14 January 2019
Nicolas Ghesquière renewed his Louis Vuitton contract this Spring. Newly committed to the LVMH mother ship, he sent out a collection that was uniquely personal—a transporting, confident return to the futuristic forms of his early work. “I felt the need to dig into my obsessions,” he said during a preview at LV headquarters on the Rue du Pont-Neuf.In a season of solutions dressing, in which designers have been emphasizing the real-world applications of their clothes, Ghesquière was in a world of his own tonight—starting with his set, a space-age anachronism set down in the courtyard of the centuries-old Louvre. He said he was interested in the edge between the virtual reality we experience through our social media streams and real life. That played out via 1980s callbacks (the decade’s exaggerated silhouettes are recurrent motifs in his work), high-tech fabrications like molded rubber, space suit sleeves, Memphis Group prints, and the Parisian savoir faire of sculptural dresses in sequin-embroidered mesh.It wasn’t a single-message collection, but rather an eclectic series of propositions: a wardrobe for the first wave of SpaceX flyers printed with images of (I’m riffing here) terraforming colonies on distant planets and toxic lakes on the planet we’ll have to leave behind. As always, there was sharp, compelling tailoring. His new jacket zipped up the middle with wide peaked lapels, and his pants, which were worn by a trio of androgynous models some mistook for men, were straight-legged and hip-slung; these were the grounded foundation around which his sci-fi experiments rotated.To finish, Ghesquière showed a trio of “space suits” in metallic floral jacquards, like virtual gardens, lush and hopeful. Nature triumphant? Ghesquière is agnostic on the subject, but this was not dystopic cyberpunk. There was a clever, thematic offering on the accessories front, including a space-capsule evening bag and an egg-shaped style that instantly conjuredAliens. Best in show was a top-handle trunk puzzled together from several of LV’s popular Petites Malles.
2 October 2018
“We are the world.” Trust Virgil Abloh to pinpoint an incredibly apt, multi-resonating, globally inclusive title for his debut at Louis Vuitton menswear. The levels of that clever reference—running from Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s 1985 charity single in support of Ethiopian famine relief, through the power source of Afro-cultural creativity in music and style, to the activation of the narrative of an international luxury powerhouse brand—were impressive to contemplate, even before the show kicked off. As the sun shone down on the gardens of the Palais Royal, the significance of his central visual metaphor, the rainbow, also sank in. All colors, all nationalities, all identities, and generations welcome here, it said.Say what you like about Abloh’s qualifications as a fashion designer—he didn’t go to fashion school, he’s accused of appropriating others’ work, all this sort of thing—the overarching role of any leader in office today (fashion, corporate, or political) is to set a tone, personally. In such a divisive, social media–bitchy time, Abloh’s humble-smart, personal-friendly communication skills are of a caliber that can bring people with him. As he faced the biggest test of his credibility today, he deftly set the mood to happiness—that, and a demonstration that, resources unlimited, he can be a bridge between the perceived divide between democratic aspirations and the output at the top of the citadel.To detail. His starting point, he said in a pre-show interview at LV headquarters, was the idea of white light hitting a prism, and dividing into its component colors. The personal symbolism—his identity as a designer of his own brand, Off-White—was exercised, classily transmuted into the opening look: a tailored suit with a double-breasted blazer and fluid two-pleat trousers. This being an accessory house, all eyes zoomed to bag and shoes: a matte white crocodile tote and trainers. It reassured, and confirmed. The tide is turning toward hip tailoring—there’s been no such thing for way too long. Plus, he’s analyzed the fine art of twisting a classic accessory just enough to make it coolly desirable. In his show notes, he’d noted it as a precise formula, “3%.”He met the challenge of designing for what is essentially a luxury accessories company by merging bags, wallets, and card holders into hybrid garments—holsters, harnesses, protective zippered vests.
Somewhere along the way, these layerings became reminiscent of Helmut Lang’s ’90s canon of design: the casual with the formal, the sense of a calmly empowered gang of friends, a new generation coming into its own.In 2018, that’s the spirit here. His casting of friends—there were maps, setting out their truly diverse roots in the program notes—celebrated that. In the end, though, the magic of this revolution was nothing confrontational. It even had a romantic, whimsical thread: the rainbow trope leading back to the notion ofThe Wizard of Oz. There was a print of Dorothy, lying in a bed of roses, beaded embroideries of the friends on the yellow brick road. In this sense, fully felt by Abloh as he came out, overwhelmed, to take his bow, it’s an American dream come true. The last look was a metallic silver poncho with “Follow the Yellow Brick” written on a breast patch. When he posted a picture of that moment on his Instagram, the caption read, “You can do it too.”
21 June 2018
Last week Nicolas Ghesquière took to Instagram to announce that he had renewed his Louis Vuitton contract with the hashtag #notgoinganywhere. The news made headlines, which says something about the instability of the fashion industry in 2018. All is change, with designers coming and going ever quicker, the possible denouement of department stores as we knew them, and the public’s new taste for accumulating luxury experiences, not luxury goods. In the face of all that, Ghesquière’s staying put is something to feel optimistic about.So was today’s Resort show, which was Ghesquière’s fifth for the house, and his freest so far. To look back at his first Resort show, held up the Cote d’Azur in Monaco from this evening’s location at the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul-de-Vence (the Cruise collections are all about #goingsomewhere), is to see how quickly he established his LV codes. The eclectic tailoring, the zesty color and unexpected embroidery, the treatment of each item of clothing almost like a treasure, or an accessory, which is of course the house patrimony—they were all here and then some, but the accessories are a good place to start. Ghesquière collaborated with his friend, the stylist and formerVogueCreative Director Grace Coddington, on a collection of bags based on the sketches she does of her beloved cats and his dog. They’ll be the proverbial catnip to their many followers. This season’s over-the-knee boot/sneaker hybrids are likewise going be popular. An elaboration of the best-selling trainers of Spring ’18, they made the ladylike pumps of the more recent Fall collection look like an anomaly.The clothes, too, had a cool factor that was vintage Ghesquière: a little bit cult-y, a lotta bit ’80s, with a soupçon of executive realness, and, for good measure, some beaded silk lingerie bits and hand-painted acid-washed denim (an obvious nod to the Maeght’s modern and contemporary art collection). There were celebrities to beat the band in attendance—Emma Stone, Sienna Miller, Jennifer Connelly, Ruth Negga, Laura Harrier—but this was not a collection for the red carpet with its stiff and stultifying rules. Ghesquière said he wanted to pay homage to eccentricity. “What is it today to be an original, [someone] who has her own way of dressing? This bricolage . . . you can start a real movement. I love those people who are eccentric.” He meant Coddington and her cohort, but with this collection he proved himself more than worthy of the appellation.
An aside about luxury experiences: In Ghesquière’s five years at Louis Vuitton, the Frenchmaisonhas gotten quite good at executing them. Of the 600 guests at today’s show, nearly half were clients. Seeing the mega-yacht anchored outside the Hotel du Cap after-party sparked an idea. Louis Vuitton cruises? Louis Vuitton boutique hotels? Surely there’s opportunity there.
28 May 2018
A spaceship landed in a disused courtyard of the Louvre tonight. The Cour Lefuel (aptly named, non?) was constructed in the 1850s for Napoleon III, complete with giant ramps for his horses. In the stakes for most sensational show setting, Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière beat himself at his own game. His models descended the 19th-century ramps flanked by large statues of wild boars, then looped around the edge of a platform like something out ofStar Wars. Once the spaceship takes off again, the courtyard will close for three years of renovations.Though the idea of time periods colliding was carried over from last season, this collection was less outré in its execution. Instead of Louis XV frock coats and pneumatic running shoes, we saw skirtsuits and other accoutrements of the haute bourgeois leavened with details like shoulder-spanning stripes and an LV logo that could possibly have been lifted from spaceship uniforms, given the setup.Space has been a recurring motif throughout Ghesquière’s career; it’s animated some of his most imaginative, exciting work—remember the articulated C-3PO leggings? Here, he was operating in a much more grounded manner, though of course, this being Vuitton, the results were far from pedestrian. Metal chains and doodads elaborately trimmed cropped jackets; dense beadwork decorated the oddly asymmetrically draped halter tops for evening. Ghesquière must’ve liked the off-ness of that gesture. The models wore only one glove on their bag hand. Flat envelope bags and large totes printed with what looked like computer motherboard circuitry were the new developments on that front.Hybrids and mash-ups have been a major theme this week. What distinguished Ghesquière’s was their almost mathematical precision, despite the intentional imbalance elsewhere in the collection. Fluid, snap-front shirtdresses, for example, were spliced above the shoulders with that striped spaceship uniform. The high-tech wizardry notwithstanding, the lasting impression was this collection’s chic wearability. Last night, at an Elysée Palace dinner hosted by her husband, Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron, Brigitte Macron wore one of Ghesquière’s Spring ’18 frock coats. There was plenty here for the fashion-loving, jacket-wearing French First Lady to like. It felt like a fitting way to end a season that has been much about representations of women, and how designers should dress us now.
6 March 2018
At Louis Vuitton, there are the mega-explosively directional runway shows in Paris, the destination-travel extravaganzas laid on for Resort, and then there’s the in-between season, Pre-Fall. Presented without much ado on appointment at LVMH HQ, this is where subtle filtrations from the last show are exhibited alongside continuity products, the nearest this storied brand gets to basics.Nicolas Ghesquière fans with an eye for his merging of the worlds of sport with historical costume will pick up on the most salient echoes of the last season: the knitted sweaters with billowy silk poet sleeves and the “Curve” trainers. The last—now developed with integral socks that hit ankle-length—were launched on the Spring runway; surely a Louis Vuitton bid for the marathon run which is the “ugly” sneaker inter-brand competition du jour.
2 February 2018
Applauded to the roof while flanked by Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss on his final circuit, Kim Jones made quite an exit from Louis Vuitton today. Jones has been artistic director for menswear since 2011, building up its reputation with men and boys—majorly because of last year’s phenomenal Supreme collaboration, but also because he’s a really good designer who inspires loyalty. “It makes me very emotional,” he admitted in an interview in the manic end-of-era atmosphere in the Vuitton studio a day before the show. As soon as he’d posted the news of his leaving that morning on his Instagram feed, “there were, like, 800 comments immediately, and they were all super-positive, which you never know these days,” he said.His departure after seven years is amicable and his choice, though he gave no clue as to where he is headed (Versace or Burberry being the much-speculated-over possibilities). “I thought this was a nice way to leave,” he said, indicating a honey beige cashmere LV monogrammed sweater emblazoned withPeace and Love,bound to sell out as a souvenir of his tenure.Performing the feat of making a super-expensive brand seem accessibly aspirational to a mass audience has made Jones something of a cult figure among young men in the age of social media. Instagram itself was only just invented (in 2010) when he joined. Reflecting on what has happened since, he remarked, “It’s how things have changed. The speed of it. If you don’t evolve, you die.”How did he evolve the label? Even without the afterglow of Supreme (and there was some blowback on the credibility of the worshipped skate brand for collaborating), Jones tweaked the ever-present travel heritage of Vuitton to make it sync with the experiential preferences of the much-vaunted millennial generation—their valuing of doing above owning. His final collection was all about that: getting outdoors, albeit shod in the most costly of hiking boots known to man, and, in one case, with a backpack consisting of a Louis Vuitton suitcase equipped with a dangling camo fur blanket roll.Jones, who is English, was born in Africa and has a genuinely voracious appetite for travel, nature, and animals, in addition to being an encyclopedic authority on street and underground fashion. The scratchy rock–textured prints in the collection were developed from his own aerial landscape photographs taken from a helicopter in Kenya last summer. His other source of inspiration came from watching a rodeo in Wyoming.
“The flank men wear these sweat-shorts,” he said, “so we did them in cashmere. And I thought it would be a nice nod to the Western to embroider this leather jacket with flowers, like they do cowboy boots.”The genius extra twist came with the patchwork-printed monogrammed leggings. After all the wide, oversize fashion that’s been slopping around recently, they suddenly looked like a brainwave of a backlash. Jones’s quality geekiness was also fully on show. Coats with detachable linings, metallic threads, taped seams, and zippers, and that holy grail of luxury, the vicuña coat—all these items and their super-advanced technicalities are exactly the kinds of details that appeal to the psychology of one-upmanship.Those who will actually get their hands on them will be few. But as Kim Jones waves goodbye, there will be many who will be eager to follow where he’s going.
18 January 2018
Paris Fashion Week ended with a history lesson. Nicolas Ghesquière staged his Louis Vuitton collection in the Louvre’s Pavillon de l’Horloge, which opened just last year, recently enough that many of the locals had never seen it. The show was held on the Pavillon’s lower floor, in what was once a moat protecting a medieval fortress. Stone walls constructed somewhere in the vicinity of 800 years ago surrounded us on all sides, and the Great Sphinx of Tanis, which dates back to 2600 BC, watched from a perch at the head of the runway.The Louvre’s evolution from fortress to royal palace to museum took centuries, but time is flattened inside. That was the motivating concept behind Ghesquière’s new collection, which combined the frock coats of its royal palace phase with elevated versions of the athletic clothes and sneakers that tourists pad around it in today. Speaking afterward, Ghesquière said, “I thought anachronism was interesting. How today can we incorporate pieces considered as costume into an everyday wardrobe?”Ghesquière has been down this particular rue before. His followers will recall a Spring Balenciaga collection a dozen years ago in which he married Louis XVI frippery with rock tour T-shirts, and cut his razor-sharp suits in scrolling wallpaper jacquards. This time around, the concert tee was aStranger Thingsshirt, which got an appreciative laugh from the celebrity bench. Now, as then, Ghesquière has an utterly confident way of combining the unlikeliest of items. Brocade frock coats were paired with silk running shorts of many colors, or, for the less toned of upper thigh, patent leather jeans.The last three centuries have been harder on Marie Antoinette’s kit than on her dear Louis’s. Maybe that says something positive about the progress of women? Rather than resurrecting her wardrobe whole, Ghesquière lifted the corseted and beruffled bustline of her dresses, added straps, and turned them into harnesses that he slung over wispy dresses in chiffon. They didn’t work as well as the sequined cocktail frocks that looked like souped-up versions of 18th-century dressing gowns. Even these were teamed with the new LV sneaker, springy of sole and with an ankle-grazing tongue and pull tab. Ghesquière’s neat trick here was making the past look like the future.
3 October 2017
It’s interesting to contemplate what a fashion reveal is in these accelerating days of social media. Kim Jones teased his new collection on the company Instagram @louisvuitton and on his own @mrkimjones account for days before his show along with, among other previews of the shoes and bags, a note thanking Drake, aka @champagnepapi, for his collaboration. The message was overlaid on a red Hawaiian print. When the audience arrived at the show in the Palais Royal this afternoon, the same prints were being sported all over the crowd, prominently worn by Naomi Campbell and others. So, no, it wasn’t a total and utter surprise to see that the collection had those self-same Hawaiian shirts in it, some veiled in organza, as Naomi was demonstrating in the front row. Nor was it a surprise to learn that the soundtrack was a song inspired by the collection that Drake had written. It had been pre-shared.Vuitton is having its cake and eating it with its menswear these days. After the global blanket coverage of its collaboration with Supreme last season, there is one company narrative that says “super-fast” engagement with youth, while the other one—the oft-told story of its heirloom quality products—says “slow-slow” and “you must wait to have it.”The company is lucky to have a designer in Kim Jones, who is able to move Vuitton forward at both of these speeds. In a preview, he talked about the halo success of the last show, but put the Supreme effect down to “the 10 percent.” Though not authorized to specify precisely how company sales figures have been stimulated, he talked about the direct conversations that have been sparked between himself and the new generation of teenagers who are fanatical about fashion in every detail. “I’ve found a lot of kids—16- to 18-year-olds—are researching what I did when I had my own label,” he said. That was quite a while ago, in London, in the early aughts, before fashion reporting documented everything via the Internet. But with their computer skills, these kids can harvest things that even their originators didn’t realize exist.So Jones—even without a massive celebrity-designer image—is watched and revered as a cult figure. Inside fashion circles, he’s also rated for the deft way he can nail a broad-strokes idea that most men will get—the Hawaiian shirt is okay again, guys!—while also having a super-sophisticated hand with fluid tailoring, convincing proportions, and advanced fabric techniques.
In this collection, for instance, there is paper-fine leather made to look like plastic, leather bonded onto neoprene, and rubberized tape used to seal surfer appeal into the many bags, micro to major, that were on accelerating show.
22 June 2017
Nicolas Ghesquière has accumulated plenty of fanboys during his years in fashion. Today at hisLouis VuittonResort show in Japan, he turned fanboy himself. First the venue. Vuitton’s Cruise collections have been held in some spectacular spots—Rio’s Niterói Museum, Bob Hope’s John Lautner-designed home in Palm Springs—butGhesquièreand co. outdid themselves today. Perched in a green valleyan hour’s drive from Kyotoand designed by the architect I. M. Pei, theMiho Museumlooks like it landed on the spot from outer space (it has that in common with the Niterói and Bob Hope’s place) or as if it had been discovered there, a ruin from the long-distant future. In fact, Pei designed the Miho to evoke Shangri-la, heaven on earth. “I understand it’s one of his favorite buildings,” Ghesquière said of the museum. There’s synergy in the setting, too. Pei masterminded the glass pyramid that revitalized the Louvre Museum in Paris; Ghesquière showed his Fall Vuitton show in the Louvre and has plans to do so again.As for the collection—his most risk-taking yet at Vuitton—among its many, manyJapanese referencesit featured illustrated sequined dresses and guaranteed-hit Kabuki-eyed bags imagined by Kansai Yamamoto. The Japanese designer is famous for dressingDavid Bowiein a glittering one-legged jumpsuit, among other pieces, and for paving the way for his countrymen and womanKenzo Takada,Yohji Yamamoto, andRei Kawakubo, who would follow him to Paris. Yamamoto, in an electric red suit, was among the notables in the front row, alongsideGhesquièrefaves Michelle Williams, Jennifer Connelly, Sophie Turner, and Isabelle Huppert. “I’ve bought many of his clothes at auction,” Ghesquière said of Yamamoto. The Frenchman is friends with his daughter and thus the collaboration was born.Ghesquière has been traveling to Japan for two decades, and this collection was a love letter, not just to Yamamoto, but to the country’s culture in general. Samurai armor, Kurosawa’s colors, Kabuki makeup, traditional prints of fishermen, and the obscure 1970s Japanese film seriesStray Cat Rockinformed his process. They produced a collection dense with prints, layers, and textures, as well as a rebellious, badass attitude.Since the old days at Balenciaga, Ghesquière’s tailoring has been influential. It commanded most of the attention here.
