Isola Bella. Louis Vuitton Resort 2024

May 25, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As a vivid nay-sayer of Nicolas Ghesquière‘s recent work at Louis Vuitton, I will admit it: the resort 2024 collection is BRILLIANT. It’s Ghesquière fashion – intelligent, quirky, high-and-low, time-proof, self-referential – that I love and truly missed for the last couple of years. His resort show yesterday (nearly) happened at the terraced gardens of Isola Bella, a tiny private island in Lake Maggiore that has belonged to Italy’s Borromeo clan for 500 years. 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. 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. 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.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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About Paris(ian Style). Louis Vuitton AW23

March 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Finally, a Louis Vuitton collection by Nicolas Ghesquière that doesn’t look like a cartoon. The concept for the autumn-winter 2023 collection came to 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”, which isn’t necessarily what all the ridiculous handbooks on Parisian style dictate. According to this offering, Frenchness in fashion is the Tricolore, which the studio reproduced on a blue, white, and red quilted shoulder bag, and leather gloves. It’s the Opéra Garnier, which inspired the light-up Phantom of the Opera masks. 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. This was a collection that was in touch with the street, with a few nods to the designer’s sci-fi obsession, softer and more down-to-earth. A close-up look at the clothes revealed intriguing details: the camel coat in look 14 may appear to be wool, but it’s actually leather, first embossed, then printed. The jewellery was inspired by musical instruments (the trumpet brooches are too good!). 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.”

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Gimmick-y. Louis Vuitton SS23

October 9, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

I’m having a hard time in understanding what’s Nicolas Ghesquière‘s Louis Vuitton is about lately. Once a leader in fashion that was both ergonomic and absolutely intriguing, for seasons now the designer does some of the most gimmick-y fashion – and not in an ironic way. Also, I can’t picture who is actually wearing Louis Vuitton’s women’s ready-to-wear, expect for celebrities who are trapped by life-long contracts. The last show of Paris Fashion Week doesn’t feel like a cherry on top, but an event to which people feel forced to go to… because it’s LV after all. The show’s location was Cour Carrée. Ghesquière invited his longtime friend French artist Philippe Parreno to create an installation, and together with the Hollywood production designer James Chinlund they created a set that felt a little as if a spaceship 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. Most of it looked silly. Something similar was happening with the cumbersome clothes. You might recognize the giant zipper pulls on HoYeon Jung’s opening look from one of the first Ghesquière collections. The designer 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. “There is always that game of what is real and what is manipulated,” he explained. “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.” Releasing your inner child is fine. But I wish Nicolas delivered fashion that’s substantial and not so pointlessly painful for the eye.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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What’s Hot (23.8.22)

August 23, 2022August 19, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Past-Present-Future Goddesses. Louis Vuitton Resort 2023

May 14, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s been a while since I truly enjoyed a Louis Vuitton collection by Nicolas Ghesquière. Something clicked again for me. The collection was a powerful ode to goddesses – of the past, present and future. The resort 2023 line-up – presented in La Jolla, California – was a wonderful reminder of how forever-forward this Parisian designer is.

His two post-pandemic Paris shows and the one shown in USA, 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. And here’s another Vuitton epic: Ghesquière has made a tradition of staging his cruise shows at architectural marvels. John Lautner’s Bob Hope House in Palm Spring, 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, its 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.