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 at Louis Vuitton in 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’s 2046 and the anime series Evangelion came 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 from Tron: 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.