He indicated that the oversized, yet hourglass blazers near the end of the show were inspired by traditional Japanese styles, while the rounded, standout shoulder lines on a series of short-sleeved jackets seemed to nod backwards at a collection he did in the late aughts. But mostly he preferred a boyish, cropped style with a hem that barely grazed the hips and shortened sleeves. His dresses were as relaxed as the tailoring was structured. Lace slips with square hems worn over white tees and stretchy, colored jeans looked street-ready and cool, and his A-list gals are likely to fight over a long black and gold lace number embroidered with miniature silver leaves in a loose, away-from-the-body shape and that same handkerchief hem.At cocktails afterwards, it was Yamamoto’s turn to play fanboy. Observing how happy Ghesquière was, he remarked about the scope of the production: “Amazing,” he said. Yes.
14 May 2017
The Louvre is the crossroads of the world—one of the globe’s most popular museums with more than 7 million people visiting annually. It’s closed on Tuesdays, but tonight several hundred guests were invited to the Cour Marly in the Richelieu wing to watch Louis Vuitton’s models wind their way through the 17th- and 18th-century sculptures wearing Nicolas Ghesquière’s new collection. It’s a first-ever for the Louvre. Shows have been held on its grounds and in the sublevel in years past, but never in its central sculpture atrium. Ghesquière said Vuitton was invited by the museum to do so, which gives a sense of the company’s place in French culture. “Today, when some people make us want to believe that the frontiers are stronger and stronger,” Ghesquière said, presumably alluding to the immigration crisis and further from home, talk of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, “I think fashion has always broken those frontiers. Especially in Paris—it’s the land of foreign designers; it’s so multicultural. Being in the Louvre where everyone is welcome, where there is no limit of culture, of nationality, is a strong message.”Ghesquière tried to re-create that sense of boundarylessness with the collection, which was less a directional seasonal message than it was a wardrobe of options for city living, with the über-luxe accents expected from a luxury goods house of this level. The denim, for example, wasn’t denim but a wool treated with multiple techniques to create a patina of faded blue jeans. Leather, of course, was central to the story; it came super polished, as in the sleek show-opening black coat, or crackled to give the impression of age and wear. Fur, a relatively unexplored material for Ghesquière chez Louis Vuitton, got special attention. He paired his short-sleeved, patchworked jackets with the collection’s relaxed, cropped flares, but they’ll look great thrown over an evening dress. As for evening, he took a big step away from the dramatic “naked dresses” of Spring, opting instead for knee-length slip dresses elaborately worked with pleats, lace insets, sheer panels, and fabrics with contrasting patterns, but with results that looked less try-hard. The best looks here—a streamlined gray coat belted over “jeans,” an asymmetrical ribbed sweater worn with tech fabric pants in a glass finish—captured that offhand sense of chic.
All of this was accessorized with snub-nosed, low-heeled boots of varying shaft heights: highly practical for forging new frontiers, or simply confronting the harsh realities of modern life.
7 March 2017
Well, it’s the boots, frankly. Their slick, patent, leg-hugging, block-y, art-heeled, orange extraordinariness will draw the fashion-savvy eye magnetically—without a moment’s hesitation. Somehow, they seem to have come from the space-age 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s: that moment of super-optimism in Paris fashion, architecture, and interior design. Some boots are white, while others are black patent (as they also were in those days). A little Françoise Hardy, a touchBarbarella—but with the genius modernizer of the flower heel, stamped out in the shape of one of the motifs in a classic Louis Vuitton monogram print. Nicolas Ghesquière put his finger on what is so attractive about them when he said, “I think that what touches one is seeing something that is familiar—that you haven’t seen before.”Ghesquière may have traveled to a Herzog & de Meuron–designed parking lot in Miami Beach to shoot these Pre-Fall 2017 pictures with Bruce Weber—it’s all very contemporary—but the default controls of his spiritual mothership are always set to fantasy futurism. In this collection, the retro-futuristic footwear operates excellently as the leg covering that allows everything else to snap into focus—the point being, everything else is reasonably classic. Whereas a menswear tweed checked coat, a poncho, an A-line skirt, or even a black leather mini kilt could look quite ordinary in and of themselves, it’s the boots that make this collection oh-so-Parisian, sexy, and generally spot-on.
1 March 2017
“Well, it’s that kind of Pop identity that’s the joy of the brand,” said Kim Jones, as he roamed theLouis Vuittonmenswear studio yesterday, gesturing toward tables laden with the Louis Vuitton x Supreme collaboration skateboards, skateboard trunks, duffels, bandanas, bottle openers, gloves, and phone cases—the whole kit and caboodle, which has already set fire to the Internet after today’s show. All you need know about it is contained inLuke Leitch’s report. The release created an upbeat buzz refreshingly at odds with the tense pre-inauguration atmosphere that has been backgrounding these menswear shows. “I don’t talk about politics here,” shrugged Jones, “but this collection is inspired by the glory days of New York artists in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—people like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s the time when anyone from anywhere went out and mixed together in clubs.” Jones is a museum-grade geek of an expert collector of street style culture, but what drew him to this particular era, now? “It was looking at the uptown-downtown social mix, which was so important then,” he replied. “It’s really important. Because that’s the thing that seems to be crumbling now.”As deeply researched as Jones’s background work is, the distinguishing mark of a great designer is to transform complexity into something that just looks simply and inevitably right. Never mind the Louis Vuitton and Supreme—this collection, with its totally believable ease and fluidity, had that talent stamped all over it. Menswear always changes by tiny increments, but here it was possible to sit back and think: “Oh, a new silhouette has finally arrived.” It’s looser; it has wider-legged, drop-crotched trousers; it has long sweaters, floppy shirts, and roomy soft coats. It’s both convincingly young but accessibly wearable for many ages and physiques. The polar opposite, in fact, of the template of super-skinny tailoring Hedi Slimane imprinted on men’s fashion 15 years ago, and continued right up to his departure from Saint Laurent last year. In such contrasts, we sense fashion changing from one era to the next.This zeitgeist-reading ability to point people in a direction that resonates isn’t necessarily the act of a deliberate revolutionary. Really, it’s more of a talent for crystallizing and confirming what’s already in the air.
Looser trousers and bigger silhouettes have been around for a bit; here they just stepped over the finishing line into the zone of cross-generational normality. What is this? The arrival of soft and comfortable clothes for hard and discomfiting times? Sounds about right, Mr. Jones.
19 January 2017
Today’sLouis Vuittonshow took place in the future home of the brand’s Place Vendôme flagship. Scheduled to open in 2017, the new store will combine two buildings, spanning the famous square and the Rue Saint-Honoré. Sitting on the boutique-to-be’s second floor this morning with those monumental views out the windows, there was no escaping the metaphor: As global as its reach is, Louis Vuitton is Paris.So it was fitting that creative directorNicolas Ghesquièrebrought his collection home metaphorically, as well. His Cruise offering, presented in Rio de Janeiro last May, was a tribute to that city’s sportif seaside culture—colorful, loaded with print, and beachily body-baring. The orientation of his bold new Louis Vuitton collection is different. While it retained some of the tropes of the previous season—the daring cut-outs in particular—the results were more glam. Call it hot bourgeois. “I realize that I didn’t explore that much yet the sophistication and the more dressed-up part of Louis Vuitton,” he said afterward.The sophistication he was speaking of comes down to the type of clothing he zeroed in on: tailoring, first and foremost. Ghesquière’s are not suits for office drones; with slices removed from the shoulders and capeleted open backs, they negotiated the territory between practicality and experimentation. As he settles in at Louis Vuitton (today’s venue seemed conceived at least in part to quash the ongoing rumors that he’s on his way out the door), Ghesquière is leaning more toward experimentation, if not the outright high-concept fashion of his earlier days. See the asymmetric draped jersey numbers with the hip and midriff cut-outs, some with 1980s-ish sprinkles of crystals and glitter; see also the series of long, sheer-yet-discreet dresses at the end.Among all the soigné stuff, there were sweatshirts, a logo tee or two, and skinny lace pants with matching pelmet skirts; they’ll be the kinds of things cosmopolitan fashion types will be seen in next season at the shows. The press notes mentioned a fact little known even among Parisians that, before the Place Vendôme was known by its current name, it was called Place des Conquêtes. As conquests go, this show had an indisputable one in the form of its Petite Malle phone cases. As the models walked by with them gripped in their hands, all the wannabe It bags we’ve seen over the last month of shows suddenly felt a little passé.
Look around, a woman can make do without a purse, but not without her cellphone.
5 October 2016
It’s official. Fashion’s obsession for Spring is travel—synonyms, indeed, are fast running out to describe the nomadic, itinerant, roving eye of designers. There’s three out of action, right there. That idea of incessant movement isn’t just a source of inspiration to Kim Jones—it’s a way of life. He is a man gripped with wanderlust, a man who has traveled to Japan alone over 70 times in the past decade, and plenty of places besides. Keeping up with Jones is difficult work. Suitably, he’s tasked with designing the menswear forLouis Vuitton, a house whose founding raison d’être was the notion of thevoyager. It’s seldom what but where next with Jones, when it comes to inspiration. The scenes make the seams.How come, then, that for next season Jones decided not to escape, but to return? His Spring Louis Vuitton show wasn’t about travel—rather, a homecoming. In typical Jonesian fashion, that doesn’t relate to a single locale, but a trio: Africa, where he grew up; London, where he was educated; and Paris, where he lives and works now.The latter two were the most evident: Africa, the source of luxurious exotic skins of crocodile and ostrich, Masai-inspired checks, and a savanna-bleached, sand-blind palette dominated by buff, taupe, and ecru (we’d call it beige); while London surrendered punk. “There’s always something a little London hidden somewhere,” said Jones. Actually, there was quite a lot. Jones is an avid collector of punk memorabilia—his horde of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s output from their Sex and Seditionaries era is second to none, including many a museum—and he put it to good use as reference material for the collection’s bondage-buckled pants, D-rings, and dog collars, albeit superlatively finished in the French fashion. That dog collar, incidentally, was an archive Vuitton style, more commonly used for pooches, named the “Baxter.”It was those odd, anachronistic crossovers that made this collection really zing. How about African checks approximating tartan in those skinny strapped-up trews? Or that the utility details of punk linked, for Jones, to the functional aspect of Vuitton’s history, the clips and fastenings of traditional trunks. A pinky-tan bomber in the pimply outbreak characteristic of ostrich hide was reminiscent of an old adage: Punk is like squeezing spots. Except, if these Vuitton ones were being squeezed, it would be in a spa in Champneys.
Then there’s the fact trunks were referred to as “Plastic Peculiars” and the idea that, in all honesty, Vuitton’s coated canvas is a glorified (and very expensive) kind of plastic. Jones had the real stuff in this show, too, pervy rubber trenches etched with the LV monogram and printed with a menagerie of mutated animals scribbled by the designer’s friends and past collaborators Jake and Dinos Chapman.
23 June 2016
The Summer Olympics are three months out (barring a Zika virus delay), and Rio is in a state of anticipation, hustling to be ready. Tell a local the last time you were here was a dozen years ago, and the reliable reply comes: “It’s a different city now.” Today the action wasn’t at a freshly completed stadium, but at the Oscar Niemeyer–designed Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, an architectural marvel perched on a cliff that looks like it could have landed from space or emerged from the sea. It was the site ofNicolas Ghesquière’s third destination Resort show for Louis Vuitton.There were 514 local and international guests arrayed on the museum’s spectacular patio this afternoon, much like we were last year in Palm Springs at Bob Hope’s John Lautner–designed home. Look in one direction and there was Catherine Deneuve, a regular at these things; look in another and there wasAlicia Vikander, Zendaya, and Jaden Smith. Some of them had already seen the Niterói from above on helicopter tours of the city. Out-of-towners began arriving in Rio as early as Thursday, and Vuitton kept them busy with everything from trips to Corcovado to paddleboard lessons. For the tour-group averse, there was people-watching on Copacabana and Ipanema’s famous beaches.Pulling off a multiday event requires a staggering amount of planning—not quite an Olympian effort, but close. A PR rep estimated the size of the team—models, hair and makeup artists, seamstresses, public relations types, and sundry others—at more than 300. Michael Burke, Vuitton’s CEO, said it took at least 5,000 work hours. Those numbers are testament to Vuitton’s power and pocketbook. Small fortunes have been spent, but the payoffs are equally big. As of an hour after the show, there were more than 10,000 posts hashtagged #LVCruise. The Brazilian model Alessandra Ambrosio was front row Snapchatting for the company.But what of the clothes? This was the most athletic collection Ghesquière has done for Vuitton, and the most body-conscious, with lots of skin—designed for the Zendaya generation more than Deneuve’s. The availability of the Niterói gave the designer a destination, and Rio and its upcoming games gave him his theme. Or half a theme, anyway. “I never forget that I’m a foreigner, so I’ve also brought Paris here,” he said. “I think what defines our time is that women want to look sophisticated and they want casual sports clothes—those are the two big obsessions.”
28 May 2016
At the end of a long month of shows, editors and buyers make superlative lists. Tallying things up,Nicolas Ghesquièregets high marks for hisLouis Vuittoncollection. One of the best shows of the season, it was also his most confident and convincing yet for Vuitton, full of pieces easy to love and to wear.Inside three specially constructed geometric structures crash-landed behind the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the setup was an underwater world, a lost Atlantis with columns, made in collaboration with the French artist Justin Morin, jutting out of the runway at odd angles. For those counting, there were 57 total, requiring 200,000 pieces of hand-fixed shattered mirrors. Afterward, Ghesquière said, “we had an idea of this trip, of a woman who could be a digital heroine, like Tomb Raider, when she discovers an archaeological site.” Ghesquière was mining his own history. He’s known as the great experimenter from his near decade and a half at Balenciaga, and rightfully so, but his most beloved collections there tapped into the energy of the street. He captured that feeling here, with a broad offering that merged athletic pieces with a more fluid sensuality than he’s emphasized yet in his collections for Vuitton.On the sporty side, there were mohair sweaters and jacket-sweater hybrids with racing stripes up and down the arms. Color-blocked stretchy knit shirts and tube dresses looked like relatively easy-on-the-wallet ways to buy into the look. Representing the sensual side were midi-length dresses in heritage scarf prints and a white silk number topped by a black leather harness that caught the runway breeze. We liked the look of zip-front, molded-hip jackets worn with loosely tailored bondage pants, and nipped-waist coats with exaggerated storm flaps. The diversity of the clothes was matched by a wide range of bags, the most eye-catching of which was a softly structured style apparently modeled on a double-handled plastic shopping bag. It doesn’t get much more streetwise than the show’s lace-front combat boots.Ghesquière dipped into the archive of others, as well. The ending section of sequin slip dresses looked like a nod to a late-’90s collection of the Belgian designerMartin Margiela, whom Ghesquière has long revered and who has become a popular reference point this season with the rise ofVetements.Demna Gvasaliamade a big splash with his debut at Ghesquière’s former stomping grounds earlier this week.
Were the dresses a tweak in his direction? Insiders will be hashing that out as they make their ways home from Paris in the coming days. But it won’t matter one stitch to customers, who will appreciate and buy into the frocks’ haute-casual vibes and poetic spirit.
9 March 2016
Nicolas Ghesquièrehas been decisive about the look and feel ofLouis Vuitton’s ready-to-wear and accessories since he arrived. The links between this new Pre-Fall collection and his previous outings are clear: The zip-front minidress made its debut forFall ’14; the sporty, color-blocked pants originally appeared last season. The echoes make his Vuitton clothes instantly recognizable, and wearing them marks you as a member of the in crowd.Discussing the collection, Ghesquière referred to three main elements: neo-classics, sporty pieces, and steampunk. By the latter, he meant the turn-of-the-last-century shape of the lineup’s bubbly, leg-of-mutton sleeves. Designers elsewhere have latched onto the silhouette, but not with the same sense of audacity. Ghesquière has got to be the only one suggesting you wear your Victorian-shouldered sweater with motocross leggings and platform combat boots.As deliberate and methodical as Ghesquière’s LV approach has been, Pre-Fall was not without its delightful surprises. This season he likes the look of belts cinched high under the bust and patent leather gauntlets that creep up toward the biceps. As a luggage purveyor, those elements make practical business sense. The most charming development, Look 1’s breezy, billowing parachute silk dress, was a little more off piste. It could be a promising direction for the Fall collection he’ll show in two weeks.
23 February 2016
Kim Jonesis an inveterate, insatiable traveler, but for the past five years (yes, he’s been artistic director ofLouis Vuitton’s men’s collections for that long) he’s been calling Paris his home. Perhaps that’s why Jones chose to dedicate his latest collection not to the far-flung locales he visits—in the past two months alone he’s been to the Maldives, Los Angeles, and Tokyo—but to Paris generally, and Vuitton specifically. “Future Heritage” was the idea. Or, as Jones said, “Paris old and new.”The old, everyone knows—the Tour Eiffel, Art Deco designs, scribbly Jean Cocteau–ish drawings, and indeed a pile of Vuitton trunks, an archetypal symbol of Frenchness. All were present—the Tour in spirit, visible from outside the Vuitton show space in Parc André Citroën—along with heirloom-style jewelry designed in collaboration with Jade Jagger and inspired by the rakish Parisian playboy Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé. His aesthetic style—dissipated European aristocrat—formed the basis of the opening passages (as they say in French). Billowy silk trenchcoats, narrow tailoring. A few berets. Chic,non?The new came, Jones said, from the fresh blood currently transfusing into Paris fashion. For Jones, that twisted thearts décoratifsinto thearts utilitaire, peppering jackets with pockets, tugging trenches and blousons inside out. The latter is a common theme across the season, but keeping up with Jones’s will take some doing. If he hadn’t reversed them for me himself—thus revealing that he’d shown their ostensible innards, with pocket-bags dangling, outwards on the catwalk—I would never have realized. All those workman jackets had a tough, bonhomie appeal; the opposite to the slick sophistication of the featherweight silk and cashmere coating, intarsia shearlings patterned like Deco parquet, or suits in tobacco shades—like the Damier check—and a pure delphinium blue.Utility and decoration are continual themes at Vuitton, a house whose primary purpose, when founded back in 1854, was to serve. Monsieur Louis Vuitton was trunk-maker and packer to Empress Eugénie. Jones pinned his models’ necks with dangling medallions bearing his face, like an old French coin: a Louislouis.Of course the bags were paramount—a new shady anthracite gray-on-black Monogram, dubbed the Eclipse, was used throughout, alongside shades of French navy and a laurel green Vuitton dubbed “Tuileries,” for bags silkscreened with a gloss LV, the pattern winking in and out of visibility in the light.
