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Louis Vuitton

Fall 2022 RTW Menswear

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Properties

Date: January 20, 2022
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 69
Brand: Louis Vuitton
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Joelle Diderich for WWD

Dream big.

If there’s one lesson that Virgil Abloh taught the fashion industry, it’s that a limitless imagination pays off. The late designer’s final men’s wear collection for Louis Vuitton encapsulated the themes of boyhood and the touches of surrealism that ran through his eight collections for the French luxury house.

On a sky blue set dubbed the Louis Dreamhouse, models, dancers and an orchestra came together for a multilayered performance that drew an emotional standing ovation from an audience that included luxury magnate Bernard Arnault, Abloh’s wife Shannon, and celebrities including J Balvin, Victor Cruz, Naomi Campbell, Venus Williams and Tyler, the Creator, who wrote the soundtrack. (Campbell returned to walk in a second “friends and family” show.)

The event started with acrobatic dancers seemingly bouncing off a staircase leading onto the set, as members of Britain’s Chineke Orchestra, which champions diversity in classical music, struck up under the direction of famed Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

The collection was 95 percent completed by the time of Abloh’s unexpected death from cancer in November at the age of 41, and carried all his signatures, with a strong romantic undertone that brought to mind his flower-strewn spring 2020 collection, shown on the picturesque Place Dauphine.

It manifested in ethereal touches, such as a few models dressed in ivory outfits, sporting kite-shaped wings made of white lace; basketball caps shrouded with wedding veils, and an allover print blending the house’s signature monogram with a pastel-colored 19th-century floral tapestry motif.

Abloh’s love of art was reflected in outfits incorporating tapestry renditions of paintings by Gustave Courbet and Giorgio de Chirico. His sportswear roots were echoed in varsity jackets covered in cartoon graphics of wizards, animals, cherubs, clouds and the Grim Reaper — though he’d recently made a strong case for tailoring, reflected in suits and coats with exaggerated shoulders.

Accessories added a surrealist flourish, with bucket bags shaped like paint cans, and a Keepall weekend bag in a semitransparent Damier pattern that looked like it was suspended in space.

It was all part of what the house referred to as Abloh’s Boyhood Ideology: seeing the world with the unspoiled eyes of a child. “Through this lens, the membrane between reality and imagination is nonexistent. Dreams can come true,” Vuitton said in the collection notes.

Speaking after the show, an emotional Benji B, who supervised the musical direction of all of Abloh’s collections at Vuitton, said the designer had wanted to bring a sense of theater to the show, which was Vuitton’s first physical men’s wear display in Paris in 18 months. The score was arranged by Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, a favorite of both men, making it a truly international project.

“I just want to be surrounded by people that really understand the assignment. It’s not a job for them, it’s a sort of emotional creative investment, and understanding the culture that V brought to Vuitton and everything that we brought, because as you know, every show is an amazing cocktail and collage, a tapestry of references coming from all over,” the producer said. “I really wanted this to be a celebration.”

While Tyler composed eight new pieces for the show, the finale song was a track from his 2017 album “Flower Boy” titled “See You Again.” Members of Abloh’s design studio walked out to loud applause, lingering on the runway to hug the models.

Referring to his autodidactic journey to the pinnacle of luxury, Abloh used to tell his followers: “You can do it, too.” His wife has pledged to perpetuate his efforts to support the education of academically promising Black students. If stuck for inspiration, they need only look at his body of work: it’s testimony to the power of blue sky thinking.

SEE ALSO:

Virgil Abloh Dies of Cancer at 41

Louis Vuitton CEO Talks Final Virgil Abloh Collection, Succession Plans

‘Virgil Was Here’: A Look at the Life and Death of Virgil Abloh

By Luke Leitch for Vogue

This slideshow includes 9 images from a second showing of this collection in Bangkok on June, 1, 2021.

During his eight collection residency, Virgil Abloh turned the house of Louis Vuitton upside down and inside out. He made the exclusive inclusive. This afternoon in Paris apparently marked the final collection of that arc, and in the set at least it appeared to come full circle. The collection was named Louis Dreamhouse, and around the runway were scattered the upended elements of a house that had been hit by some enormous force of energy now spent.

In one corner was a staircase (nodding to The Truman Show set of season 4), from which some opening dancers, after some apparent security issue had been resolved, bounced up and down on hidden trampolines. An empty bed rested alongside the roof and chimney, from which a homey puff of steam emerged. On the other side of the roof was a long dining table, down which sat the Chineke! Orchestra musicians whose performance of a Tyler the Creator-composed piece contributed swooningly to making the show so moving. On the wall above them a stopped clock read the time as eight, on the dot.

The collection unfolded on 20 dancers and 67 models. Abloh’s great gift as both designer and lightning rod—masterfully to navigate an elusive commonality of commodity and community in order to service the former and uplift the latter—was posthumously still very much alive, even when referencing death. The inclusion of a Jim Phillips-esque Grim Reaper graphic was a breathtaking detail from a man designing his own legacy while gazing upon his own mortality. Bags came shaped as bouquets. The closing four all-white looks, some featuring Leonardo-esque wings, required no interpretation.

To focus overly on the merch at a show attended by his widow and so many friends that it acted also a form of memorial feels almost grubby. However Abloh did articulate himself very specifically through design, and here his instinct to cross-pollinate categories in order to erase boundaries was in full force: lushly magisterial suiting, both quirkily detailed and jewel-accessorized, played alongside the “streetwear” tradition this designer refused to tolerate being marginalized.

Then there were the two tapestried looks, one on a topcoat, the other on an acutely waisted—almost Bar-shaped—parka, upon which were reproduced De Chirico’s The Melancholia of Departure, a piece the artist created multiple versions of. These, said the notes, were illustrative of the 2020 Abloh-termed concept named “Maintainamorphosis,” defined as “the principle that ‘old’ ideas should be invigorated with value and presented alongside the ‘new,’ because both are equal in worth.”

Returning then to the “old,” it was back in June 2018 for collection 1, his very first for Louis Vuitton, that Abloh transmitted multiple references to The Wizard Of Oz, all of them specific to Dorothy’s fever dream. Today, as members of Abloh’s design studio came out en masse to a standing ovation after his very last collection for Louis Vuitton, they stood within the inside-out of Abloh’s cyclone-scattered dreamhouse. What an irreplaceable force he was.