Nicolas Ghesquière went on a fantastic voyage in Paris this season, closing PFW with a departure from the kind of fast, less considered offerings that have proliferated once again this season, taking Vuitton in a new direction and not looking back. For the love of a not-so-distant dystopian future, Vuitton gave their latest collection of zany girlish-cum-utilitarian fashion formal looks a digital veneer.
Presented at the Fondation Louis Vuitton SS16 within a set that featured monitors playing excerpts from geek-cult videogame Minecraft, the whole thing, however you may take it, was very un-Vuitton from the get-go. Moto jackets were the first clothing element to be most exaggerated but the hardened leather look was soon set against floaty fabrics sprouting underneath and transparent whispers of mesh tops that appeared like a chain-mail circuit of wires.
The bags and accessories that Vuitton does so well at were even more specialist this season, transformed into micro-sized Gameboy like parcels that can’t really be called a “trunk”, but thanks to the trademark monogrammed check pattern, as warped as it may have looked, they should still keep tongues wagging among consumers. There will be no vexed Vuitton heads here.
Overall, because this season was just so out there and so wildly esoteric, we don’t really know how to feel. On the one hand, it’s shown Ghesquière at his best, experimenting with abandon and doing it in a completely inspired manner, but on the other, all the techno trials are so detached from a house like Louis Vuitton that it couldn’t help but feel like a flash-in-the-pan finale for one of Paris’ most established end-of-schedule staples.
One small sartorial step for Ghesquière, one monumental departure from rhyme and reason at Vuitton.
by Liam Feltham
Images courtesy of Louis Vuitton