Some of the clothes bore trunk-stamps, symbolizing a symbiosis between clothing and accessory. What that symbiosis really meant is that the two worked together to forge a look, rather than either outshining the other.Many designers have been obsessed with history this season, but few present their new wares in the shadow of a major national institution honoring their old ones. Jones scribbled “Volez Voguez Voyagez” in a ribbony print, the title of the Vuitton retrospective currently packing them in at Paris’s Grand Palais. His work is an ongoing conversation between now and then—tugging motifs and ideas from inside those glass vitrines and musty storerooms, dusting them off, making them feel as new as they originally did.Jones’s use of the title “Future Heritage” for this collection wasn’t an indication of inflated self-worth, but a statement of fact. This season, Jones created a clutch of micro-trunks, lined in mirror and designed as hyper-luxurious attaché case, Gatsby-ish mobile bar, and a ludicrously delicate tool kit. Those delicately wrought trunks are destined to slipstream into the Vuitton archives, alongside the originals that inspired them. Jones is creating his own history here at Vuitton. The catwalk is its exhibition. We’re lucky we get the chance to see it twice a year.
21 January 2016
We exist on the digital frontier, at the dawn of a virtual age in which all experience will be filtered through screens.Nicolas Ghesquière, long one of fashion’s most intrepid designers, isn’t looking back. Since he arrived atLouis Vuittonin early 2014, the idea of travel has propelled him; Vuitton has been in the business of making luggage since 1854, after all. But this season he took a different kind of journey. “We are all living with this new dimension,” he said afterward. “We are all managing how to integrate these new notions of digital, virtual, and cyber with our real life.”A conversation between technology and nature animated the new collection, his most audacious yet for the house, and one that had his fans chiming, “The old Nicolas is back.” The old Nicolas was a sci-fi obsessive and an experimentalist, qualities he subsumed early on during his tenure at LV that came rocketing to the fore here. His reference points were many: Wong Kar Wai’s2046and the anime seriesEvangelioncame up backstage. The show itself started with an introduction to the video game Minecraft, which will be familiar to anyone with young children. Later, a sound clip fromTron: Legacy, the original of which was a favorite movie from Ghesquière’s own childhood, played. “I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer,” Jeff Bridges intoned. “What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see, and then one day . . . I got in.”Ghesquière’s cyberpunks wore moto jackets and metal-embroidered skirts, laser-cut leathers and beaded knits that coded like armor, and spaceship-print pants. Leather gauntlets keyed a tough, aggressive attitude, but the designer’s vision was not a dystopic one. On the contrary. He was quick to point out that his materials looked high-tech but were actually not synthetics at all. What with the nailhead-embroidered peasant dresses, the crafty sweaters, and the festival-girl crop tops and shorts, Vuitton Spring looked a lot like a digital bohemia.
7 October 2015
Kim Jones is like a pirate king, roaming the world then coming back to Paris with a treasure trove of wonders for Louis Vuitton. Among the mind-bogglers today were jackets cut from indigo-dyed Kobe leather (the cows are massaged with sake; the hides are sun-dried). The pearls that appeared as accessories were also indigo-dyed, actually in the shell. And there was a small group of fully reversible pieces made from organza-backed lambskin, so ludicrously light that they were practically incomprehensible. But all of this is just verbiage—such technical wonders demand sight and touch, which the chill blankness of a computer screen can hardly supply.But nor can the distance of a runway. That was the single problem with the Vuitton show today. You wanted to drown in the detail of the pirate king's trove, but it was overthere, on the catwalk. So what immediately stood out were the pieces that pleased the eye from afar: the vivid satin souvenir jackets with the embroidered cranes (Japan) and birds of paradise (Indonesia); the red silk Hawaiian shirt with the embroidered monkeys (China); the blouson with an embroidered stripe from a Southeast Asian hill tribe that, though ancient, looked utterly contemporary.Jones said he was fascinated by the way ideas migrate, Japan's absorption of the language of American sportswear being his biggest case in point. But he does exactly the same kind of thing in his designs, filtering traditions of all kinds through his own pop sensibility. So it wasn't just the cheesy GI souvenir of an embroidered jacket that was transmogrified today. Jones also transformed a gas jockey's jacket and jeans by cutting them from indigo silk denim. (His alchemizing of American workwear puts him on an equal footing with someone like Junya Watanabe.) And he created a new kind of pebble-dashed, hand-painted camo.Nile Rodgers made the music for the show, introducing it in a showbizzy "put your hands together" way. But that fitted with the flash and shine of the clothes. It's past time to celebrate what Kim Jones is doing at Vuitton. The party starts here.
25 June 2015
The Resort season has turned into a mini architecture tour. Karl Lagerfeld set up Chanel operations at Zaha Hadid's Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul on Monday. Raf Simons will show Dior at Pierre Cardin's south of France home next week. And today Louis Vuitton had over 800 rooms booked in Palm Springs, California, for the celebrities, international journalists, and clients that assembled here to witness Nicolas Ghesquière's latest LV collection at the Bob Hope estate. The designer first laid eyes on the Bob Hope house 15 years ago on his earliest trip to this desert city; it made a lasting impression. Driving up to the place this evening, it was easy to understand why. The John Lautner-designed house (which is for sale, by the way, with an asking price of $25 million) is perched on one of Palm Springs' central peaks. The views of the valley below are breathtaking, but the house itself is a scene-stealer, a hulking 23,000-square-foot marvel that, depending on the vantage point, looks like a grounded spaceship or a volcano but is decorated on the inside in what Ghesquière described as a sweet '50s style. "The paradox of the brutalism of the architecture and the refinement of the interior was quite inspiring to me," he said. "I love the idea of sweet and hard at the same time."That idea played out in the clothes. But first, a word about the setup, which was choreographed down to the minute. As the 500-odd guests milled around on the lawn, the gong that rings at the Fondation Louis Vuitton could be heard, establishing a connection between Paris and Palm Springs. A drone hovered overhead, capturing footage for the live-stream. And the 6:15-on-the-dot start time capitalized on the magic hour light before the sun dipped below the mountains behind the house. Plywood and Plexiglas stools were arrayed on the terrace below the swooping copper roof, and as the models began their exits, they could be seen walking across the house's second floor and descending the staircase through well-placed windows. They circled the pool before making a circuitous path in front of a crowd that included Kanye West, Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Williams, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Grimes.The lineup's big news was its silhouette. Ghesquière set the current trend for A-line miniskirts in motion with his first Vuitton show 14 months ago, a fact he's no doubt aware of.
He pivoted here, sending out maxi skirts on desert boots paired with blousy cropped tops crisscrossed by leather belts that exposed a triangle of midriff. It was a directional look that had just a touch of the 1930s Hollywood starlet to it. From there, he was off and running, alternating printed and quilted silk housecoats like something a Palm Springs granny would wear with leather motocross jackets that inevitably called to mind the upcoming reboot ofMad Max. A black-tie-ready beaded scuba jacket and sporty, tailored trousers intermingled with printed eyelet prairie dresses that he suggested nodded in the direction of Altman's classic3 Women. And then there were the hot pants, cut high on the thigh and worn with everything from an army sweater to zip-front silk blouses to a boxy suede jacket.Ghesquière has spent his first year and change at the brand developing his signatures, and despite the far-ranging feel of this show, he didn't abandon them here. The oversized front zips he's used from season one reappeared, as did the suede color-blocking and the metal studding. As usual, he made the most of the house's leather know-how, cutting the maxi skirts in a leather so liquid it could be mistaken for silk, choosing a sturdier weight for a dress that he embellished with the four-pointed fleurs of Vuitton's iconic monogram, and, most spectacularly, embroidering glossy swatches of the stuff in a snakeskin motif on a long, lean column of body mesh. As strategic as he remains, the collection's lasting impression was its uninhibited sense of play; and the reaction was unanimous, this was Ghesquière at his most Ghesquière: experimental and unconstrained. California suits him.
6 May 2015
It's been a year now since Nicolas Ghesquière's Louis Vuitton debut. Sitting in the geodesic domes set up in the shadow of the Fondation Louis Vuitton at his show this morning, what struck you most was just how comfortable Ghesquière seems with this gig. It can't be straightforward for a designer to find a new voice, perhaps least of all for one who'd been setting the fashion agenda for nearly a decade and a half at his former place of employ. For his first few outings at Vuitton, Ghesquière looked back in time to the 1970s to create a contemporary woman's wardrobe. But the tinge of retro that defined his earlier LV output was gone this season. This wasn't a knock-'em-dead collection, even if the fabulously furry brushed sheepskin coats that opened the show qualified as such, but it suggested that Ghesquière has settled in enough to find his own unique path forward.Once more for the former Balenciaga designer that means embracing the future. "The exploration went a bit further," he said backstage. "There's still a certain respect of the patrimony, but also of technology, [which is] what I like." A drone flew over the venue, and 21 video screens were arrayed on each of the metal scaffolds propping up the domes' see-through roofing; they played different angles of the show back to the crowd as it was happening. On the runway itself, the pieces that channeled the future most brightly were the second-skin ribbed knits; with their cutouts above the bust and their fluted cuffs and hems, they were as efficient as uniforms. Metallics abounded. On a silvery silk pantsuit worn with a logo tee. On a glinting dress with the puffed, mutton sleeves that were one of the show's distinguishing features. And on the accessories. You couldn't miss model newcomer Fernanda Hin Lin Ly's transparent glass fiber vanity trunk. There were other mini trunks in aluminum and copper and ultralight carbon, and inside they were all equipped with storage space for iPads, chargers, and other modern-day necessities. For all of the technological feats, though, there was no compensatory sacrifice of craft. See the jellyfish chinoiserie jacquard dress.In straight-up shoppability terms, this collection looks primed to be Ghesquière's most accessible so far. His high-rise jeans from Spring were in heavy rotation this month. We expect to see even more of the leather versions he presented today at the shows the next go-around.
And Ghesquière should have the confidence to push his explorations further next season.For Tim Blanks' take on Louis Vuitton, watch this video.
11 March 2015
Louis Vuitton presented its Pre-Fall collection in the midst of last week's haute couture shows. No 48-hour tour in Tokyo, no trip to the Austrian Alps à la Dior and Chanel. Nicolas Ghesquière and co. preferred the intimacy of LV's new Right Bank headquarters to show his first Pre-Fall offering for the house. It made sense. With his first three runway shows (two in Paris and one in Monaco), Ghesquière established the new Vuitton silhouette: lean, lanky, and strongly influenced by the 1970s. This season, the intention was to add on to that bold foundation with new materials and treatments, and to an equal degree, to soften some of the key shapes he's introduced so far. Ghesquière talks about wardrobe-building these days—the idea proved extra relevant here.Spring's narrow, two-button blazer returned in an amusing coq embroidery. The matching pants were high-waisted and cropped, somewhat stiff, like the ones we've seen in his previous collections. Having established denim as a signature, there was more of that, too, alongside cool leather pieces like a snug bomber with a furry spread collar. The news of the lineup was the softness, seen in a fabulous jersey dress color-blocked in graphic shapes lifted from LV's classic monogram, as well as in the oversize blue tweed of a skirtsuit. The skirt was still A-line and it came with strips of leather piping down the front familiar from last season, but it had a relaxed attitude that will make it easier to wear every day. A coat in a brown version of that oversize tweed looked like a hit, and we won't be surprised when we see the corduroy coat that opens this Juergen Teller-lensed lookbook making the rounds at the shows.
3 February 2015
Christopher Nemeth was always Kim Jones' favorite London designer. The way he mixed Savile Row and the street anticipated Jones' own aesthetic. But, outside Japan, where Nemeth lived from 1986 until his death in 2010, he was largely overlooked. Jones set out to fix that state of affairs today. Utilizing to the max the creative muscle of Louis Vuitton, he saluted the man who was, on some level, his mentor.The tribute was absolute. Nellee Hooper, a friend of Nemeth's, made a soundtrack of his favorite songs; Judy Blame, Nemeth's compadre in the legendary House of Beauty and Culture collective, created the gorgeous bricolage that stood for jewelry; Nemeth's widow and daughters consulted with Jones on the details.Before he died, Nemeth arranged his archives meticulously, which made it that much easier for the equally meticulous Jones to spread the Nemeth love. He chose four original prints from those archives and reproduced them in a variety of media wide enough to highlight the extraordinary craftsmanship of Vuitton's ateliers. So there were a shearling coat laser-etched in a Nemeth pattern, a bonded cashmere sweatshirt embossed withcork(unfathomable!), wool/cashmere denim masterfully overlaid with paper patterns, and a substantial—and very limited-edition—suitcase in a flocked design.The most winning aspect of this whole thing was, of course, that it looked so fresh and energetic. You can honor your heroes all you like, but if your respect curdles into worthiness? Well then, it's scarcely worth the effort. Jones has too much experience to fall into that trap. He has rejigged Vuitton's menswear so that it skews young and stylish. There was a sense of gap-year sportiness that jelled nicely with Vuitton's world-in-motion heritage. The parkas, duffle coats, jean jackets, and Crombies had a reassuring classicism, but God truly is in the details—or at least in the hardware—at Jones' Vuitton, so you could picture some future civilization digging the LV buttons out of the ashpit of history and marveling at them.As much as Jones is a creator, he also has an eye on the commercial prize. It's been 130 years since Vuitton opened its first store outside France, and it was—naturally—in London. So celebrating Nemeth as the unsung Best of British made sense on that level. But it was also a reminder of another Vuitton throwback that yielded massive dividends for the company. Marc Jacobs decided attention must be paid to Stephen Sprouse, and look what happened there.
In an ideal world, the visual iconography of Christopher Nemeth will soon be as familiar as Sprouse's graffiti prints.
22 January 2015
The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Frank Gehry's new masterpiece (in this case the word might be an understatement), was gleaming above the Bois de Boulogne in the October sun. In the Paris show venue stakes, Nicolas Ghesquière zoomed out so far ahead today, his fellow designers will be wrenching their necks to get a look. Ghesquière is used to being in the lead. His debut collection for Vuitton last March, his first after a year's absence from the runway, sent ripples through fashion that are registering this season with an industry-spanning 1970s revival.His terrific show today began with a video clip of youthful faces speaking in unison lines that had been lifted and modified from the 1984 David Lynch film,Dune: "A beginning is a very delicate time…Day zero in the heart of the project, code-named GEHRY014…A ship surrounded by a gigantic woodland, a ship made up of 3,600 glass panels and 15,000 tons of steel, a ship that serves as an incubator and ignites our fellow creative minds…Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you, today, October 1, the LV house wants to explore the ability to travel to any part of the universe without moving. The journey starts here."With an intro like that, not to mention theClose Encounters of the Third Kindlighting on the runway, it was tempting to think we'd get a return to high concept from Ghesquière. He did space-y collections at Balenciaga—see Spring '07, the season of the C-3PO leggings. But while a zip-front sweater and high-waisted cropped pants could double as a stewardess uniform on Virgin Galactic or some other spaceline of the future, the collection wasn't as out there as all that.Quite the opposite: The cut of the clothes was designed to be familiar. Cue a navy blazer and cropped jeans worn with a white high-necked blouse, a fitted green sweater tucked into a mid-length black skirt with a high middle slit in the front and back, a straightforward peacoat. "No rupture with last season," Ghesquière said afterward. "It's still a wardrobe, it's about an instinctive mix." But undeniably it's a special wardrobe. If you think of his debut last season like an architect's early schematic design, this collection was more filled-in, with plush velvet pantsuits; densely sequined zip-front minidresses worn with thick, textured tights; and a sleeveless shift in an amusing print of makeup, household appliances, and muscle cars.
And, of course, there was leather, pieced together in bright stripes on a shirtdress or, quite spectacularly, cut into thin strips and woven with metal rings in such a manner that a high-necked minidress almost resembled lace. Ghesquière may have embraced wearable design, but you'd better believe he understands how to make his work stand out. Take the heels that enlivened the boots here: colorful, plastic, and cleverly cut in the shape of the LV monogram flower.
1 October 2014
Kim Jones was named for a Rudyard Kipling character, the Irish orphan alone in late-19th-century India. Jones is a real traveling man, so it's surprising that it has taken him all this time to actually get to India. It was the late Louise Wilson, his professor at Central Saint Martins, who persuaded him to make the trip. He dedicated his latest collection for Louis Vuitton to her.Inevitably, a fundamental synchronicity emerged. The maharajas of Jodhpur and Jaipur were big Vuitton customers in the twenties. The timeless luxury of their palaces was an inspiration to Jones and his team. The palace guards were the starting point for the collection's variations on military garb, like an army shirt and shorts in a lustrous suede, and jumpsuits in khaki and pink, "the navy blue of India," according to style oracle Diana Vreeland. Shisha mirror-work beautifully decorated a flight suit and military bombers, every single mirror engraved with the LV logo. It was this kind of detail that testified to the designer's all-seeing eye. There were plenty more. How often do you find yourself possessed by belt buckles or buttons? It was hard not to be when they were as immaculately realized as they were here. Jones had to produce the cotton-silk Airtex lining of his jackets artisanally, because mass production has destroyed any other options.But that is really the kind of story that Louis Vuitton is always trying to tell: a connoisseur's appreciation of the rare, the precious, honed by exposure to the best of everything. Jones obsesses over fabric research. Everything, from the organza shirts to the water-resistant leather bags, testified to that. He also knows from personal experience what real travelers need. It was a shame that the audience had no idea that a couple of the cases carried in the finale opened to reveal a portable writing desk or everything a musician would require (music paper, notebooks, ink). The guitar case, on the other hand, was obvious, even if its sheepskin lining wasn't.What people see and what they don't is always going to be an issue when a collection like this is presented in the conventional way. For example, the seventies-influenced silhouette—high-waisted trousers and longer, double-breasted jackets—polarized the audience, so the big picture obscured the many wonderful details that distinguish Jones' tenure at Vuitton. But the true connoisseur won't be distracted.
