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Louis Vuitton

Spring 2022 RTW Menswear

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Properties

Date: June 25, 2021
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 73
Brand: Louis Vuitton
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Sarah Mower for Vogue

Additional looks from Virgil Abloh’s final show for Louis Vuitton, held in Miami, on November 30, 2021, have been added to the end of this slideshow.

“I feel like I’m writing a book with these collections. It’s one continuous logic about diversity and design,” said Virgil Abloh, talking from the Louis Vuitton menswear studio. “And it’s now synced up with my true thoughts about culture.” Abloh’s multilayered, multi-referenced filmmaking in the time of pandemic has taken him to a place of collective communication where he’s uplifting and materializing far more than clothes on a runway. “I’ve started to let my imagination run wild,” he said. “I try to create the world as I would like to see it in real life. Having something that’s pop culture and fashion, that’s an education and maybe opens minds. To me, that’s the North Star.”

Questioning designers about where their inspirations come from is a typical fashion-editor gambit, while who copied who is the accusatory game of the internet. This time Abloh essentially took that on and checkmated it with his knowledge of Black music’s revolutionary creative methods of sampling: of how hip-hop and jungle evolved into rave through subcultures, countries, and time until the genius of the provenance is all simultaneously embedded, normalized, and erased in the mainstream. That’s where the vast Black cultural global fashion influence of tracksuits and sneakers comes from—uncredited. And it’s where, at the very top of the menswear establishment, it faces off with the in-the-know formalities surrounding the sartorial canon of the suit. “When it comes to the nuance of Black culture and design, how does it show up? How does that become canonized? I stand in a very privileged position to be able to educate on that.”

Abloh named the collection and its film Amen Break—a perfect metaphoric illustration of how an original drum break recorded by the Winstons, a funk and soul group, in 1969 became the most sampled drum break ever. “I called the collection that because I think it’s so profound: this idea that something can be iterated on by so many artists in so many songs to the point where it melts away. They weren’t compensated for it, by the way. And people don’t know that the drum pattern in their favorite song was from a very specific soul song—and it’s a sampler that makes it possible.”

In that way, Abloh actively joins his weight from the point of view of Black authority to the live debate about hacking, reappropriation, and source sharing that has been batting between Gucci’s Alessandro Michele and Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia. If there’s a contest on who did it first to create new significance and new looks out of those already existing, then it all points to who was doing what in Black culture, music, and style in America in the 1970s and ’80s. All of this is documented and factually backed up in the 40-plus pages of Abloh’s show notes.

But to the collection. Abloh took chess as one of his organizing themes—for salient, timely reasons beyond the binary clash between the cultures of suits and tracksuits. “The game of chess, as it relates to life. This idea of two entities that always battle in a strategic way. Also, how the same pieces are divided by color on the board, that makes them inherently at odds,” he said. “ I thought there were some great parallels as we come out of 2020 in the cultural context. Then I linked that to the Damier print in the Louis Vuitton archive. So I was looking at the brand, interpreting things through a historical lens.”

It gave him and his stylist Ibrahim Kamara the keynote for the chess-piece silhouettes—identified by tall hats, furry headphone headgear, and the long lines of skirts, “like the queen, the knights, and pawns, perhaps. That’s where the dreamlike sort of silhouettes began to take shape. And the other half of the collection is the battling opposite, all the gray suits.” The bright colors and tie-dyed semiotics of rave—neon green, yellow, electric blue—jump out of the look-book pictures: lots of cheerful, grabby fashion fun there for next spring.

But there’s yet more loaded symbolism that intersects with the skirted shapes, the padded vests, and armor-plated puffers in the show. For that, Abloh had centered himself on the imagery of kendo, the Japanese martial art, a reference honoring the memory of the Wu-Tang Clan and how hip-hop brought the knowledge and influence of Japanese and Chinese martial arts into his youth.

“I very much appreciated those narratives about how martial arts spreads across different cultures and becomes something new wherever it lands, and that was key,” he reflected. “Diversity represents highlighting other cultures, not just my own—and making space to share those. The things we’ve seen in the pandemic regarding Black culture and Asian culture, to me, are enough to make me want to keep diversity at the forefront of how I think about what fashion is today.”

