At Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière offers a particular take on the joy of dressing up. Ghesquière called upon the American production designer James Chinlund to construct a runway that would the convey the feeling of being inside a hot air balloon. For that reason, the Louis Vuitton collection made lightness its point of departure in buoyant garments that evoked the breezy, billowing effect of sails. The idea of the hot air balloon set an adventurous mood for the show, entirely in the vein of Ghesquière whose approach to Louis Vuitton’s voyaging genes is often rooted in the dream of time travel. He expressed it in a collection, which defied the constraints of eras and dress codes and freely spliced together silhouettes and wardrobes in a dynamic, Pierrot-ish look that jumped between the 1950s and the ’80s (like the Yves Saint Laurent-inspired padded jackets), with occasional 19th-century stopovers. Patterns became the focal point of the collection: English checks were twisted and turned into billowing blouses and sharply-cut flowy skirts. Stripes increased the graphic value in shirts and trousers borrowed from the men’s wardrobe and magnified in expression. Scarf-like chain prints found their way onto skirts, and checkerboards and vintage-y houndstooth animated broad-shouldered jackets.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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