25 June 2014
The steep, winding streets of Monaco are fenced up and guardrails hug every curb. The Grand Prix begins here next Thursday, but this weekend belonged to Louis Vuitton. Team LV set up a see-through tent with custom-made Pierre Paulin seating for three hundred in the Place du Palais, and Nicolas Ghesquière favorites including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jennifer Connelly, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Brit Marling, Ziyi Zhang, and Mackenzie Davis sat in the front row. All of them stood up when Prince Albert and Princess Charlene, accompanied by a battalion of security guards, walked in with Bernard Arnault.The Cruise collection, Ghesquière's second show for the LVMH powerhouse, was an elaboration of his first. He's still thinking about "a wardrobe," but these clothes were significantly more embellished than what he did for Fall, and, by extension, more playful. Ghesquière appeared to be having quite a good deal of fun: collaging mismatched prints, embroidering lace with tiny seed beads, and accessorizing with spiky silver belts and gladiator sandal-boots that inched up toward the knees. Deep pink was paired with baby pink, and caution orange with yellow and sea blue—"a game of colors," he called it. It made his debut look almost austere by comparison.At Vuitton's March show, the blinds louvered open; here, the curtains closed and moving images of water flowing over rocks, shot by the artist Ange Leccia in Corsica, began playing on the video screens installed in the floor. "I liked the spirit of the girls walking on digital water," Ghesquière said, referring to the Oceanographic Museum around the corner from the Palace. Aquatic motifs extended to the clothes. Coral branches were embroidered on a flaring, knee-length skirt, and the printed top it was paired with was decorated with two cutout portholes. Formula One, another Monégasque reference, got callouts of its own in the form of a snug racing car red leather jacket and a jersey dress printed with a checkered flag motif.Ghesquière is still liking the fit-and-flare silhouette he introduced for Fall, but there was more diversity on the runway tonight. High-waisted, slightly flaring trousers will stir memories for fans of the leg-elongating pants he used to make at Balenciaga; on the other hand, embroidered slips with scalloped hems were among the least structured things he's ever done.
And because this was a Resort collection—in stores longer than any other season—the show ran the gamut, from a sheared fur coat to jersey T-shirt dresses. The handbag offering has grown, as well: The Petite Malle now comes with a chain handle, and he's added a new, wide-mouthed bucket bag.The overriding impression was of a designer not holding back. There was an engaging new eclecticism, but it didn't come at the cost of the easiness that he established as one of his key LV codes back in March. The sensational first look—a silk top inset with LV's classic monogram pattern embroideries and a pair of those high-waisted flares—captured that yin-yang best. Other looks, like the printed pantsuits, seem destined to garner the cult status that so much of his output has in years past. So, Ghesquière is enjoying himself at Vuitton? "I am. I'm inspired and I'm very happy." It's catching.
16 May 2014
There was a tender typewritten note from Nicolas Ghesquière on every seat at his first show for Louis Vuitton this morning. "Today is a new day. A big day…Words cannot express exactly how I am feeling at this moment…Above all, immense joy." Emotions were high in the crowd, too. Few designers are as beloved, respected, or copied as Ghesquière is, and he's been off the scene and badly missed since his departure from Balenciaga a year and a half ago. Only Raf Simons' debut at Dior was as breathlessly anticipated as Ghesquière's at Vuitton. They're the jewels in Bernard Arnault's LVMH crown, and Arnault was in the front row today, seated alongside Princess Charlene of Monaco and other lights from the worlds of film (Catherine Deneuve), art (Cindy Sherman), and fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier, for whom Ghesquière worked early on, turned up, as curious as the rest of us to see what the new LV, after fourteen years of Marc Jacobs at the helm, would look like.As the metal blinds of the Cour Carree show space opened to bright sun, Freja Beha Erichsen emerged in a black leather snap-front coat with a wide caramel-colored collar, carrying the new Petite Malle bag, a miniature LV trunk at her fingertips. The coat's flared A-line cut and abbreviated thigh-high hem was the show's predominant silhouette, but if that shape cued a 1960s vibe, the workmanship was 21st-century state of the art. "The knowledge of the team is extraordinary, the best of the world," Ghesquière said afterward, clearly delighted to be back at the red-hot center of things. You won't find a more luxurious coat than the black crocodile shown here, despite its industrial zip front, or a jacket as well made as the one he patchworked in different colored leathers.Naturally, there were a lot of skins, a lot of suede, a lot of leather, and naturally Ghesquière used them in innovative ways. A pair of cool evening looks had molded leather bodices and knit skirts aswirl with hand-cut feathers. Elsewhere, the designer's famous flair for experimentation was somewhat scaled back. (That mostly holds true for the bags as well, save for a double-handled style that in fact came with just one handle.) "I will not say it was effortless, but it was a much more natural and easy process," he went on. "I listened to the girls in the studio a lot, the women around me, what they want, what they need.
" That came across in an outfit like the checked three-button blazer accompanied by glossy leather jeans and a red cardigan with a frilly white collar underneath, and in another that consisted of a white turtleneck, a trim black jacket, and a skirt in wool and crinkly leather, the new LV suit. And in a third that was as straightforward as a ski sweater and a belted A-line mini can be. Skirts and dresses were squarely the focus, yet fans of Ghesquière's life-changing trousers could take heart at the sight of a high-waisted style into which he tucked a khaki jacket. In any case, there will be plenty of seasons for pants. This was a great beginning, understated but not without power, for Ghesquière and the new Louis Vuitton.
4 March 2014
Kim Jones nearly died for Louis Vuitton. His research trip to the Atacama Desert in Chile—the oldest and highest desert on earth—coincided with the windy season. The tiny plane he flew in on was so savagely buffeted by updrafts, downdrafts, and everything in between that he'd have said prayers if he thought they would have helped. But he landed safely, absorbed the Mars-like lack of atmosphere, and returned to Paris with a new collection germinating in his mind.Jones, the son of a geologist, has been mesmerized all his life by the intricate miracles of the natural world. Now, as style director of Louis Vuitton's menswear, he has the resources at his fingertips to alchemize his passion into physical objects. As challenging as Atacama was—and Cuzco and Nazca and Machu Picchu and the other places he visited on his research trip—Jones found a wealth of inspiration in the colors of the landscape and the crafts and the cloths of the indigenous population. They helped shape the Vuitton collection he showed today. The venue, for instance, was transformed top to bottom, hand-painted with an aerial image of Atacama. And the Andes loomed from the first look, a double-face cashmere coat striped like a traditional Chilean dress, with buttons of stone resembling the stones on the plains of Nazca. Draped over one shoulder was a long scarf woven from wool and alpaca.Alpaca, native to Chile and Peru, was a cornerstone of the collection, fuzzing up the front of a sweater and a cashmere coat, woven into blanket stripes for a blouson. But Jones rolled out thereallybig guns with a handful of pieces made from the wool of another Andean native, the vicuña, rarest of the rare, ludicrously luxurious. So much so, in fact, that the vicuña coat, blouson, and lounging suits will be available only as part of Vuitton's made-to-order service.If there was paradox in ultimate luxury being extracted from some of the poorest regions of the world, there was also affirmation of the questing spirit that drives the true traveler to such extremes. That's the spirit Jones has brought to Vuitton. And it doesn't stop with souvenirs of his physical trips. This collection had not just the obvious luxury of the Andean fibers, but also the surprise of a parka in silk, not nylon; of track pants in super-light shearling rather than some high-performance synthetic; and of a trenchcoat reversing from gray cashmere to camel silk.
Jones also transformed Vuitton's signature Damier check, reconfiguring it in a deep cobalt blue. A travel bag and wallet in the cobalt Damier are available online now.
15 January 2014
Nicolas Ghesquière will present his first collection for Louis Vuitton at the Fall shows in Paris come early March. The label presented the Pre-Fall lineup, produced by the in-house design team, here in New York. The collection married whimsy with a nod to chic practicality. On the one hand, there were chunky sweaters stitched with giant sequined logos, graffiti print dresses, and bold furs intarsia'd with the brand's famous LV initials. On the other, there were new interpretations of the suit. But the team had their fun with these, as well, mismatching colors and embellishing jackets with crystals and fur. A tweed and green leather bomber and miniskirt had a lot of cheek, as did the logo-stamped, over-the-knee boots they were paired with.That sense of play extended into the Icons range of more casual items. Designed for travel, most of the outerwear pieces, including the great-looking shearlings, were reversible. Pants zipped off into Bermudas and sweaters became sleeveless vests. Also fun: camouflage-patterned knitwear and embossed leather and fur moon boots.
8 January 2014
Fade to black. After months of speculation about the status of Marc Jacobs' contract at Louis Vuitton, the writing was on the wall today. The staging of the show re-created many of the sets from his sixteen-year tenure at the LVMH-owned house: the elevators, the escalators, the carousel, the fountain, last season's hotel corridors—they were all there, a reminder of the designer's extraordinary showmanship, only rendered this time in shades of black. After the show, Jacobs confirmed that he and his business partner, Robert Duffy, would be leaving the French luxury goods house. It's said that they will focus on an IPO of the Marc Jacobs company, in which LVMH is also an investor.So it was good-bye today on the runway. But despite the mournful implications of the all-black clothes, it didn't feel like a sad affair. Jacobs dedicated the collection to the many women who've touched or influenced him during his decade and a half in Paris, including designer muses Coco Chanel, Rei Kawakubo, and Miuccia Prada. You saw bits and pieces of their work in this collection, in addition to callbacks to his own greatest hits. "To the showgirl in all of us," was how he signed off his program notes.Among the forty-one looks, some more than others resembled showgirl clothes, but nearly all of them were elaborately ornamented with combinations of jet beads, crystals, and glossy feathers. Each and every one of the models wore an extravagant Stephen Jones-designed headpiece of ostrich plumes. And yet you could feel the influence of the street in the same way you did at Jacobs' New York show. That had a lot to do with the flat shoes that the models padded along in on the Mongolian lamb rugs; the heavily embellished biker jackets (instant collector's items, those); and a not-insignificant emphasis on denim, both the faded blue variety worn underneath tulle tank dresses with a twenties spirit, and in crafty patchworks of black paired with mannish blazers. Jacobs seemed to be making a point with those all-Americanisms, and a timely one at that, given his imminent refocusing on his own New York-born brand. It was perhaps no surprise that the American press led the standing ovation.Jacobs reversed the fortunes of Louis Vuitton, and whatever the behind-the-scenes negotiations of the past few months, he and Duffy appear to be leaving on good terms. There were heartfelt hugs all around backstage.
But don't forget, the designer raised some hell along the way, and he didn't completely shy away from a little provocation here either. Naked save for a G-string and the Stephen Sprouse-designed LV logo scrawled all over her body, Edie Campbell made her runway circuit in handcuffs and chains. Among the many challenges that will face Jacobs' successor at Vuitton, when he or she is eventually named, will be living up to a fearless, fabulous moment like that.
1 October 2013
Kim Jones' natural habitat is the open road—he has terminal itchy feet. For him, the ultimate luxury is the freedom to up and go. Louis Vuitton, the company he works for, has a rather different approach to luxury. But their points of view have proved extremely compatible in the two years since Jones became style director of Vuitton's Men's Studio, working under the artistic direction of Marc Jacobs. The reason is simple: Kim and Louis both like to travel well. And today's show offered another 41 reasons why.That's because it took 41 looks for Jones to road-trip across America. Or maybe make that 41 archetypes: preppy, broker, frat boy, gas jockey, scout, hippie, greaser, trust fund baby, and so on. In each case, the style was touched by the Vuitton ateliers. Tie-dye became something sumptuous and dark, rather than a muslin boiled up on the stove by an earth mother. The scout's cotton drill parka was archly sewn with badges and souvenir pennants announcing his mastery of all things Vuitton, and the coat's elbow patches were crocodile. A pastel prom jacket was woven from kimono silk. The varsity jacket was silk, too, and a denim jean jacket was actually suede.Effortful though the production process may have been, there was a natural ease to everything, which the styling of the show emphasized. Wall Street–ready suits were worn with casually knotted bandannas. Sporty outerwear wrapped slender tailoring. Look closely and you might notice clothes pegs attached to lapels. Jones was thinking of the ordinary little things you pick up as souvenirs (Vuitton's come in sterling silver and mahogany).The last outfit was an evening look, with a jacket whose luminous LV jacquard glittered like fireflies. Its natural habitat would be a Palm Springs patio or a penthouse in Vegas. Not exactly the open road. But the fact that Kim Jones can relate to the individual who would crave such a thing—and might that be David Beckham, in the front row today?—just as well as he'll relate to the next tribesman he runs into on the veld is the foundation stone for the future of the Vuitton man.
26 June 2013
Louis Vuitton's women's design director Julie de Libran said her inspiration this season was "the French girl." As a card-carrying member of that tribe, she knows the subject well. "She's a sophisticated bohemian," de Libran went on. "She likes to mix and match, and combine comfort and sensuality." Her shoe of choice is a clog or a loafer or a flat sandal.To start, de Libran showed a series of denim pieces: a great-looking double-breasted pantsuit, a drop-waist chambray dress topped by a white satin blazer, and a jacket and trousers that combined nubby indigo tweed with leather. Denim might not traditionally be the most Gallic of fabrics, but what she did with it earned the French appellationchic.Cool is cool in both English and French, and it was the guiding principle for everything from the T-shirt-and-mini combination that the designer dubbed Vuitton's "new suit" to the double-faced men's coat she tossed over a vintage-feeling floral frock. De Libran has a subtle way of synthesizing ideas Marc Jacobs introduces on the runway. This collection's prettiest dress, in a black-and-white wallpaper motif, looked like a real-world riff on the embroidered tulle showstopper Kate Moss modeled for Fall.
12 June 2013
The scene Marc Jacobs set at his evocative show for Louis Vuitton this morning was that of a grand hotel. Out of fifty numbered rooms lining the runway, models emerged in varying states of dress and undress. One wore a flower-embroidered double-breasted jacket and matching briefs with her platform sandals and fifties wig, an echo of a silhouette Jacobs showed in New York nearly three weeks ago. The pajamas of that collection reemerged here as well. More often, though, he conveyed a sense of intimacies exposed—the walk of shame, some called it, which fits with what he was saying backstage about our exhibitionistic and voyeuristic tendencies. There were lace-edged negligees under sweeping astrakhan coats, printed silk brassiere-and-slip sets, and peignoirs lined with plush fur. Daywear, too, evoked the boudoir: Skirtsuits were stitched with degradé embroideries, deep feather hems decorated oversize men's coats.Jacobs has taken us to hotels before—the quartet of old-fashioned cage elevators from his Fall ’11 Claridge's collection lingers in the memory. But where that show had an erotic undercurrent of sex, the takeaway today was more romantic. Back then, Kate Moss wore hot pants; here she was in a long-sleeve tulle dress embroidered with flowers. This was a romance with intimations of decadence and melancholy, though: Only the very indulged or the very depressed stay in their jammies all day. For his bow, Jacobs wore the pj's from Vuitton's recent men's collection, which feature Jake and Dinos Chapman's print interpretation of Diana Vreeland's Garden in Hell apartment. That's a choice ripe for interpretation. You couldn't blame him for wanting a nap, given his myriad responsibilities. On the other hand, with his fiftieth birthday coming up next month, perhaps he's simply achieved a greater sense of relaxation. Afterward, the designer shrugged off any special meaning. "I haven't worn anything else for months," he said.The clothes on the runway were lovely, with their muted, sleepy colors and the deluxe details that Vuitton does so well.Luxurywas the word for the bags, too, which were Vuitton classics like the Speedy, the Lockit, and the Pochette Accessoires in materials that included marabou feathers and waxed crocodile. If the collection felt less provocative than usual, in spite of the suggestion of illicit goings-on behind closed hotel-room doors, that's emblematic of a season in which designers have turned en masse to the look of midcentury clothes.
That could have been prompted by last season's Miu Miu collection, but Jacobs has never hidden his affection for the work of Miuccia Prada. If the Vuitton designer is comfortably part of the pack this season, the clothes were none the worse for that.
5 March 2013
Kim Jones has centuries of National Geographic secreted in his hidey-hole. The man is a natural-history buff to give David Attenborough a run for his money. The fact that he is also Louis Vuitton's men's studio and style director only adds extraordinary layers to his passion for nature. Imagine how he felt as he researched the latest men's collection for Vuitton in the Himalayas, hiking through the Bhutanese cloud forest, the only place in the world where tigers and snow leopards cross paths. Ah yes, it's a designer's life.But Jones is a connoisseur of life in all its forms. He understands luxury. The snow leopard he so loves made its presence felt in the first look of today's show: a cashmere coat with an underlay of mink that had been needle-punched through to the surface to make a pattern of snow leopard spots. The tone was set: technical expertise meets extravagance. Jones said that the goal was to introduce elements of LV's bread-and-butter leather goods into the clothes. You could imagine a bag being cut from a single hide, but a cocoon coat? How big was that animal? The seamless modernity of the result was compounded by laser-cut slash pockets. It was the same with a puffa made from reindeer leather, or a parka trimmed with a wide band of VVT (Vache Végétal Teinté), the result of Vuitton's environmentally sound means of leather production.Bhutan's ethnic dress has only ten patterns for checks and stripes. Picture a Nat Geo-phile like Jones going haywire for the possibilities presented by such limits. They were here in the Bhutanese stripes of a duffel or a poncho. The designer wanted them to stand for the things that travelers return home with. At the same time, he commissioned Dinos and Jake Chapman, Brit-art provocateurs par excellence, to make images that would translate across clothing and accessories. Their snow leopard sweater was benign. Their Garden in Hell print was something else, a luxuriously graphic rendition of flora and fauna with fangs, rendered in silk jackets, robes, and lounging pajamas. The tux will never be the same. Nor will the carpetbag, so densely, intensely clotted with needle-punched embroidery that it was a work of art walking.If those extremes defined the personality of Jones as a designer, the cufflinks carved from stones lifted from Everest said something about him as a dreamer. And he certainly reached the top of that mountain with today's collection.
