Louis Vuitton opened with much anticipation, having announced just a few days earlier that New York native Colm Dillane, of KidSuper and 2021 winner of the prestigious Karl Lagerfeld Prize, would be their Fall/Winter 2023 guest designer along with a creative team made up of famed French filmmakers Michel Gondry, Olivier Gondry, creative directors Ibraham Kamara, and Lina Kutsovskaya. As if that wasn’t big enough news, Rosalia was announced to perform live at the show. Outside the show at the Carré du Louvre, was a much different affair due to a Nation Strike and over 200 demonstrations expected, along with k-pop fans, editors, and buyers that managed to make it over.
The journey we are brought on this season is one of the rites of passage from childhood to adolescence, and adulthood, it’s something that connects all of us. On a personal intuition, its stands in as a catalyst for our beautiful planet that also connects as we experience it going through changes on a global level. For the past few seasons, Louis Vuitton hasn’t shied away from addressing this through a strong focus on lower-impact production and their upcycling ideology. Upcycled looks in the collection are created by pieces upcycled by recycling material from overstock upcycled from recycled ideas, and or pieces upcycled through reiteration from previous storylines.
Stepping into the show was an immediate feeling of escapism with Rosalia in an oversized white doudoune, like the ones we never grow into, on top of a vintage remastered model car as models with bucket hats walked through rooms that are reminiscent of the formative moments of our upbringing. Bedroom motifs were delicately embroidered in patchwork on denim trousers and a hoodie pays tribute to the sacred spaces of teenagers. Denim pieces glazed, slashed, distressed, or interwoven from scraps in plays on optical illusions and effects innate to TV screens while the Maison’s logo in an effect echoed through jacquard in denim workwear while workwear constructed in magnified volumes becomes increasingly oversized and culminates in trousers deconstructed into full skirts.
Escapism, after all, whether in our childhood bedrooms or on the open roads that life takes us, is in the DNA of its founder, Louis Vuitton, who invented a genuine “Art of Travel”. Today we saw Packable icons as tote bags attached to mini Louis Vuitton icons into which they can be compressed. On the move, standouts from the collection were made up of coat-within-a-coat, landscape imagery, freezer motifs depicting one garment or accessory within another appearing in a silver bomber jacket as well as in bags, blown-up bomber jackets to the deformed hardware that adorns garments, shearling appears glazed and cracked in a flight jacket, and bringing it home were letter suits are structured from fragments of leather printed with scans of real letters written by members of the Louis Vuitton Studio Prêt-à-Porter Homme in the multitude of languages of their nationalities. The last but not least thing to bring on your journey: shoes. We saw the LV Trainer 2.1 evolve from the athletic 2.0 edition made more minimalistic with an upper in grainy leather meanwhile the LV SK8 was adapted into a more minimalistic manifestation.
Louis Vuitton has had many successes collaborating with artists in the past from Stephen Sprouse, Jeff Koons to Yayoi Kusama who is being spotted taking over Louis Vuitton shops around the world. For ready-to-wear, Colm brought in his art school touch, perhaps a future with Louis Vuitton Men hosting designers traveling to the city would make for an exciting journey for a couple more seasons.
Take a look at the collection below:
