Louis Vuitton’s dream team

On the catwalk or in the front row, one can really only speak of modern family in the Louis Vuitton house. In the first row at the fashion show sits the family of origin, meaning Bernard Arnault, owner of the luxury hub Lvmh, along with his children Delphine and Antoine. On the runway, what can be considered the adopted creative family, the one that brought the French maison’s menswear to the stage after the passing of designer Virgil Abloh. A true dream team. There was the Rosalía, the one-time Grammy and eight-time Latin grammy winning spanish star, the musical curator of the fashion show who warmed up the spirits by performing live during the show with that caliente r&b and hip hop vein of hers that blended well with the atmospheric street soul.

Along with her, the guys from the Louis Vuitton men’s studio who designed the pieces came up on stage at the end of the fashion show: American designer Colm Dillane behind the KidSuper brand, who was an inspiration for concepts and ideas, Sierra Leonean stylist Ibrahim Kamara and Ukrainian creative director Lina Kutsovskaya, both longtime collaborators of the Arnault’s family maison. The show’s set up and its cinematic prelude were directed by French directors Michel and Olivier Gondry, who have great experience in the music world having directed videos and collaborated with names such as Daft punk, The Rolling Stones, and Björk.

The set is a house to grow up in, from an infant to an adult. Games, drawings, walls on which to write, computers, and dart competitions, images that return to the spirit of the collection and to that aesthetic of the child that had always characterized Virgil Abloh’s work. All starts with the reformed formal in the elongated lengths, in leather, and in reassembled check weaves, in the palette that plays first with purple, in a metamorphoses of revers. Camouflage patterns pop up, big eyes looking out from the outerwear and portraits of stylized faces all over them, as in children’s painting pastimes.

It is a message, as one of those letters that completely cover a look of written missives. The head is protected by rubber caps like wetsuits, leather baseball caps, large architectural hoods in down jackets. The new blurred apple silhouette prints have lettering such as «Fantastic imagination?». The collection is full of words and phrases on the clothes and fragments of images as windows on the looks, in a crescendo of volume, with crystals to give a bling ring to the famous pattern and logo lettering, with visual tricks such as trompe l’oeil on bags moving from a sporty touch to a destroying soul in denim, and the security of a deluge of bags that actualize iconic details. A mixture of performance and craftmanship, as Virgil Abloh would have liked it.

Judgement. Abloh’s legacy can be felt, even literally. He left the brand the musical rhythm that has become its true aesthetic pillar, but above all, mental. A freedom that removed barriers and thoughts out of the box. The fashion show is a kaleidoscope of sounds, colors, races, suggestions, that are all amalgamated and all ready to talk about a menswear that is growing. (All rights reserved)