16 January 2013
The Bride Wore Black.It's a long way from the sunny optimism of Marc Jacobs' Spring show for Louis Vuitton to François Truffaut's famous movie. Vuitton's women's studio director, Julie de Libran, found inspiration in the 1968 film, and it gave the label's pre-fall collection a decidedly darker mood.Vampywas the word de Libran used, which makes sense. The only thing that was in more abundance than the color black was lace. Not just lace the fabric, which she used for a comparatively simple shift dress with patch pockets in suede and mink, but also lace prints and lace jacquards and lace debossing (embossing, but in reverse) techniques on silk twill. She packed a lot of textures into each outfit, and she had a lot to say in terms of silhouette, as well.Lifting jackets from the Spring collection, she exaggerated their proportions, extending the shoulder seams and puffing up the sleeves. The squared-off, slightly two-dimensional results had an oversize, masculine feel, on the one hand, and on the other, suggested flat doll's clothes. Slightly challenging, in other words. It probably came off best with the swingy red "circle" coat that fell in an A-line trapeze from the shoulders.She took a more classic approach to the Icons portion of the collection. Tops here were a pair of reversible shearling jackets.
8 January 2013
Pop! Paris fashion week finished this morning with a six-minute Louis Vuitton show as energizing as it was brief. Marc Jacobs makes it look so easy. The mod, sixties-ish shapes, the eye-grabbing checks, all those miles of legs gliding around on sharp little heels. The girls walked out in pairs—models of efficiency!Les Deux Plateaux, a famous installation piece in the Palais Royal by the artist Daniel Buren with columns arranged in a grid, gave Jacobs his starting point. The columns' three different heights suggested the show's three lengths—mini, midi, and maxi. Buren also collaborated with Vuitton on today's fabulous set, with its four escalators emptying out on a giant yellow and white check runway.Vuitton's famous Damier provided the template for the checks—both large and small. Even the floral embroideries were stitched in mini-squares, and the house's iconic Speedy bag got cubed, too. The checks gave this collection a graphic immediacy not unlike that of Jacobs' signature line in New York, where stripes ruled. A month ago, that show got fashion watchers talking about the new minimalism. Backstage today, the designer said, "After the romance of the train and storytelling, this felt like something very powerful without telling a story. I was like, yeah, let's have a grid." A flash of flat tummy between bandeau top and maxi skirt and hipbones jutting out from a cropped jacket and a lean pencil skirt ensured that the collection didn't feel cold, despite its comparative lack of emotion. The sunshine yellow worked its optimistic magic, too.For a finale, the models streamed down the four escalators like an army of grown-up Diane Arbus twins. The show was a kick. It was also a corrective response to the excesses of last season and a reminder, during a Paris week when other design stars are hogging the spotlight, that Jacobs is as agenda-setting as ever.
2 October 2012
Next year marks the 30th anniversary of the Louis Vuitton Cup, prelude to the America's Cup, so it was the perfect moment for Kim Jones to take LV to sea in his third season as Men's Style Director for the house. He added sport to LV's two totems, travel and luxury, and made a collection that could carry the Vuitton adventurer from scuba-diving to yachting to full-moon raving to a tux-clad dinner under the stars.Jones is a born storyteller in clothes, leading his man from deluxe double-breasted tailoring to a weekend mood (scarcely less deluxe in a superlight crocodile hoodie) before sending him sailing away in his yellow slicker and what looked like a leather life vest. There was a very practical backpacking passage. But the Vuitton m.o. is nothing by halves, so this traveler would likely be hitching a ride on a luxury yacht, where he could model his cashmere neoprene "wet" suit (the very idea being the best illustration yet of Jones' awed declaration, "Nothing is impossible at Louis Vuitton").The designer insisted his own travels in Indonesia and Thailand infused the collection, but the souvenirs he included actually came from Japan, in the form of items made using the ancient artisanal technique ofboro,which creates and sustains fabrics though a never-ending cycle of loving repair. If the patched, worn boro jackets, shirts, and shorts stood out like sore thumbs in the midst of all the surrounding sleekness, they were the clearest testament to Jones' imagination and creativity. And even after he'd brought his sailor man safely back to the suits and blazers of his home city, he still managed to gift him with a jacket in the most form-flattering chenille organza, and a bright white suit in an unlined double-weave voile whose softness—and whose mother-of-pearl buttons—would remind the adventurer of sandy beaches he'd known and loved.
27 June 2012
Louis Vuitton's women's design director Julie de Libran can rattle off the references almost as fast as her boss Marc Jacobs can. For Resort, which she presented in a mini fashion show format at the DIA's old space in Chelsea, she cited Catherine Deneuve inIndochineandLa Sirène du Mississippias inspiration. In both films, Deneuve keeps her French cool—"put-together, elegant, and sensual," de Libran said—despite the stifling heat.The clothes here hewed more closely to the layered look that Jacobs established at LV's show in March than they did to the style of those films, but the "put-together" idea fits. This was a sweet, feminine collection all about ensemble dressing: a drop-waist printed silk dress worn over matching cropped pants; an elongated vest and flared trousers, both in a red and white dot, paired with a broderie anglaise tunic; a sheared mink the same color of candy pink and brown as the pants and polo sweater it accompanied. Where the Fall collection riffed on the Edwardian era, this had more of a seventies vibe—a decade that's been getting a lot of play with designers this season. Towering straw platforms and wide-brimmed raffia visors accompanied many of the looks. Other outfits were accessorized with crystal tiaras.If those seemed a tad frivolous, Vuitton is plenty serious about a new made-to-order service. In a salon at the Fifth Avenue flagship, clients can customize their handbag from five silhouettes and many different leathers and linings. There are 40,000-some possible combinations.
13 June 2012
How do you follow up a merry-go-round? If you're Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, you get your people to build an old-fashioned train car. From scratch. The steam engine it was attached to pulled into the Cour Carrée a few minutes after ten this morning. One by one, Jacobs' models de-boarded wearing outfits straight out of the golden age of railroading, followed by porters carrying as many as three bags per girl. The news on the bag front this season is their oversize proportions and exotic fabrications. "It's just a trip," Jacobs said afterward, but you could tell even he was chuffed by the grand spectacle of it all.Longtimers in the crowd remembered a John Galliano couture show for Dior, the one where a train stuffed with supermodels steamed its way into Paris' Gare d'Austerlitz. The more interesting echo today was with Miuccia Prada's show in Milan, where she too put skirts, dresses, and coat-dresses—likewise embellished with enormous crystals—over cropped pants and platform pumps. Here, as there, the elongated silhouette created by all that layering was quite strong—Stephen Jones' squashed hats added a good six inches of height.Even if the look didn't strike you as a modern proposal, there was plenty to marvel at, from the kangaroo leather swatches patchworked together into a checkerboard of matte and shine to the kaleidoscopic application of holographic baubles on brocade. Only a house with the high-techiest technologies at its disposal could pull off that kind of embroidery.During a post-show interview conducted on board the train, Jacobs said he was interested in "things looking like they were from another time." The exhibitionLouis Vuitton—Marc Jacobs, opening at Les Arts Décoratifs tonight, which tells the tale of the two men's contributions to the megabrand, clearly had Jacobs thinking about the company's nineteenth-century origins and travel heritage—and how to make the synergistic most of them.Fifteen years into his tenure at Vuitton, he's not just one of the world's most fanciful designers and extraordinary showmen, he's also a damn smart businessman.
6 March 2012
A sophomore endeavor in the glare of the spotlight is never easy. Think second books, second albums, second movies. To sharpen the challenge for Kim Jones, Louis Vuitton draws one hell of a spotlight. But in his second season as director of the men's studio for the brand, Jones aced it. The job agrees with him. He loves travel, which is Vuitton's lifeblood. He has a connoisseur's sensibility, again, a Vuitton signature. But Jones also has the kind of endlessly engaged, curatorial attitude to his world that can make memorably graphic connections between people, places, and times. This collection, for example, he called "a tale of two cities," Paris and Tokyo, capitals of culture that have enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship. Georges Vuitton, son of Louis himself, was inspired by Japanese floral paintings while he was developing the iconic monogram.But Jones was also thinking about a different kind of bridge for Vuitton. He has always loved Antonio Lopez, the fashion illustrator whose visual style helped define the seventies and eighties. Lopez was, according to Jones, one of the first fashion people to ever go to Japan and use its inspiration in his work. He was also an alumnus of the High School of Art and Design in New York. So is Marc Jacobs, Vuitton's Number One. All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the point that Vuitton's latest menswear collection made the kind of connections Jones relishes. And that's even before we get to the fact that Giorgio Moroder, Mister Disco himself, introduced the show, vocoder vox and all, before pressing the button on a soundtrack of his classics.Under a giant silver globe (for some reason, it echoedScarface, but maybe that was just because Moroder, who scored the movie, was in the house), Jones marched a consummate collection of new international style down the catwalk. The materials alone took you on a journey: a camel coat with kangaroo fur collar, a trench with crocodile patches, a coat cut from a Vuitton travel blanket, shoes of astrakhan, and, most of all, exquisite silks that had been woven outside Tokyo in a place recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The weaving process is so agonizingly ritualized by tradition that they can produce only 20 centimeters a day. And yet here were whole suits and kimono shirts cut from the stuff. The shirts were used under jackets instead of waistcoats, "a replacement of the three-piece," said Jones.
But counterpointing this traditional stuff were the most advanced techno fabrics, also from Japan. They were cut into reflective outerwear that harked back to Jones' own collections.There was detail in the collection that made the head spin—Antonio's feather and arrow motifs were reproduced by couture ateliers (the feathers hand-painted in the company's Gaston color scheme), locks on bags were covered in tiny leather sheaths modeled on the signs of the Chinese zodiac. It's that curatorial thing again. But today it was also the genuine pleasure of an eye for detail meeting a bottomless pocket. The result was a stellar sophomore outing.
18 January 2012
Disney's "It's a Small World" was playing at Louis Vuitton's presentation. It's a fitting message; few brands have the global reach of this powerhouse. For pre-fall, design director Julie de Libran opted to expand on the house codes established since Marc Jacobs moved in and began designing ready-to-wear for the company nearly 14 years ago. And she did that through the lens of Charlotte Perriand, the late architect and designer who's as well-known in France for her personal style as for her prodigious output between the wars.That meant that the clothes had a vaguely 1940's feel, with menswear checks bonded to duchesse satin to produce the softened, slightly rounded shapes of car coats and skirtsuits. It also gave de Libran a reason to put a military spin on the proceedings. Trompe l'oeil frogging details dressed up both a baby-doll dress belted high on the waist and a princess coat. As for other house codes, the iconic Stephen Sprouse leopard print made an encore performance on a sharp mohair jacquard pantsuit. The charm factor was high here—see the studded and grommeted berets and the shoes with tufts of fur spilling out. Most important to the brand, however, is the reintroduction of the Papillon bag. Now in a mini size, the cylindrical tote came "debossed" with the LV logo. The world is full of embossed monogram bags, after all.
11 January 2012
The carousel that team Louis Vuitton set up in the Louvre's Cour Carrée was echt Marc Jacobs. The designer has made an art form of the fashion 180. Last season's fetish-y rubber boots sold 2,000 pairs in the first week they were available, Jacobs reported, but he was ready for a change nonetheless. "After the hardness of Fall, we wanted something gentle and kind, fragile but strong, too," he said, touting the workmanship that went into not only the clothes but also the bags. Matte crocodile coats painstakingly hand-pieced together so that the scales match; an eggshell lacquer bag made with the assistance of the last man in Paris still in command of the 1920's technique. That sort of devotion to craft would come in handy were Jacobs to land the top design spot at Christian Dior and the couture atelier that comes with it. No?If anyone wondered whether Jacobs wants that gig, his pavé diamond wishbone necklace (a good luck charm, he called it) sealed the deal. Same goes for the clothes. Squint and you could see the vague outlines of Dior's New Look "Bar" suit in a minty green checked cotton nylon jacket and skirt. But it wasn't quite as literal as all that. What lingers about the collection is just how sweet it was—everything candy-colored and much of it trimmed with big lacy collars or oversize white buttons. Broderie anglaise dresses came veiled in pastel shades of organza; laser-cut lace tops and skirts were sealed in silk cellophane—the suggestion being, perhaps, that the contents were too precious to be unwrapped. After an interlude of matte crocodile motorcycle jackets that fell short of edgy in their icy pastel colors, Jacobs affixed 3-D plastic paillettes to dresses with crystals and embellished tweed skirtsuits with ombré feathers.The fashion merry-go-round keeps spinning, but there was one constant with his Fall show: Kate Moss was the last girl standing on the runway. We don't know yet if this was Jacobs' Vuitton swan song, but just in case, might as well make the parting shot count.
4 October 2011
Kim Jones' debut as men's style director at Louis Vuitton today was a coup similar to the one achieved by Vuitton's artistic director, Marc Jacobs, 14 years ago. A union that seemed unlikely on the surface turned out in actuality to be a relationship of remarkable, intimate compatibility. In the four months since he was appointed to the position, Jones and his team managed to turn out a collection that wove his own history into Vuitton's heritage. The common bond? Travel. Vuitton has always been the traveler's brand. Jones grew up in Kenya, and his life since has been defined by a nomadic spirit.But the personality of his first LV collection was just as contingent on Jones' famous connoisseurship of pop culture (made obvious by a front row that included Kanye West, Lily Allen, and Michael Stipe). He'd been thinking about photographer Peter Beard, the once-gorgeous Kennedy-like apogee of American aristocracy whose life and work have been devoted to the Africa that Jones is equally enamored of. (The show was tracked by Talking Heads' "I Zimbra.") Like Beard, the consummate WASP gone native, the collection ran a gamut from city suits to tribal textures. A Masai blanket Jones has at home as a souvenir of his East African childhood inspired an extraordinary passage of cornea-searing blue-and-red plaids. Wild alligator was tamed in a jacket paired with pajama-striped pants. Crocodile was revisited as a varsity jacket with sleeves in navy cotton canvas. There were gold and navy tops in shimmering raffia.Underscoring Jones' achievement was the fact that the more "western" pieces were equally seductive. The tailoring felt fresh and youthful, and the designer had effortlessly cracked the codes of the house with the easy, functional luxury of pieces like the tan Harrington with leather-ribbed cuffs and waistband, or the suede parka that folded away into its own pac-a-mac bag. And, for get-up-and-go ingenuity, the sandals that packed flat and snapped into shape were hard to beat. Jones showed them with his midnight blue silk mohair evening suits, just to make the point that traveling light need not mean traveling low-rent. Anyway, that would be next to impossible with any one of the bags that accompanied the clothes. From tobacco-toned totes to festival-ready knapsacks, the luggage danced attendance on a new dawn for Louis Vuitton's menswear.
22 June 2011
The Four Seasons restaurant's pool was lined with a real grass runway, tables were set with macaroons, and Kirsten Dunst mingled with the crowd. Louis Vuitton went all-out for its Resort presentation this morning, and there was a good reason. Sofia Coppola, a longtime friend of Marc Jacobs (she said she's known him for nearly 20 years when she gave him his Lifetime Achievement Award at Monday night's CFDA festivities), collaborated with Vuitton design director Julie de Libran on the line. "Julie and I are friends," theSomewheredirector said after the show. "We like the same things, jewelry, little dresses. I chimed in with things that I wanted to have, and she was open to that."There were plenty of baubles and frocks in this whimsical collection, which was as unlike LV's fetish-inspired Fall outing as can be, and, it probably goes without saying, a good deal more wearable because of it. LV pendants dangled from long gold chains; big, bejeweled cuffs accessorized both wrists; and heart earrings dangled from lobes. As for dresses, the mood was Parisienne,trèsParisienne—see the white and red Eiffel Tower-print shift. Prints, in fact, were one of the show's big stories; the best was a Stephen Sprouse-style graffiti motif that decorated a pajama set and its coordinating helmet. No word on whether Vuitton is making the Vespa to match, but we bet Coppola could have it arranged if she likes.
7 June 2011
The Fall collections ended today as they began nearly a month ago, with Marc Jacobs in arch provocateur mode, exploring and exploding the meaning of fetishes. In New York, the designer sported a latex T-shirt under his button-down; in Paris at Louis Vuitton, it was a miniature plastic mask of the sort that decorated the models' hats—peaked caps in the manner of Charlotte Rampling inThe Night Porter. Backstage, Jacobs explained that the fetish idea came from a conversation with LVMH's Bernard Arnault about women's "inexplicable" (his word, not ours) obsession with bags. "And that got us started thinking about passions, and any of the disciplines that require effort and work and commitment," he said.Disciplined is one word for this season's LV collection; kink is another, but more on that in a minute. First, the silhouette: If the sculpted jackets, blouses that buttoned up the back, and below-the-knee pencil skirts were a few millimeters more forgiving than the ones at MJ last month, they were bisected by waist-defining belts in shiny cordovan. Pants weren't a focus of this collection, but the ones Jacobs did show had a jodhpur shape—the discipline of dressage. And puff-sleeved, Peter Pan-collared French maid uniforms came tricked out in plasticized lace or decorated with appliqués in the shape of platform pumps, masks, and handcuffs. As for the kink, where to start? There were rubber dominatrix boots (instant hits, those), see-through flasher macs, and let's not forget the lace-ups that exposed a bare expanse of Kate Moss' thighs below retro briefs.Moss, waving a cigarette and smoking in every sense, was only the super-est of the supes on the polished black runway. Naomi, Amber, and Carolyn all came out for Jacobs. The set was a feat in and of itself, complete with four working lifts and a porter for each, and a staircase on each side. It could've been an expensive hotel, circa the forties, and the girls high-paid escorts.Their bag of tricks this season was the reinterpreted 1958 top-handle Lockit bag, sometimes affixed to the models' wrists with diamond handcuffs. We know of very few designers who can simultaneously pump out the product—in this case, many multi-thousand-dollar luxury handbags—and provoke like Jacobs can.
