Review of Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton Cruise 2022 Fashion Show
Amidst a Monumental Sculpture About Time and Life, the Splendors of Clothes Spanning Fashion History
By Long Nguyen
The Axe Majeur is a 3.2 kilometers long straight pathway partially painted in red that runs from the village of Cergy-Pontoise village, less than an hour northwest of Paris, passing monuments, fields, and a small island in the Oise river with a skyline view of the French capital.
Axe Majeur is an incomplete masterpiece of work by the late Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan, known for his site-specific memorials and monuments. Karavan used mass scale environmental art to generate physical and emotional memories where visitors to each of the sites experience the natural elements surrounding the manufactured objects. His best early works were the wall reliefs in the assembly hall at the Knesset parliament building or the 35 iron sculptures at the Court of Justice in Tel Aviv. Initially developed by the Japanese sculptor Inoue Fukichi and finished in 2006 by Karavan. The Muro Art Forest intends for visitors to walk through artwork placements to conceive depopulation. Karavan carved the word ‘Shalom’ onto the circular concrete columns in 100 languages in the sculpture Way of Peace in Nitzana on the Israeli-Egypt border in the sand as a witness to peace.
“Sunlight, water, steam, soil, grass, water, steam, white concrete, iron, railway tracks, laser beam. Dimensions 36x150x3200m” is how the artist himself described his ‘ongoing’ large-scale sculpture commissioned in 1980.
“A sculpture conceived like a beautiful utopia, by a humanist artist whose compassionate, peaceful works are scattered worldwide. An architecture of reconciliation, where water, light, wind, sand, concrete, stone and steel create a felicitous relationship between nature, space, and time,” is how Louis Vuitton decided on Axe Majeur as the location to stage the brand’s annual cruise show within sites known for architectural marvels. Previous Louis Vuitton cruise shows have been at the Miho Museum in Kyoto, the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, or the Fondation Maeght Saint-Paul de Vence in Cannes.
“Red leathers, blue satins, vivid prints, jacquard coats, embroidered capes, silver corsets, leather joggers, silk sheaths. Dimensions 45 looks” should be the material description for the Louis Vuitton Cruise collection taped show where the models walked along the paths of the Axe Majeur.
In a concise collection rich in stark colors, bold designs, and elaborate craftsmanships, Nicolas Ghesquière, the creative director, sent out a strong resort show. The clothes balance the focus on architectural cuts with loose silhouettes in an array of bright colors to emphasize the sporty feel of these individual pieces. More importantly, these clothes have all that sharp silhouettes, a signature of the designer work developed over his years at Louis Vuitton since his debut show in March 2014.
In the open air and perhaps free from the art constraints, often at the main collection showings at the Louvre, the cruise clothes do not veer towards the conceptual art. Still, instead, they are consumer-friendly offerings of a black single breast jacket with gold buttoning or even a black embroidered wave-cut evening top with dangling sleeves and a multi folds leather skirt, combining soft and rough elements.
The airiness of these clothes denotes a sense of comfort and ease of movement as part of the Louis Vuitton travel heritage, with design elements together showing the clash of time.
The red leather knee-length coat that opened the show anchored the ease expressed by the clothes throughout the show, followed by a black loose vinyl leather, flare elbow sleeve coat with a black leather biker riding pants.
Making the collection more sport than formal wear is another strong point in this cruise collection.
The clothes are available at retail over the most extended selling period in the year. A model wore a bright yellow knit with blue/green/white furry sleeves with a white leather zippered pant in this show. A blue and black leather boots break the evening formal demureness of the gold metallic bead and fringed black dress – or wear a black leather crescent shoulder jacket over the dress.
Even the blue tuxedo with a track pant looks more of a daywear ensemble than a suit made for an evening outing.
A white satin collarless dress with flying layered sleeves; a blue sleeveless satin sheath dress with drawstring trims paired with a flounce leather short skirt; and a sleeveless white knit tunic dress a pink stripe cardigan – these new cruise dresses are the slight trapezoidal silhouettes of sheath dresses that Ghesquière has shown in previous collections. These specific shapes are now the building vocabulary of his fashion oeuvre at the house in the same way the designer incorporates softness into his more structured design. The white and blue satin dresses have hand-painted decorations depicting a collage of mountains, the planets Saturn and Jupiter, and images of aqua oceans and violet dunes typical in old science fiction movies.
As with many of Ghesquière’s previous Louis Vuitton collections, say Spring 2018 or Fall 2020, a clash of materials and period styles is inherent from overt to subtle. Here, the short blue dress with multiple fold sleeves and bubble drawstring hems with a sizeable white zipper at the neck is a perfect dialogue between past and present and between the 1960s and the 2021s visions of the near future.
The mixing of eras, here, are prominent, for example, in the leather zippered patch pocket biker jacket with colorful red and blue hand-painted patterns, in the 19th century corset now worn outside of a silver cardigan and long front slit wool silver skirt, and in the 18th-century French military coat now as a triangular shape vest paired with a striped cotton shirt and zippered straight leg wool pants. The more traditional double breast blue printed jacquard lurex cropped sleeve cape combined with modern a black leather short dress/coat with round trims sleeves represents this time travel.