Fashion Brief
The difference between Marc Jacobs’ Louis Vuitton (1997-2013) and Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton (2014-future date unknown) is this: Jacobs’ Vuitton was about travel, and Ghesquière’s Vuitton is about exploration. The Vuitton story began with trunks made for the wealthy and adventurous, and Jacobs loved to fetishise the rituals of high-end holidays: his shows featured bellboys and chambermaids, hotel corridors and steam trains. Ghesquière is more interested in travel as a mindset and a catalyst for ideas.
The Louis Vuitton fashion show, Ghesquière’s second for the brand, served also as a glamorous debut for the new Foundation Louis Vuitton, a museum of contemporary art which will house LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s collection of modern art, and which officially opens later this month. Architect Frank Gehry has compared the building to an iceberg, to sails, and to a cloud. The asymmetric glass and steel arcs, and the waterfall lapping around the entrance, give it a sense of being a fractured-mirror image of the 1899 Grand Palais, that other vast glass-roofed Parisian temple of art, which sits on the bank of the Seine in the centre of Paris.
Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA
“When I saw the building for the first time, I thought it looked like a ship, or like a spaceship,” Ghesquière said after his show yesterday. Strikingly, Ghesquière – LVMH’s most high-profile new boy – turned his back on the airy charms of his bosses’ fancy new space in the Bois de Boulogne, and staged the show in a blacked-out box hidden in the centre. “I wanted it to feel like you were going into the belly of the ship,” said Ghesquière. The belly of this ship is where those original Vuitton trunks would have been at home, of course; but those trunks’s owners would have been enjoying the view from the first class deck.
The pitch-black catwalk was spotlit as if from a hovering spaceship. The show began with digital screens from which 10-foot-high faces of young men and women – beautiful, but ungroomed and unmade-up – spoke a synchronised message. “A beginning is a very delicate time,” they began, referring both to the foundation and the still-fledgling Ghesquière project at the label. “The audience is asked to sit in a place that doesn’t exist for now, a ship surrounded by woodland, a ship that serves as an incubator for creative minds … Oh yes. I forgot to tell you. Today the Louis Vuitton house wants to explore the ability to travel to any part of the universe without moving.” Twenty voices, male and female, were blended into one to give a disembodied, androgynous quality to the sound. Ghesquire said after the show that he “wanted to express the spirit of mind in Vuitton. The idea of exploration taking you in different directions.”
Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA
If this was time travel, we had landed around 1964. Simon Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence played on the soundtrack, and the tiny tunic dresses, the soft haute-hippie velvets, the crackle-patent boots, the exaggerated eyelashes and oversized white earrings all conjured up the brief glory days of Edie Sedgwick, who Ghesquière namechecked backstage. But the high-collar blouses, the high-water trousers and the patch-pocket blazers were above all a uniform for the cool girl of 2014, who Ghesquière dresses now: ably represented, in his front row, by Michelle Williams and Sofia Coppola. “It’s kind of Edie, but it’s not a retro reference. She was in the 60s but something about her look takes you forward into the early 80s. What I like to do is start with a reference, and then refine that look again and again until I have erased that reference, and what remains is just itself,” Ghesquière explained. The bold, flat collars and high-waisted A-line skirts picked up exactly where his previous collection left off. “I didn’t do a big statement this time. I wanted to follow where I had started last season, to speak to that same cool girl.” But where he danced on Vuitton’s most hallowed-ground – the monogram, the suitcase handbags – Ghesquière did so with more of a sense of confidence and freedom than in his debut. A print of matchboxes and cassette tapes was inspired, he said, by “the LV monogram when girls stick silly stickers on it”. Meanwhile, the miniature suitcase-handbags looked less precious (in both senses) this season, in the soft olive-green canvas which speaks of intrepid and weather-beaten travellers, rather than glossy high-end tourists.