8 March 2011
The newLouis Vuittoncollection was basic black in palette and mood, appropriate given that Paul Helbers, who heads the menswear design team, was inspired by the monochromatic dress sense of the Amish and the disturbing oeuvre of David Lynch. That recipe for a split personality was served on a runway wreathed in shadow, to the tune of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" (which, after its appearance in Lynch'sBlue Velvet, probably still soundtracks some people's nightmares twenty-something years later).One central conceit of the collection was the doubled jacket, as in a lush shearling that trailed an attached leather parka like a tail, or a jacket that had a puffa vest built into it. One suit left its vest dangling in back. It was part of an ensemble—jacket, pants, shirt, and dangling puffa—in a flaming vermilion the polar opposite of the somber shades that otherwise dominated proceedings. The show notes called it Motel Red. And the splits just kept on coming.A Motel Red blouson unzipped to reveal a peek of quilted black leather (Lynch's motels concealed dark secrets, too). The footwear was schizophrenia in a shoe. And the final evening jacket in dusty black dévoré velvet looked well and truly worn in, almost Amish in its sobriety, bar the sprinkle of sequins that added a sparkle of sin. It was the last flicker of light in a suitably strange parade.
19 January 2011
IntroducingLouis Vuitton's pre-fall collection, design director Julie de Libran explained that its genesis was an exhibit of Louise Bourgeois' last fabric works in Venice. De Libran went on to reference the 1920's and thirties,les garconnes, and Art Deco, calling the lineup a "liberated wardrobe for a woman who goes out to conquer the world." That's a lot to live up to, but the clothes shown at LVMH's 57th Street Magic Room measured up to their billing. That's assuming, of course, that the LV woman's bank account is as liberated as she is—these clothes are seriously luxe. Of particular note was an inventive fur-collared coat that combined navy shearling and woven striped wool reminiscent of Bourgeois' textiles. The prints on jersey wrap dresses, meanwhile, evoked the style of the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka. And you could see shades of Chanel's Deauville in the tweeds used for a skirtsuit and an elongated pantsuit.Despite the decades separating this collection's inspiration and the 1970's of the Spring Vuitton show, you could make connections—the twenties and thirties, of course, influenced the Me Decade. A striped sequin sack dress with a drawstring waist glittered a little less brightly than Marc Jacobs' opulent party frocks did, but there was plenty of razzle-dazzle in a flapper dress dripping with beads.
10 January 2011
On every guest's seat at Louis Vuitton was a single piece of paper with a quote from a famous Susan Sontag essay: "The relation between boredom and camp taste cannot be overestimated," it said. But if Marc Jacobs' Spring show bordered on camp, boring it wasn't—not with all the desirable party clothes he put on the catwalk. Backstage, with glitter all over his face (residue from a hug with Kristen McMenamy, whose torso was painted with black and white zebra stripes), Jacobs was talking about Art Deco, Art Nouveau, orientalism, and the first designer he ever worked for, Kansai Yamamoto. "Basically, I didn't want anything natural," he said. "I wanted everything overly stylized."There wasn't one dull surface in the show. That goes for the faux marble runway and the gold and black fringed curtains, next to which were perched three giant taxidermic tigers. And it goes for the clothes: cheongsams swishing with fringe; a Lurex halter worn with an LV monogram lace skirt (with fan to match); metallic-shot dresses with sequin sashes from waist to hip; and animal-head sweaters—an homage to Kansai—picked out in sequins. As for the de rigueur bags, they were smaller than last season's Speedys, but hardly understated—especially those patent clutches with "Vuitton" embroidered in rhinestone block letters.Not unlike his seventies-inflected signature show back in New York more than three weeks ago, this was a flat-out refusal of the minimalism that was all over last season's runways, his own included. (It might also have been a play for the burgeoning Far East market, although it's debatable whether the aspirational Chinese customer wants to look like a "China Girl.") In any case, Jacobs these days does nothing by halves. If it was brazen in its decadence, this show was also a hell of a lot of fun.
5 October 2010
For his new collection, Paul Helbers, men's studio director for Louis Vuitton, imagined a digital bohemian traveling the world via his computer screen, composing an eclectic personal style with no boundaries. Helbers' "head trip," as he called it, incorporated hints of a pan-global sensibility into a look that was still very Louis Vuitton—quietly luxe clothes for the well-heeled contemporary traveler.As promised by the helicopter roar that launched the show, the journey was less head trip than pond skip across a range of references: a little Chinese quilting; some abstracted animal prints; a suggestion of extreme sports in a laced parachute jacket or a cream quilted fencing jacket; a bit of safari in a curry-colored camp shirt. Though restraint is generally his byword, this modern adventurer does occasionally want to break out, as in an eruption of parakeet green that disrupted the flow of neutrals.Certain items were treated with extreme prejudice, like a leather jacket "tattooed" with undulating grooves, or a parka that had been "sun-distressed" to seersucker translucence. True, these were subtle flourishes, but that is Helbers' strength. Who knew that self-belting pants could be such a source of fascination? They are when he designs them with such precision. And as for the footwear: Not for the first time, it was the highlight of the collection.
23 June 2010
"For Fall, Marc went back to curves, the woman. This is continuing in that spirit, but going to extremes with jewelry and accessories," announced design director Julie de Libran at Louis Vuitton's Resort presentation at the Maritime Hotel. In keeping with the extremely feminine look of Marc Jacobs' Paris show, dresses in upholstery florals came with flared skirts, nipped waists, and pushed-up busts. Those looking for the "new"—a concept Jacobs has questioned of late—will fasten on a butter yellow shorts suit and the introduction of pants. A pair of high-waisted trousers in double-face navy cotton, belted over a navy lace T-shirt, had a vibe that was more seventies than fifties. As for the accessories, yes, there were oversize chain necklaces, leather driving gloves, and bold, floppy hats—all money in the bank for the powerhouse brand—butextremestill might not be the right word. Here, as at many other Resort shows in the last two weeks, the models wore easy-on-the-feet sandals and ballerina flats.
9 June 2010
On the final day of Paris, Marc Jacobs rounded off the Fall collections in more ways than one. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was one fashion show heterosexual men are going to understand. Breast-wise, it put it all on a plate—or rather a corseted, cantilevered, frill-edged balcony. "And God Created Woman" announced the program, bringing up thoughts of the era of the young Bardot, of fifties-sixties wasp waists, and circle skirts. And, inevitably, Miuccia Prada, who first broached the comeback of the curvy silhouette earlier in the season in Milan.It takes a different casting approach to do justice to the refocusing of all eyes away from legs to the plentiful bosom. Thus, Jacobs had called on Laetitia Casta, Bar Refaeli, Catherine McNeil, Karolina Kurkova, and finally Elle Macpherson, all women whose physical attributes have acted as a disqualification for fashion show participation for so long. Not that the rehabilitation of the embonpoint was vulgarly done. Jacobs framed it more as a fresh, feminine, ingenue look, with hair scraped back into high, bouncy B.B. ponytails; clean makeup; and square-toed, block-heeled pumps trimmed with flat bows—another angle on theMad Menera but this time with a charming Frenchified accent. The show swung along prettily as a fountain sprayed and jolly fifties movie music played in the middle of the tented courtyard, creating that quintessentially Parisian atmosphere, a sense of all being right in the best of all possible cities to be appreciated as a woman.If there was little to zero variety in silhouette—and the dirndl-esque petticoated skirt can't be for the many—the items and trimmings exemplified the Vuitton knack for classy detail, as in fur buttons and collars and glittery heels. And above all, this Louis Vuitton show provided a charming backdrop to display the bags. This season, it's a zillionmignonnereinterpretations of the classic Speedy. Here, that functional shape, designed in the 1930's, came flocked and sequined, smothered in guipure lace over satin, or woven in metallic thread and done up in fox.
9 March 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
20 January 2010
There weren't any Afro wigs, but the vibe at Louis Vuitton's pre-fall presentation was just as playful as at the Spring ready-to-wear show—think crocheted tube socks in place of furry clogs and micro-mini cashmere sweater dresses instead of pleated kilts. This season, the design backstory goes, the Vuitton woman has stumbled across a stash of brimming LV heritage trunks (lucky girl!). Inside them is a treasure trove of goodies, many with a 1960's slant, from a gray fox vest straight out ofLove Storyand a swingy cape cut from a vintage Vuitton blanket to reverse tweed skirtsuits and stripey handkerchief dresses. And then there are the accessories: tote bags in steel lamé jacquard lined in quilted safety orange, and evening sandals complete with fur leg muffs. The collection may be young at heart, but it's 100 percent luxe.
6 January 2010
First impression of Louis Vuitton: confusion. As editors and VIPs scrambled to take their seats in the dark, security guards in the courtyard of the Louvre were shouting, "Vite! Vite!" and maneuvering people through the doors (punctuality is the thing at this house these days). Meanwhile, models in giant Afro wigs were already trotting past several empty front-row seats. What was the look? Another calculated mix-up Jacobs later summarized as being "about travelers—the movement that came after punk. Then we were thinking about hiking, trekking, and then denim and parkas—city utilitarianism."What did that actually mean? At first sight, Japanese by way of early Galliano, though it was hard to find a definitive label for the sporty, couture-ish, military, metallic, glittery layering going on. There were brocade cycling shorts, pleated kilt-cum-belts, army-pocketed jackets, neon and nude camouflage slipdresses, and LV-stamped ombré-dyed denim looks with fringed edges. Tubular sport drawstrings were used as cross-lacing up the sides of leggings and later got chopped up and applied to body dresses in swagged appliqués vaguely reminiscent of Native American jewelry. Among the sport mesh and draping in the abbreviated prom-meets-tennis dresses, there was a flash of a brilliant green pailletted number that seemed to link back to the army subtheme (though it hardly matters where it came from, it was so cute).Apart from that, though, there was less of the sugar-coated overt luxe of the last Vuitton collection. In fact, all the action was in the super-young accessories. Toggles, tassels, and fur tails dingle-dangled off squashy backpacks and satchels, while head-turning suede peg-heeled clogs (the season's funniest take on the resurgent kitten heel) sprouted fur patches and hardware. When Jacobs took his bow, he was wearing a pair of them himself.
6 October 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
24 June 2009
The French coquettes on Louis Vuitton's Fall runway have set off for the beach. They've traded in their kinky above-the-knee lace-up boots for swashbuckling gold sequined open-toe numbers and replaced their satin and lace with nautical-stripe bustier dresses and bikinis or crisp khaki safari jackets and wide-leg, deep-cuff trousers. Bags, belts, bracelets, and shoes are trimmed with rope details, but that's about as overt as the Riviera referencing gets in this enjoyably saucy collection. A black silk plissé cocktail dress with a plunging neckline edged in gold embroidery and a tuxedo jacket that turns to reveal a sexy cutout back look just as likely to turn up at louche Paris hot spot Le Baron as they are on the boardwalk in Saint-Tropez.
17 June 2009
Marc Jacobs ended the season at Louis Vuitton in Paris as he began it with his own show in New York: with the eighties. Different city, different accent, though, and this slice of the late eighties—ruffled, ruched, and poufed as it was—looked as if Jacobs had pulled out his 1987 magazines and worked up a playful homage to Christian Lacroix. He didn't quite put it that way backstage, however. Jacobs said that, partly in preparation for theModel as Museexhibition at the Met and his role as honorary chair of the opening gala, he was thinking of "all those great French muses of the late eighties." Specifically, he cited Marie Seznec (who modeled for Lacroix), Victoire de Castellane (who worked for Chanel), and Inès de la Fressange (who was virtually French fashion mascot in chief at the time).Looking back on those days of chichi fashion extremes brought out a lot ofjeune Parisiennefrivolity in the clothes, if not the staging, which was done, pseudo-salon style, without a runway (albeit in a large transparent tent parked, as usual, in a courtyard of the Louvre). The chance of a close inspection revealed lots of puffy peplum jackets, tons of shirring and ruching (in print or leather), bubble skirts, bejeweled satin leggings, and a mini lace Marie Antoinette pannier dress with a saucy sheer balconette. Jacobs' take on big shoulders ran from grosgrain bow-smothered balloon puffs to the widest short coats (in camel or red) on any runway—almost as broad as they were long.It was also a rich accessory fest for the leather goods company. Leather necklaces and belts came fashioned like paper chains, and thigh boots were topped with ruffles and balanced on pearl and glitter-covered heels. The all-important bags had also acquired eighties pie-crust frills and gilded monograms. If it wasn't quite the fashion tour de force of Vuitton's Spring collection, this penultimate show of an often dour and cautious season read as a welcome interlude of cheerful, flirty confidence in a post-crash depression.
11 March 2009
Worlds (and decades) divide the blooming neon exuberance of Louis Vuitton's Stephen Sprouse tribute collection and the house's soberly chic pre-fall lineup, which, said women's studio director Peter Copping, was inspired by a book on Paris during World War II. Pretty print day dresses and bustier-topped party looks were shown on models who wore their hair in Veronica Lake waves, accessorized with brooches made of wood, papier-mâché, and pearls, and sported beaded socks that alluded to 1940's hosiery shortages. A sporty drawstring-waist topper and a sexy pair of skinny jersey ski pants added a modern element to the retro mood.
14 January 2009
Sexy, saucy, and full-on Parisian, somewhere out of the forties and swizzled up with a dash of glitter and Josephine Baker African razzmatazz—Louis Vuitton came like a cathartic, mood-enhancing cocktail at the end of a long, grinding season. Or as Marc Jacobs, working slicked-back hair and a sharp-shouldered pinstripe suit, had it backstage, "Little Parisienne princess, no?"Well, yes and no. As a piece of fashion defiance in the face of incoming depression, this densely worked, heavily accessorized collection held inspiration for far more women than just leggy teenagers. Where recent Louis Vuitton collections have fallen into either confusing high jinks or an exclusionary high style (like last season's eighties reprise), this one—with its multitude of tiny, flippy skirts; obi-cinched waists; glittery sweaters; padded-shoulder jackets; and elegant wide-leg pants—had something to seduce everyone.What held it together was the pitch-perfect spirit of the will to dress up in tough times. It was a suggestion rather than a theme, but there was something here of the plucky glamour of women in wartime Paris: a Deco-era palette sparkled up with showgirl glints of metallic python and crystal; crepe kilts spliced with windows of dotted net in the rear for naughtyjeune filles; sculpted-shoulder blazers and graceful high-waist pants for grown-up mesdames.And then there was the mesmerizing sight of a zillion accessories. A slew of tribal-art references came in necklaces, earrings, and stacks of bangles and amazing shoes loaded with sproutings of feathers and plastic collages of abstract African faces. The bags were back in sumptuous array: tactile, poufy shapes glowing with mixed-material suedes and multicolored metallics, python, and leopard spots. Quite brilliant.
4 October 2008
The press notes opened with a quote from Charlie Chaplin about the randomness of the way the Little Tramp, the character that made him his millions, came together. Paul Helbers, studio director for Louis Vuitton's menswear, invoked Charlie as a guiding spirit for this new collection. And Tindersticks mixed up a special soundtrack of their songs and the music for Chaplin'sCity Lights. As random as the inspiration seemed, it was clearly significant. Could it produce sparks? Well, in a word, no. "Less formal more fragile," was Helbers' intent. That translated as an icily pale color palette (a handful of charcoals and pinks excepted), lots of shorts (bare legs can look fragile on the right model), delicate fabrics like voile, and details such as "couture gathering," which pleated the back of shirts into poetically blouse-y volumes. In such a subdued context, the knitwear and accessories loomed spectacularly (this collection always excels at shoes, and Spring 2009 welcomes the apotheosis of the espadrille). And, given the inspiration that Vuitton famously offers others, there will surely be a lot of Banana Republicans who will be keen to absorb the proposals of Helbers and his team.
25 June 2008
Marc Jacobs sailed Louis Vuitton smoothly into Resort with a collection of mostly pared-down and shipshape looks. There were trim, belted coat-dresses, and sharp skirts cut from a painterly striped print commissioned from London-based illustrator Tanya Ling. Among the nip-waisted suits was one in a classic Jackie O. silhouette, cleverly freshened up in white leather with black satin bows and worn with teetering wedges. Adding some spice to the safe, ladylike lineup were sexy embellished bathing suits and colorful Grecian draped jersey looks for evening. "[They have] a Miami feeling, which is a bit of a cruise cliché," explained women's studio director Peter Copping. "But why not?"
18 June 2008
The new, punctual, be-suited Marc Jacobs stood backstage after his Louis Vuitton Fall collection and briskly rattled off the need-to-know: "We just worked with shapes. Darts, folds, and pleats. I don't like to use these words because they sound pretentious, but if you like, last season was painterly, and this season's sculptural."In essence, what he'd just shown was a more shapely and pulled-together version of the eighties-inflected collection he'd sent out under his own name in New York. If it led to puzzlement at first viewing, now, at least, his intentions can be read in context. Four weeks is a long time in fashion, and in the interim other designers—most notably Stefano Pilati at YSL—have been pushing big pleated pants, scrolliform necklines, and standout dirndls in heavy fabrics.At Vuitton, what with the abstract conical fez, ballooning pants, and blocklike pump-wedges, the silhouette seemed to have been drawn from Grace Jones in her early eighties heyday, or the moment when Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana dominated Paris fashion. It's never quite that exact in Jacobs' hands, of course, but compared with last season's random, chopped-up, multicolored collage, this was a total top-to-toe grown-up look treated to a toned-down palette of muted browns, dusty blues, mint, and black.In some ways it seemed right. This is a moment when many designers have intuited the need to chuck out the junk and get back to the cutting table. At Vuitton, even the bags—the bellwether of every change in the economics of desire—have been stripped of jingly junior doodads and are now quieted down to the point where the branding is only visible on embossed surfaces.The question is whether that meant throwing out baby with bathwater. When the overexaggerated shapes calmed down, some chic things emerged, especially toward evening: a long-sleeved dress with a standout whorl at the hip, a strapless sheath with a caged tulle bustle, and a couple of crinolined dance dresses. Otherwise, though, it was lumpy going.
