Today’s Louis Vuitton show took place in the future home of the brand’s Place Vendôme flagship. Scheduled to open in 2017, the new store will combine two buildings, spanning the famous square and the Rue Saint-Honoré. Sitting on the boutique-to-be’s second floor this morning with those monumental views out the windows, there was no escaping the metaphor: As global as its reach is, Louis Vuitton is Paris.
So it was fitting that creative director Nicolas Ghesquière brought his collection home metaphorically, as well. His Cruise offering, presented in Rio de Janeiro last May, was a tribute to that city’s sportif seaside culture—colorful, loaded with print, and beachily body-baring. The orientation of his bold new Louis Vuitton collection is different. While it retained some of the tropes of the previous season—the daring cut-outs in particular—the results were more glam. Call it hot bourgeois. “I realize that I didn’t explore that much yet the sophistication and the more dressed-up part of Louis Vuitton,” he said afterward.
The sophistication he was speaking of comes down to the type of clothing he zeroed in on: tailoring, first and foremost. Ghesquière’s are not suits for office drones; with slices removed from the shoulders and capeleted open backs, they negotiated the territory between practicality and experimentation. As he settles in at Louis Vuitton (today’s venue seemed conceived at least in part to quash the ongoing rumors that he’s on his way out the door), Ghesquière is leaning more toward experimentation, if not the outright high-concept fashion of his earlier days. See the asymmetric draped jersey numbers with the hip and midriff cut-outs, some with 1980s-ish sprinkles of crystals and glitter; see also the series of long, sheer-yet-discreet dresses at the end.
Among all the soigné stuff, there were sweatshirts, a logo tee or two, and skinny lace pants with matching pelmet skirts; they’ll be the kinds of things cosmopolitan fashion types will be seen in next season at the shows. The press notes mentioned a fact little known even among Parisians that, before the Place Vendôme was known by its current name, it was called Place des Conquêtes. As conquests go, this show had an indisputable one in the form of its Petite Malle phone cases. As the models walked by with them gripped in their hands, all the wannabe It bags we’ve seen over the last month of shows suddenly felt a little passé. Look around, a woman can make do without a purse, but not without her cellphone.
