Dispatch from Paris: Louis Vuitton

What determines how we feel about a show? Is it the immediate feeling that we want to own it, or is it something more intrinsic than that — a case of emotional resonance? If you’re Nicolas Ghesquière, it is often both.

His work at Louis Vuitton indicates that he designs from the gut. I guess his work at Balenciaga did that, too. And that gut feels a lot like an emotional roller coaster — you think you’re getting one thing but you end up with something different. There’s this sense of uniformity that is so difficult to pinpoint. It’s like you’re on your way to a party and you see a group of girls across the street. Given their demeanor, you just know that they’re going to the same party. They don’t look like each other, they don’t really sound like each other — you might decide that you hate them, but there’s an understanding between that cohort and you that you’re all the same. In a way, you’re bound. That’s what Louis Vuitton under the Ghesquière reign does — it binds us.

On Wednesday morning, the Fondation Louis Vuitton was covered in screens. These screens projected cuts from a popular video game called Minecraft. From behind the screens emerged models. We could only see them from the torso down and I swear to blog every time an entire outfit was revealed, I was surprised. It seemingly started as a futuristic, digitally-ept take on punk. There were clunky shoes and jumpsuits and rock and roll jackets and skirts — both leather and studded. There were slingback loafers which I know aren’t new but feel so satisfying, like a can of Diet Coke after 8 years of abstinence.

And then slowly, a different vision under the same establishment sauntered in. Victorian collars and elaborate sleeves and low rise flight pants, embellished cropped cape tops and this series of hideously marvelous bubble skirts and dresses rendered in white and metallic silver. There were shrugs and pieces of fringe hanging from open knits. Every girl wore a set of what looked like leather hand casts — a new take on motorcycle gloves, no doubt.

Descriptively, they have nothing to do with each other, right? But watch the collection — you’ll see that they’re all from the same video game.

We’re spending a lot of time talking about what it means that Balenciaga is now two for two with the tapping of young designers who are known for their contemporary appeal. We fear old house tradition falling by the wayside and what it means that couture, a relic of the past, will now truly become of a bygone era. Maybe they were hoping they’d find a new Ghesquière: a real artifact of the future. Nothing less.

Photographs via Vogue Runway; Feature collage by Elizabeth Tamkin

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