1 March 2008
A little backstory: The latest Vuitton collection was looking a bit lackluster till Marc Jacobs' trusted menswear lieutenant Paul Helbers began waxing enthusiastic over a 1963 movie calledMélodie en sous-sol, about a gang of ne'er-do-wells swanking up as big-timers to rob the casino in Cannes. It starred Alain Delon and Jean Gabin, and it would be hard to find two screen icons more "male" (in France at least). But Helbers' own take on the butchness of his inspirations was slightly more ambiguous. "If they steal anything, they steal a heart," he said after the show. That statement was poignant—even romantic—enough that one might have wished for a little more of its essence in the actual collection.As things stood, Helbers and his team skillfully, wittily adapted elements of the bank robbers' tale. (The aerodynamic "getaway" hair was just the start.) The faded-but-rich color palette was lifted from the tones on old banknotes. A pattern engraved on a suit or a jean jacket duplicated the patterns on paper money. And—best of all—a silver tracery on a blazer was also taken from the metallic designs on money. A bank robber's need for a quick change accounted for some incongruous layering: a corduroy jacket over a nylon blouson, a formal shawl-collared jacket over a wrapped knit vest, another formal jacket over a boilersuit (that essential combo for the elegant crook will probably show up in the nextOcean's). The concept of disguise made its presence felt in a plush fur blouson and coat that were actually sheepskin. And the time frame of the original movie inspired a sleek silk suit in green-and-blue houndstooth that was easily the sexiest piece in a show that was otherwise light on carnality for something that had Delon and Gabin at its heart.The odd idea leapt out—a gunmetal peacoat, trousers with a generous new cut—but what loomed largest in the end was probably Damier Graphite, the latest variation on the pattern that Georges Vuitton introduced 120 years ago to foil imitators. It's unleashed in a range of guy-friendly styles in August, and you've never seen grown men lust after an It bag like they did this morning.
16 January 2008
For city slickers, Louis Vuitton's "urban feel" pre-fall collection offered one-stop shopping. Marc Jacobs covered lots of ground in just 19 looks, revisiting some of his favorite themes—minimalism, sportswear, lingerie—in a sophisticated, soigné way. There were suits made for a day on the town, worn with over-the-elbow bejeweled gloves, as well as an electric pink mink hoodie that topped flaring, thin-wale cords. A cream party dress perfect for Winona Ryder combined "poor" (cashmere flannel) and luxe (Tokyo silk) fabrics—a theme that ran throughout. Edgier was a leather skirt paired with a top that was first draped then beaded, to give the effect of a "fractured brooch."
14 January 2008
"It all came from our collaboration with Richard Prince, who is an artist who appropriates references within his work, which is what we do—which is fine, so long as there are three differences in everything!" declared Marc Jacobs, in the push and shove of the media mayhem backstage at Louis Vuitton. "And I'm a fan of SpongeBob SquarePants—and for all I know, so is Rei Kawakubo, because that's where our color came from!" Phew. If you take the decoder to that rush of explanation, it might take all night, but essentially what you have is Jacobs' defense against critics who skewered his New York show last month as derivative, especially of Comme des Garçons.Pulling in Richard Prince for this season's Louis Vuitton project was a typical Jacobs coup of multidimensional, referential, and self-referential significance. The artist's spray painting and texts were worked into LV bags, recalling the hit collaboration with Takashi Murakami. Prince's body of work also triggered a rerun of the 12 Carita-uniformed girls who opened that Murakami show, but this time, they were sexy nurses in see-through plastic coats—Stephanie Seymour, Eva Herzigova, Nadja Auermann, and Naomi Campbell among them. That hilariously kinky parade was inspired by Prince's Nurse paintings—one of which appeared on a Sonic Youth album cover, which again links back to Jacobs' family circle of personal reference.The collection? It was a reconfirmation, in less extreme form, of the controversial show with which Jacobs kicked off the season in New York, full of nutty combinations of fabric and garish SpongeBob pastels. The Lurex knits, pencil skirts, and gazar trenches came in mauve, yellow, pink, and purple, with deconstructed fragments of pinstripe vests, tweed suiting, and goddess-y chiffon fused into the mix. It was crazed, random, playful—yet grounded, as always, in bottom-line business sense. To see that, you only had to focus on the shoes—pointy pumps with bows and sparkles in the toe—and a new chunky line of costume jewelry. It's Jacobs' way of walking the line between creative freedom and commercial innovation.
6 October 2007
Leave it to Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton to make something covetably collectible out of the resort season's most predictable clichés. Inspired by vintage travel posters—not to mention old forms of elite island-hopping—he whipped up everything from forties-style nipped-waist dresses to hippie deluxe caftans in cruise-ship and prop-plane prints, often tossing on an anchor-shaped brooch for good measure. On a less whimsical but no less cheery note, he revisited some of the painterly pastels he used for fall. One lilac satin skirt was topped by a lemon-yellow bow-front blouse and a raspberry pullover sweater. The standout evening look, though, was a simple black jersey number wrapped goddess-style and secured over one shoulder with giant gold links. Worn with flat lace-up sandals, there was nothing retro about it.
9 July 2007
"Blue skies, smiling at me, nothing but blue skies…" Irving Berlin's golden oldie anticipated the dominant color on the men's catwalks for Spring 2008, and the joie de vivre he was describing when he penned the lyric seems to be have infected the season—first in Milan, and now Paris. Paul Helbers, Marc Jacobs' menswear maestro at Louis Vuitton, launched the label's latest presentation with a passage that was cheery blue, from cap to carryall.The show was called "Moon Beach"—picture a sci-fi dream of a fin de siècle summer in Biarritz and you're somewhere close to its distinctive blend of high tech and soft touch. Helbers and his team have been experimenting with cut, and their efforts produced something they called a "spiral," an innovation that looked like a diamond patchwork on jackets and waistcoats. There was also a "parasol cut," which apparently folds like an umbrella around the body. It was particularly spectacular in the sun ray of colors in a nylon blouson, over which had been laid a transparent veil (not the first time the veil has appeared this season—paging Doctor Freud). The sci-fi-ish elements were most obvious in the silvered fabric of a trench and a jacket with a holographic shimmer, but this was countered by clothes withdégradéhems and seams. They looked luxuriously weather-beaten. In fact, the whole affair was imbued with a sense of easy, lived-in luxury. Accessory note: In a season of sandals, Vuitton has the sandals of the season.
28 June 2007
Behind the scenes, Marc Jacobs—now in his tenth year at Louis Vuitton—had a knowing tag for the season: He called it "Girl with a Monogram Handbag." So there it was, as a mathematical equation: Scarlett Johansson (she ofGirl with a Pearl Earringand the Louis Vuitton ad campaign, sitting front row) + Vermeer (research trip to Holland) = Fall 2007 collection. And yet, not quite. At the end of the show, which also featured a plethora of references to Jacobs' previous LV outings, all he would declare was, "Clothes, and more clothes!" and then, more reluctantly, "A Vermeer palette. Romantic, graphic, painterly, but kind of strong."In fact, there's no urgent need to Google "Dutch Masters" to get a fix on the fact that this Fall collection was actually a mustering of sportswear pieces as a foil for a huge range of Vuitton accessories—everything from big, floppy Flemish berets to tinted patent and shearling bags, brushed-gilt plate-metal buckled belts and shiny little shoe-boots. First off, the clothes were simply a matter of high-necked dark green, gray, and fluffy orange sweaters, color-blocked against copper, bronze, blue, and red lamé skirts. Then came leather circle skirts with loose-backed jackets falling in a curve at the back, and a great oversize blue-gray sweater over slim pants.That section moved into black and navy tailoring, the best examples being neat pencil skirts with menswear pocket flaps, and eventually into grown-up chic suits (including a couple with pieces of densely tufted tulle and crochet whacked on the shoulder to puff things up) and black dresses. For evening, it was a matter ofdégradéprinted dresses, some sprouting ostrich feathers under the hem. In other words, the show felt a bit all over the place. But never mind: A lot of the women in the audience declared that, once the elements are merchandised for stores, they'll be going shopping.
3 March 2007
With the Eurythmics on the sound track and Annie Lennox's signature red slickback on the models, you could hardly fail to spot the sleek eighties subtext in the latest Louis Vuitton collection. Unless, of course, your head was swimming with visions of David Bowie inThe Man Who Fell to Earth, the movie that preceded Lennox by a decade and inspired her android fabulosity. Vuitton menswear designer Paul Helbers surfed this retro-futuristic wave with a collection that subtly combined tech and trad, hard and soft—hence the appearance of a Mitteleuropa black leather cape and fluoro-orange trainers on the same catwalk.This play with contrast has been an evolving theme in the Vuitton men's collection—two seasons ago, it was about nylon and chinchilla, here it was nylon and silk velvet. The label's signature colors were reconfigured as a geometric patchwork for a nylon parka. The velvet showed up as jackets, waistcoats, and—best of all—shoes that, in an ideal world, would be mandated footwear for all public officials.After the show, Vuitton design honcho Marc Jacobs tipped his cap to Helbers, praising the collection'sdégradéeffects. (In one outfit, these ran spectacularly through jacket, sweater, pants, and shoes.)But the potential genius of Vuitton's menswear is that it can also offer something as "basic" as a tan-leather-trimmed shearling to a man with money to spend and a taste for big-brand luxury.
25 January 2007
Dark clouds swirled ominously on a video backdrop. Then, in a defiant bid to shoot a ray of light into gloomy times, Marc Jacobs sent out his romantic-cum-sporty, casual-but-pretty Vuitton collection—motivated, he said, by his championing of "beauty, despite everything." A mattress-ticking anorak, over cropped white cotton drill pants and a funny cheap checked shopping bag that carried a big, passport-style Louis Vuitton stamp, set the mood. As usual, though, this collection was a complex refraction of the many inspirational sparks that go into the work here: pieces synthesized to project the simultaneous multinational appeal this brand must maintain.As it developed, the show patched in elements of Victoriana (corseted leg-of-mutton-sleeve jackets, cotton-muslin underpinnings) against oxford-blue men's shirting, sprigged Liberty-style prints, balletic tulle petticoats, and washed-out khaki parachute silks. Add the detail of puffy pockets, drawstring ruching, tape ties, and suspended shapes, and you have the laundry list, though not the complete essence of it. The X-factor is the Asia-facing appeal in all this prettiness. Jacobs and his team were in Tokyo for a Vuitton show last May, and while they were at it, they looked at the streets and took in some shopping at one of Japan's specialistfiguastores, which sell hyper-lifelike child dolls clothed in complete wardrobes of faerie frills and flounces.That reading delighted the junior Japanese fashion editors in the audience, who, like the girls back home, kill for thekawaii(trans.: cute) aesthetic Jacobs consistently fields so well at Vuitton. To Western audiences, meanwhile, the faded, watered-tea-to-dusty-rose tints and the hint of Meissen milkmaid skewed moreMarie Antoinetteaftermath. No disagreements, though. It was young and refreshing, and the multilingual signage in the bags and the shape of hollowed-out shoe heels flashed out loud and clear. "LV-OE," it read.
7 October 2006
Marc Jacobs is unique in fashion for his willingness to acknowledge the efforts of his collaborators. His generosity is most apparent in menswear, a subject he happily claims not to understand all that well. That's why he handed the reins of his latest Louis Vuitton men's collection to Paul Helbers, formerly of Martin Margiela's design studio. It was Helbers who came up with the show's complex rationale, a meeting of Victorian England and Hawaii (he said he likes finding harmony between extremes).The new man at the helm was also responsible for the presentation, which—in an effort to create an impression of real clothes in motion—featured models marching backward and forward in front of shimmering, watery back-projections. If the overall effect was too abstract to allow a full appreciation of Helbers' work, there were signs that he might in time set a new standard for LV's menswear.This collection's underlying concept was most obvious in the hibiscus print on shirts, scarves, and ties (the paper lei invitation was kind of charming, too). And, according to Helbers, the dark Jacquards reflected an imagined Hawaiian response to traditional English weaving techniques. Phew!Highfalutin concepts aside, it was easy to see the appeal of trim blousons, beautifully cut trousers, and piqué waistcoats that added a flair of fashion. And, come next spring, the branded bags and silvery shoes might launch the kind of waiting lists Vuitton's women's accessories regularly do. That alone would presumably be enough to justify Jacobs' faith.
2 July 2006
The only designer who makes a major impact on both the New York and Paris runways, Marc Jacobs had the first and last say on the season with a collection that translated his look from Manhattan-American into Louis Vuitton French. Jacobs¿ influential layered urchin look, done up in the drab colors of putty, gray and concrete, turned a little more streamlined and perky to rhyme with the ever-cutejeunesensibility which he knows keeps the LV tills ringing across the world.Not to say that Jacobs deleted the eccentricity; if she wants, the Vuitton girl can jam on a completely mad flannel hat shaped like a flat upturned bowl, then sally out insouciantly toépater les grown-upsin scary black patent calf-length Velcro-strapped platform boots. (Note: Scary is good in this season of bold-stomping footwear extremes.) Between head and foot, though, the essential clothes story, as Jacobs put it, was about chopping "all the influences of the past" into some kind of modern Parisian fashion tartare.Mostly, the layerings of thick waffle-knit sweater dresses over pants, flannel bustiers over knits, and oddly folded and pulled tailoring ended up looking never-before-seen. But those past influences were traceable, too. Jacobs' LV team is full of fashion brainiacs who, among other things, can draw a parallel between a punky red leopard spot by Stephen Sprouse for Vuitton in 2003, and the animal prints of Saint Laurent. Other nods in the haute direction could be seen in the wide velvet Schiaparelli-shocking-pink pants and Dior-referenced gray skirt-suits and peplums. Even the huge fur-trimmed parka hoods that looked like mini army igloos (call them the last word in weird nowness) were part-inspired by the shape of the knitted cocoon that YSL made in the mid-sixties.Still, what really matters to this house is the bags. This season's offerings were also a bit transgressive, though playfully so. Some of them came in soft embossed vinyl (a daring departure for a leather-goods house), others in white fur, sprayed with the multicolored blowups of the monogram as famously reinvented by Takahashi Murakami. Still others came in slinky leopard-printed chain mail grafted onto classic LV-stamped leather. The standout: a big patent hand-held tote with a handle formed from a pair of golden headphones. Never mind the clothes, that's the one they'll be beating down the Louis Vuitton doors for the minute the first delivery drops.
4 March 2006
With its metallic striped floor and Rorschach shapes carved into the mirrored backdrop, the set by Glaswegian artist Jim Lambie had a hard sci-fi sheen. And the soundtrack was one of composer Philip Glass's exercises in monotone ethereality. But, insisted Marc Jacobs, "This isn't futuristic, this is NOW!" According to the designer, the collection had none of those fashion-history references he loves. In their place was a curious hybrid of high touch and high tech (making Lambie the perfect visual complement). Chinchilla and nylon vest, anyone?Extremes of real and synthetic defined the clothes. Here a streamlined tailored wool suit or a wool and cashmere topcoat, there a nylon parka over bronze nylon trousers. And everywhere, that fur and nylon combination. City and ski-slope came together in outfit after outfit. Almost as frequent as the nylon was plush alpaca "teddy-bear" fleece. In coats, it had an extreme cuddliness that reflected this collection's only obvious reference point: There was an undeniable hint of cartoonish manga in the exaggerated proportions.As for the accessories, shoes too went from one extreme to another, either Cuban heeled boots or a stolid hiking style. And this time round, the bags that built Vuitton included a chevron-printed carpetbag, though waiting lists are more likely to form for the sleek ponyskin tote—or perhaps the chinchilla earmuffs that Jacobs himself sported when he took his bow.
26 January 2006
It fell to Louis Vuitton to throw a gigantic end-of-collections party that lit up the rococo exterior of the Petit Palais like a giant L.V. trunk and celebrated the reopening of the extraordinary art-installed high-tech wonderland that is its Champs-Elysées flagship. It therefore fell to Marc Jacobs, too, to match the hedonistic moment by doing something majorly loud and celebratory on the runway. In that way, he did not let the side down: Out charged the L.V. girl army in short, hot-pink, body-conscious, bejeweled clothes. Clanking with gold medallions, weighed down with charm bracelets, and toting plastic-covered scarf-print bags, they looked almost as if they'd walked straight out of eighties Italian fashion photographs, by way of Graceland. Versace, Krizia, Ferré—Elvis!Why did Jacobs choose those references? Partly, no doubt, to annoy the grown-ups—who tend to come over queasy when forced to face a flashback of their eighties embarrassments—and to reinforce the fact that Louis Vuitton is aimed at global twentysomethings, who are currently loving a bit of revived Versace. And partly, just for the hell of it. "Why not? We were looking at decoration and color and sun, and at designers whose work we haven't looked at for a long time," he declared. "And, you know—it really doesn't matter any more. The truth is, everything you want to wear is fine and great.Vive la différence!" As a last word on the season, that couldn't help but set the brain whirring about what will happen next. Is fashion about to plunge into its first outbreak of exuberant excess since Tom Ford left the scene? If so, it's about time.
8 October 2005
Fishing for summery, romantic icons for his latest menswear collection for Vuitton, Marc Jacobs summoned up Christopher Atkins inThe Blue Lagoonand William Hurt inBody Heat. Which just goes to show that designers' insights aren't always particularly logical. There isn't much that Atkins and Hurt share, apart from being beautiful, blond, and American. But maybe that's what Jacobs was driving at. The show had a sunny, sexy momentum that evoked gilded hard bodies kicking back at the beach. And they were wearingshortshorts, usually in silk for added cling. When paired with a matching branded blouson, they looked athletic. But a gray, striped, silk shirt-'n'-shorts combo felt more like a cabana outfit for George Cukor's most private pool parties.Poolside wear also cropped up in lounging pajamas in a tropical print. Rather more versatile were the white jeans, which looked prepped for a high-styled summer with a checked silk shirt or a navy safari jacket and buckled loafers. The crease pressed into denims (which were worn under a silk trench with gold-buttoned epaulets) momentarily suggested a slightly older Vuitton man, but that impression was rapidly sidelined by more—what else?—shorts. After the show, an uncharacteristically tailored Jacobs initially scoffed at the notion that he'd be baring his legs next summer. "But," he added, "I said I'd never wear a suit, and look at me."