In the film, directed by Mahfuz Sultan and star-studded with heroes like Goldie, a sense of male-world tension and the underlying threat of masculine competition run through the nonlinear narrative. Where it came from was Abloh’s absorption of The Lone Wolf and Cub movie when he was a child in Chicago. Where he took it, though, was very much of now: the idea of a father protecting and teaching his child to survive through the trials and perils of the dangerous world. “That very much fits into my overarching ethos about boyhood. They’re navigating through these landscapes and through the chess game—the turmoil of it,” he said. “It’s just metaphoric: parent and offspring, the layer of protection that’s needed in uncertainty.”

By Joelle Diderich for WWD

‘Tis the season of the mega-collaboration.

Just hours after Dior revealed it was teaming up with Travis Scott on its spring 2022 men’s collection, Louis Vuitton dropped another bombshell during Paris Fashion Week: The French luxury brand has partnered with Nike on new versions of its iconic Air Force 1 sneakers.

The shoes, which come in 21 colorways, were unveiled on Thursday as part of Virgil Abloh’s men’s collection for Vuitton, but additional details were scarce. Asked whether they would be made available for sale, the house merely said: “Stay tuned for more details.”

The launch marks a full-circle moment in hip-hop culture. Abloh, who has a highly successful collaboration with Nike through his Off-White label, was inspired by the cover of the 1988 album “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock. It shows E-Z Rock wearing a Nike Air Force 1 basketball trainer altered with a swoosh adorned in the Louis Vuitton monogram.

“The cover embodied the hip-hop community’s early practice of hacking together high fashion and sportswear, sidelining diverging brands with equal reverence. A cultural symbol in its own right, today the Nike Air Force 1 serves as an objet d’art emblematic of self-generated subcultural provenance,” Vuitton said in its collection notes.

Or as Outfitgrid founder Dennis Todisco commented on Instagram: “When the fake becomes real.”

For Abloh, the U.S.-born son of Ghanaian immigrants, it’s yet another chapter in a narrative that has seen him rise from outsider to kingmaker. He acknowledged as much in a short speech to his team, gathered in a cinema in Paris for the premiere of his collection film, titled “Amen Break” after a famous drum sample.

“Fashion can make you feel like things are impossible. We’re a part of a team that can make people feel a specific way. And through this body of work that we’re about to see on the screen, we deconstruct and dissolve and melt away this idea that fashion is elitist, or fashion is for only a select few,” he said.

Indeed, Abloh has blown open the gates of luxury to a whole new category of participant, from the kids who line up for his sneaker drops to the talent that takes part in his shows.

Musicians GZA, Goldie, Saul Williams, Lupe Fiasco and Shabaka Hutchings appear in the film alongside “Les Misérables” actor Issa Perica, in a storyline inspired by the classic Japanese kung fu film “Lone Wolf and Cub.” Chess is a sub-plot, inspired by the cover of GZA’s seminal album “Liquid Swords,” as well as Vuitton’s signature Damier motif.

In fashion terms, the theme translated into a plethora of check motifs, on items ranging from luxed-up track suits to tailored suit jackets paired with floor-length skirts, in a nod to traditional garments ranging from kilts to kendo uniforms. Checkered bodysuits served as an underpinning for a fuchsia suit, a silver foil jacket and pants, and sober black outfits inspired by martial arts garb.

The central idea was a confrontation between tailoring and trackpants, which materialized into a human chess game — though there was ultimately no winner. “I’m not choosing between one or the other. My signature is both,” Abloh said, noting that the logo of the film contains a yin-yang emblem. “That symbol fits perfectly in my canon.”

Hence the leap between his new-gen suits — think short, belted jacket and pooling pants — and the raver elements in the collection, including airbrushed monogram-embossed leather jackets, and an outfit pieced together from rainbow-colored flyers printed on leather, featuring the logo of Goldie’s record label Metalheadz.

Abloh said he wasn’t playing along traditional gender lines either. “We have straight-up A-line skirts. It’s liberating in 2021,” he said, pointing to a black-and-white rain jacket worn over a hoop skirt. The designer considers it as the natural evolution of a year that has seen social issues from Black Lives Matter to trans rights take center stage.

“The next thing in fashion isn’t in fashion. It’s in people, it’s in the atmosphere, it’s in the streets, it’s in the socio-political,” he said. “Decision, gender, diversity: those aren’t even hot topics. That’s top line. That’s already been established. Now, it’s developing men’s wear into showing the freedom that can be.”

Now on his seventh collection for the house, Abloh feels increasingly legitimate in delivering his point of view. “I’m older, so I don’t feel the fear of being young and trying to stake a claim or aim high,” he said. Yet the striver in him is never far below the surface: by bringing the bootleg back to the source, he’s scored yet another win for the culture.