This is Nicolas Ghesquière’s second resort collection for Louis Vuitton without a destination show. A year ago in the early months of the pandemic he staged a studio shoot, but this time around he filmed a short movie at Axe Majeur, a sculpture park outside of Paris conceived by the late Israeli environmental artist Dani Karavan that rivals previous LV show locales in scale and grandeur, if not in distance from the house’s headquarters.
An in-the-know local says of the place, “You feel like you’re outside time. You could be in some indeterminate future or some past utopia vision of the future.” Anyone familiar with Ghesquière knows that that description jibes with his career-long interests in sci-fi and outer space and with the time-collapsing fashion he’s made his métier at Vuitton. The monumental setting definitely befits a collection that was partly inspired by the nascent possibility of space tourism.
In fact, Ghesquière said the prospect of public space travel inspired the collection’s anachronistic prints, which set an escalator, a basketball court, and a roadside motel, among other things, amidst alien landscapes. There were also parachute pleats on minidresses, pants with the padded quilting of spacesuits, and nods to the iconic vinyl of André Courrèges, the French designer whose streamlined Space Age creations of the 1960s still read as futuristic (and au courant) half a century later.
Ghesquière is equally excited about the prospect of the reopening back here on terra firma as the vaccines have their desired effect, and the renewed enthusiasm for dressing way up that’s likely to come with it. “It’s a very optimistic, joyful collection,” he said. “There’s a jubilance to it.” This was reflected in the heraldic tailoring, a top and skirt aflutter with “feathers,” and a cocktail dress that glittered like a disco ball, a couture-level LV trophy. A group of silk blouses with cape-like backs that added softness to the structure of their accompanying pencil skirts and high-waisted trousers achieved a more everyday kind of chic lift-off.
As the pace of business picks up Ghesquière said he’ll hold onto the more deliberate approach he adopted during the remote work of the pandemic lockdowns. “I hope the industry can be more conscious in that way.” But space travel is something the designer is full speed ahead on. He might not be on the first public trip to the moon, but he affirmed his interest. “There’s many projects that want to take us to the edge of the atmosphere,” he said, smiling. “That would be great.”