6 July 2005
After a signature collection that started the New York season in controversy, Marc Jacobs came back to close the Paris shows with a triumph. He took Louis Vuitton into the dark, sober territory he had sketched out in his own collection, but this time, there was nothing morose or clunky about it. Instead, it served as a concise, uplifting exploration of Parisian chic, wiping away the anxious question marks that have hovered over black, voluminous shapes, and around discussions of retro vs. modernism and restraint vs. opulence.Making it look simple is the trick, and Jacobs did that right away by sending out an impeccable black Shetland suit with an elongated calf-length pencil skirt, the jacket's elegant balloon sleeves re-emphasizing the tininess of the waist. Next up: a cashmere double-breasted coat, swinging loose from the body, with sloped fifties shoulders and three-quarter-length sleeves, finished off with a wide-brim purple fedora. From then on, the audience was won over by the reworkings of bubble-backed, shawl-collared Balenciaga-era coats and spellbound by the intensely detailed decoration that began to appear: mink embroidery on a cape; herringbone tweed covered in a veiling of tulle; lizard patchworked on dresses and skirts. After Vuitton's circus of spangles and multicolored prints last season, it represented one of those defining moments when a designer puts his finger on what needs to change, and how to do it.Afterward, amid the media scrum, Uma Thurman nailed the show's attraction. "It's luscious and structured, with regal sophistication and sexiness," she declared. "Splendid, whimsical things!" commented Selma Blair from the other side of the room. Jacobs, meanwhile, was busy explaining that the influences, researched by his team, had sprung from a trip to Vienna, where they'd immersed themselves in the Wiener Werkst¿tte turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts movement to find a stricter, darker source of structure and texture.Meanwhile, the other stars of the Vuitton show—the bags—were receiving their very own deluge of attention. The amazing confections of mink, python, embossed quilting, tulle, jet crystal beading, leather passementerie, gold bookbinder printing, Art Deco chains, and cabochons of semiprecious stones were lined up as if on an altar, where Japanese TV cameras were jostling for close-ups. Of course, this is the whole point of Louis Vuitton.
One can only wish that the outstanding clothes of this collection will (finally) be as available in stores as the bags.
5 March 2005
The huge red velvet drapes that swagged the stage set the decadently theatrical tone of Marc Jacobs' latest men's collection for Louis Vuitton. The cape, the velvet jeans tucked into ostrich boots, and the cap only compounded the effect—once again this season, we were being invited into the world of Rudolf Nureyev. A dungaree or two echoed the downtime togs of the primo male ballet dancer of the seventies. Bow ties on silk shirts screeched, "Let's go disco!" And all the astrakhan in the collection would have reminded Rudy of Mother Russia.Nureyev, though, would never have been able to afford the overwhelming luxe of these clothes. Aside from the astrakhan and ponyskin in coats, jackets, and cardigans, there was nutria fur galore, in everything from a duffel coat to a bomber jacket to a pair of mittens. The Mitteleuropa glamour extended to cashmere coats, a loden green military-styled jacket, an Austro-Hungarian braided pea coat over velvet trousers with a tuxedo stripe, and an infinitely desirable old gold raincoat.The show also featured some spectacularly overt product placement, with an LV cashmere travel blanket casually draped round the shoulders of a cable-knit mohair sweater. But nothing could beat the glorious carpetbags, which dwarfed the young men toting them.
28 January 2005
Sometimes, it's a bit of a challenge to work out just what's going on among the frenetic kaleidoscope of color, this-meets-that styling, the girly bag-swinging, and the melee of celebrity action that make up a Louis Vuitton show. Christina Ricci, the week's second Hollywood actress on a Paris runway (she's starring in Vuitton's house ads, like Nicole Kidman at Chanel), opened the show in a little black forties suit with a sparkling peplum. Pharrell Williams was in the house, too, wearing a pair of the red-plastic-framed shades he's designed for Vuitton. Takashi Murakami, a seasoned hit maker, was present by way of a cherry-print bag that flashed at the sides of the spangled circle skirts and shivery crepe de chine retro-flowered dresses.Not surprising then, that this carnival of multidirectional brand projection was based, in part, on the big top. Marc Jacobs and his team had been looking at circus photos from the forties, which explains the colored sequin trims sprinkled among the puff-sleeved, tight-bodiced silhouettes. Then again, Jacobs also said he was inspired by the vintage clothes the model Querelle wears to her go-sees. He can't stand being tied down by too many literal stories, though. "I like hybrids," he shrugged. "And you know, it's just about having fun with clothes."Which should be easy with this pick-and-mix variety show. Take the white peplum suits, bustle-frilled skirts, and dresses with Peter Pan collars or garlands of fabric flowers. Or go a crazier route, with neckpieces of fake flowers or collars of bright Lucite to throw the forties thrift store look off a notch. Logo lovers will get their fix from "LV"-printed pedal pusher jeans, cardigans patchworked with denim pockets, and of course, matching bags. Some of those were jeweled, or knitted and crocheted in Lurex to echo the flash of the clothes. Something for everyone—and not to worry too much about linear coherence. At the end of the day, what pulls everything together at Louis Vuitton is the way Marc Jacobs makes it sell.
9 October 2004
Photographer Peter Schlesinger should be drawing a royalty from the spring 2005 menswear season. Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs was one of several this season to name-checkA Chequered Past, Schlesinger's book capturing the high (and low) life in early seventies London. Then again, Jacobs also mentioned the movieAnother Country, as well as that hardy perennial of Brit style,Brideshead Revisited. He hardly needed to specify the latter—the minute a pajama-clad model appeared on the catwalk clutching a teddy bear, it was clear that Oxford's decadently dreaming spires were on the designer's mind.Under an ivy arbor, Jacobs paraded a lush sequence of aristocratic college classics: a cashmere cricket sweater, college-striped linen trousers, a silk velvet smoking jacket, languid layers of all white or all cream (all you need is a gentleman's gentleman to sponge off the spots). The all important Vuitton accessories included an alligator traveling bag—with matching shoes, of course.
2 July 2004
From the moment 16-year-old Lily Cole, wearing a belted, fur-collared tartan coat, set her dainty high-heeled golden bootie onto the snow-covered runway, it was clear this was about to be one of Marc Jacobs¿ delicious Louis Vuitton blockbusters.Making tartan and solid country fabrics young and sexy isn¿t easy—as all too many designers have proved this season. Jacobs clinched it, though—cutting plaid tight, on the cross, in tiny leg-o'-mutton puffed-sleeve blouses and making slim tweedy skirts explode into flirty, petticoated godets in the hem. On top, he would add girlish tippets (one in faux ermine) tied with a satin bow and accessorize, accessorize: There were velvet bags printed with the house monogram and trompe l'oeil hardware, furry purses, and a myriad shoe-temptations (high plaid spectators, patent stiletto ghillies, brocade ankle boots fastened with ribbon)."Scotland, Tissot, a little Foujita," said Jacobs, reeling off his research references. To elaborate: His design team had taken a tour of the Highlands, circling Balmoral (Her Majesty the Queen's grand Scottish bolt-hole), then patched in the frothy French prettiness of James Tissot's bustles and lace. The work of Tsuguharu Foujita, a Japanese traditionalist painter who worked in Paris in the twenties, also got pinned to the inspiration boards, striking a cute note for Japan's legion of LV fans.The Tissot prettiness—swagged tartan taffeta, bustle bows, lace-framed décollétes, frilled fur capelets—just prevented the collection from tipping over the Scottish border into a full-on Vivienne Westwood homage. (Though, since her retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is imminent, Jacobs is probably ahead of the curve in saluting her.) In fact, this show, so delightfully full of rich pickings, was dedicated to another design great who had a profound influence on Jacobs. Stephen Sprouse, the friend who collaborated on the famous Louis Vuitton graffiti bags, died this week, and Jacobs acknowledged his loss in a moving program note.
6 March 2004
When Marc Jacobs is on form at Louis Vuitton, he can make clothes so effortlessly, eclectically right that it leaves the audience tingling. In a season when old-time movie glamour, an adoration for saturated color, lovely textures, and glints of glitter are the materials of a woman’s fantasies, Jacobs had the last word on making all of those work every day—and every night, for that matter.The sensation started the minute the auditorium darkened; music pumped and a projection of an LV monogram covered the entire space including the figure of the first advancing model. She was wearing an absinthe draped silk top with a little silk crepe de chine peacock-blue skirt and a pair of suede platforms, carrying one of the neat new LV monogrammed bags (this season, its chunky straps are picked out in juicy colors or gold). Jacobs worked to bring an antique richness to the clothes by using panne velvet, pressed sequins, and gold and silver lamé, but it never became overdone or literally vintage. The sequins could turn up banded onto a wear-in-the-street glazed linen trenchcoat, the gold lamé made into a cute blouse/jacket too great to save for special occasions. With the inclusion of pieces like Clam diggers and sailor pants for practicality, and items like small decorative dresses, tap pants, and a pale Lurex swimsuit for insane temptation, it was a collection that gelled all the elements of the way a young woman wants to look and feel.That is Jacobs’s knack, although at Vuitton he generously reflects accolades back on his hip behind-the-scenes team. “It’s the things we like playing with, our favorite things,” he said afterward. “But it’s always about our favorite things of the moment.” Sometimes the best collections happen when designers don’t torture themselves to make a statement. This season, fashion is essentially about nothing more cerebral than finding a way to feel and look happy—and Marc Jacobs nailed it.
11 October 2003
A new big-shouldered, graphic silhouette is working its way into the fashion system, and Marc Jacobs is bent on making it look like something we’ve never seen before. For starters, his short, slightly stiff navy coat had a large wide-set collar embellished with darkly sparkling disks and swung over a felt skirt, long socks and high square-toe crocodile pumps. The volume of that rounded shoulder, cut on the curve, stood out—literally—through the entire Louis Vuitton collection. It surfaced in sleeveless coats worn over big-sleeved sweaters and in the new shape of his beloved pea jacket; it was exaggerated even more in the furry mass of a caped Mongolian coat and in the funnel-shaped stole that was part of a suit.By cropping skirts and dresses short, often with an under layer or a squared-off panel hitting a different level in back, Jacobs filtered ’60s and ’80s influences to come up with something fresh. There was a touch of the current feel for space-age-slash-medieval militarism in the studded tunics and coats cut to hint at armor-plated layers. Formfitting ribbed knit dresses with a hint of Claude Montana about them ended in a flip of gladiator pleats. But a couple of simply pretty tiered chiffon dresses, tied with velvet bows—and all those cute socks—kept the show from stumbling under the weight of its references.One of the ways Jacobs keeps his luxury lighthearted is an irreverent patching together of precious traditional fabrics with something flashily modern. For fall, he rendered the classic brown-and-yellow monogram in printed vinyl and paired it with tweed in a raincoat and a trashy-meets-ladylike handbag—his iconic Louis Vuitton-craze device for the season.If the designer had kept his audience guessing at the influences behind the show, all became clear when the fans surged back to congratulate him. As Catherine Denueve emerged from the throng, Jacobs grabbed her hand and exclaimed, “It was you! That David Bailey picture of you in the socks and short skirt. Remember? That and Joan of Arc—my heroines!”
9 March 2003
Marc Jacobs' latest for Louis Vuitton is so verykawaii(that's Japanese for "cute") it's going to drive young women everywhere utterly nuts. Girl nation was thrown for a loop when the designer sent out a pastel-rainbow troupe of sweethearts in duchesse-satin zip-up dresses with Peter Pan collars. They tripped along carrying the latest monogram bags, perked up by computerized prints of little flowers and cartoon creatures, the work of the latest LV guest artist, Takashi Murakami.The collection radiated a sunny '50s- and '60s-style optimism via little dresses, jackets, swingy skirts, knits and bathing suits finished with minute edgings of frills and tiny bows. There were strappy dresses with raised waists, some formfitting and others flared, done in a palette that ranged from the prettiest champagne through rose, lemon, pistachio and sky-blue. Even the swimsuits had that cute flip of a modesty flounce circa 1960.In this, his third stellar collection of the season, Jacobs proved just how adept he is at merging happy retro memories and modern pop culture. His smartest crossover moves? Morphing rubber into cherry-red polka-dot pencil skirts, macs and suits decorated with 3-D flowers, and cutting ladylike jackets and coats out of printed neoprene. Add in jokey Minnie Mouse bows on peep-toe slingbacks and the result was a collection that will have lines forming around the block at Louis Vuitton stores from the first day of spring.
6 October 2002
At Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs found a way to surprise and delight by turning his attention to the neglected middle ground between the glamorous and the everyday. Using a delicate, almost-there color palette and perfectly calibrated details, Jacobs conjured a sense of filtered 1950’s glamour that was never so exaggerated as to become literal.The elegant and the rumpled were literally fused in the designer’s first two outfits, trompe l’oeil dresses that joined silky tops to knee-length alpaca skirts perfectly accessorized with satin Louis heel slingbacks. A throw-it-on attitude toward the ultra-luxe was cultivated throughout, especially via herringbone tweed pencil skirts with washed silk camisoles and casual white rabbit bombers. Jacobs paid attention to the LV monogram by scattering it discreetly over a black silk bomber paired with a sexy tight skirt, or embedding it in the little metallic mesh shoulder bag— this season’s quiet, yet undisputed monogram statement.There was room for pure luxury, too, in crinkled lamé tops or sheared mink skirts banded with silver sequins. But the measure of Jacobs’ success in holding back from overstatement was in the way he made the appearance of a deep red cashmere cardigan—or the simplicity of a deep rose lipstick—suddenly seem like the height of glamour.
10 March 2002
Marc Jacobs could not have chosen a better note with which to close the Spring 2002 collections—his Louis Vuitton show perfectly captured the dreamy, romantic aesthetic that has dominated the season.One of the many feats Jacobs pulled off was to make snakeskin soft and demure. His gently scalloped silver python skirts and cropped jackets conveyed not a hint of aggression, while a delicate snake trim also surfaced on a mini-suit and several perky dresses. Elsewhere, Jacobs offered some of the best peasant dresses around—A-lined, swimming with delicate paisley prints, and grazing the floor. The same silhouette was used for the empire washed denim robes, which gave the humble fabric an air of grandeur. Lamé jackets with naif embroideries are just the thing to throw over any of these superb dresses.This is clearly the season to invest in Louis Vuitton accessories. After the street-inspired (and by now ubiquitous) graffiti totes, what better change of pace than a sweet butterfly, mouse or winking owl bag?
11 October 2001
Marc Jacobs delivered yet another impeccable collection for Louis Vuitton today, once again raising the ante for designers in Paris.Jacobs acknowledged the predominantly black, moody aesthetic that has been so prevalent this season but gave it a sophisticated, playful spin that was nothing short of joyful. His felted cavalry twill coats and suits were hard and sexy—but also sweet, thanks to puffs of mink that served as buttons. Jacobs' silk jersey Empire dresses were miles ahead of the pack, relying solely on modest polka dots and precise cut for effect. His denim jeans with tiny gold zipper pulls at the pockets will bring quiet luxury to the street. Tone-on-tone plaid dresses and efficient little robes with colorful optic insets referenced mod classics but felt absolutely fresh and original.Evening was also impeccable. Mink pom-pom T-shirts were effortlessly chic; velvet dresses and translucent silk jersey tunics were simultaneously cool and grown-up, especially when worn with high cordovan side-lace boots that are sure to become one of Fall's must-have accessories.
11 March 2001
Never mind that Marc Jacobs designs four full collections a year in addition to his recently launched secondary line. With Louis Vuitton, he proved once again that he has plenty of talent to spare, and no signs of slowing down. Normally, one can be happy if a designer proposes one solid trend per season. But that would never satisfy Jacobs; instead, he whipped up and reworked several of the season's recurring motifs in completely novel ways. Uniforms, a clear influence on the Spring collections, were referenced through khaki and olive-green military blousons with epaulettes, snap-side skirts, policeman hats, an "SS Vuitton" naval cap and a genial camouflage rose print. Pining for fluorescent colors rather that six months in the army? Jacobs took the day-glo trend from street to chic with impeccable hot pink and neon green V-neck sweaters. Fifties met '80s punk with pleated, low-slung skirts with folded waistbands and clear plastic bands to pinch the silhouette.Accessories? Hardly two pairs of shoes were the same: There were fluoro pumps, casual flats and sexy kitten heels to choose from. And just when you thought you couldn't stand another logo, Jacobs found the perfect compromise between art and commerce: Stephen Sprouse graffiti-painted "Louis Vuitton" on the house's brand-new totes.
10 October 2000
As decade crunching continues to move forward at breakneck speed, it is inevitable that a designer as acutely attuned to the style buzz on the streets as Marc Jacobs should pick up and run with the '80s vibe currently setting a younger generation of style-makers on fire. For luxury house Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs revisits Paris in the '80s, paying homage to the looks featured in publications like the so-hip-it-hurts style manualJILL, and translating them into must-have modern looks.The early Madonna moment—beret, oversized sweater slouched off one shoulder and short, leather pencil skirt--was skewered and chic-ed up with luxury fabrics. Think of that sweater in corduroy-seamed sheared fur, the skirt in satin thick as leather.Early Montana and Mugler signatures were evoked in details like the decorative silver-press stud fastenings on the shoulder of a satin print T-shirt, silver cube buttons as closures on man-size jackets, curving seams on footballer-shouldered jackets and zippers diagonally splicing 7/8 coats. Jacobs' twisted palette also brought the decade flooding back—endless existentialist black of course, spiked with café au lait, chocolate, peppermint and teal (dazzling for a crocodile trouser suit). His tortoise-shell, sequined mini dresses closing the whirlwind show were suspended from—or trimmed with—the fine gold chain that was also used for the adorable midget disco purse—just big enough to hold that members' pass for disco hot spot Le Palace.
27 February 2000
It was a veritable tour de force for Marc Jacobs who, after showing his own line in New York, presented an impressively honed collection for Louis Vuitton. Travel and luxury have always been essential components of the Vuitton allure, and this season it looks like jet-setters will feel equally at home on their way to a safari in Africa or hopping on the Concorde between New York and Paris. Canvas skirts, trenchcoats, and jackets stamped with LV's mini-monogram were reminiscent of a luxury-starved colonial explorer's uniform, as were the wool denim pieces and oversize bags. For more urban tastes, Jacobs produced a series of fluid silk jersey dresses with graphic prints, gold skirts and coats, and cashmere tops with scarves. The overall feeling was of easy, eminently wearable chic—adornment was restricted to very subtle diamond stitching on pants and skirts, and occasional embroidery on tanks and evening gowns.
3 October 1999