Kim Jones is an inveterate, insatiable traveler, but for the past five years (yes, he’s been artistic director of Louis 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 the arts décoratifs into the arts 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 Louis louis.
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.
