3D cityscape jumpers and aeroplane handbags: Louis Vuitton gives us the bustling life we've been deprived of
Virgil Abloh, artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear, likes to take his audience on adventures down the rabbit hole. There have been sets recalling 1980s downtown Brooklyn, dreamscapes of fairytale forests and, on one memorable occasion, taking over an entire neighbourhood in Paris to create a (heavily luxified) children’s play park.
This year, Covid put paid to the lavish fashion show sets and in-person experiences, but for his autumn/winter 2021 men’s show, broadcast digitally, the designer looked to more solid ground; a paean to the bustling city life and travel experiences we’ve been deprived of this past 10 months.
Ever fond of some catwalk theatrics - models have previously appeared with scaffolding around their heads - this time the sartorial hijinks came in the form of 3D structures across puffa jackets, one depicting the landmarks of Paris and the other of the New York skyline, like tourist trap trinketry blown up and applied to clothing. If you can’t go on that city break, bring the city to you.
Abloh - the first African American man to helm a Parisian luxury house - said he wanted to explore the theme of displacement, inspired by James Baldwin’s novel Stranger in the Village, about a black man finding his way in a remote Swiss village.
That parlayed into the clothes worn by the myriad types of men that Abloh sent down the catwalk. There was the ramshackle wanderer in a plush, soft-structure dressing gown coat, a nod to lockdown’s relaxed dress codes. There was the business man on his brisk stroll through St Germain, coffee and newspaper in place, wearing slick suiting and precise, sharp coats.
Hot on his smart, leather heels was the streetwear renegade, in flowing tweeds twisted into contorted shapes, baseball jackets and pimped-up furs with tracksuits.
The collection also spliced African Kente cloth - a nod to Abloh’s Ghanaian ancestry - with tartan; tribes united in fashion form.
Some of the fabrics used in the collection were upcycled, which chimes with one of the biggest movements in fashion at the moment to reduce its impact on the environment - although that message of modernity was somewhat contradicted by the inclusion of real fox fur in the shaggy, 1970s-style coats.
Luggage was heavily present, in gleaming silver travel cases; a sign of optimism (and safe bet for profit margins) that by this winter we’ll be globe-trotting as normal.
And as for those fantastical 3D cityscapes erupting from clothes? If you’re looking for a striking solution to social distancing, this is it in the most gloriously fashion-forward manner possible.
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