“I think if you don’t put yourself in aesthetic danger every season, you’re not playing the game of fashion.” Nicolas Ghesquière made that memorable remark on a recent episode of Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast. It was a fitting summation of the often exquisite Louis Vuitton collection he presented tonight in a show that capped off his 10th anniversary celebrations at the house.
Ghesquière was off on another time traveling trip, this one to the Renaissance, an era he said he feels personally connected to, having grown up in France’s Loire Valley with its centuries-old chateaux. The collection opened with a group of jackets—all puffed sleeves, pulled-in waists, and peplum hems—but the biker shorts and chunky leather sandals they were worn with brought them back to the here and now. So did the supple construction of what would have been in the past very ponderous coats.
He liked the idea of developing the architectural shapes he prefers but with a lighter hand and a fluidity in make. “The game,” he explained, “was to work with the two ateliers—there’s flou and there’s tailleur—and we break boundaries. It’s a contraction, to build these clothes with as much detail and structure, letting go of gravity somehow.”
Subsequent looks married breeches with roomy blouson jackets and/or drop-waist ribbed knit dresses, and Ghesquière challenged his team to cut coats that look and feel more like blouses. “The lightness of the silk fabric is very alive,” he said. “What I really wanted is that you couldn’t put a name on these pieces.” The day/evening divide would’ve been slippery too, but for the lavishing of embellishments, like the cabochons dotting loose-fitting tops worn with his take on the transparent pantaloons that have become one of the season’s breakout trends.
The stars of the show came at the end. They were a trio of unstructured jackets featuring paintings by the French artist Laurent Grasso from his series Studies into the Past, on which he inserts modern celestial and atmospheric phenomenon into works rendered in the style of the Renaissance greats. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting artistic collaborator.
Ghesquière mentioned one more challenge he’d set himself: the creation of a “generational” bag, meaning, it seems, an everyday sort of style with a casual cool in contrast to the preciousness of the clothes. Pictured in look 1 and 2, it follows the rules of his game: Where most LV bags are structured, this one has the “soft power” he was after.
