The luxury game has been battling a losing streak recently; as one retailer put it this afternoon: “flat is the new up.” So it seemed startlingly appropriate that the snakes were much more prominent than the ladders upon the enormous board that Louis Vuitton constructed as the set of this evening’s menswear show.
Snakes and ladders originated in India, the great nation that inspired this collection. Pharrell Williams first visited the country in 2018 and returned with the LV design team this year to prepare this collection, stopping in Delhi, Mumbai, and Jaipur. “We make fashion, but we’re a house of travel,” he observed in the backstage area in the Pompidou Center pre-show. He added: “I charge my team with refinement. There’s a lot of houses that focus on trying to make statements, you know? You’ll see things that are, like, loud and avant garde, and there are ones that do it that I absolutely love, but that’s not my strong suit. My strong suit is in the details.”
To suggest that Louis Vuitton isn’t loud seemed as rich as the many, many VIC clients who joined Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a show that was beautifully (and resoundingly) soundtracked by Voices of Fire and l’Orchestre du Pont Neuf. However there were absolutely many beautiful and thoughtful details here. Vuitton aficionados will justly be excited by the recreation and expansion of the 2006 luggage set Marc Jacobs designed for Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. The animal illustrations drafted for the original designs by Eric Anderson—elephants, antelope, zebras in rapid transit between palm trees—were also transposed to damier check canvas bags and garments. These included an absolutely lush vicuna overcoat, a seven-layered poplin coat with hand-embroidery, and full denim looks that were also modeled this evening by Williams’s watching family: preppy with a twist.
Accessory highlights included the deeply dyed blue and orange hued Speedy 40s and yoga bag, plus some lovely carpet bags also in the Speedy shape. Sunglasses came edged with the rounded metal protectors that featured on the Darjeeling trunks. The animal motif of the season was a frog; when Williams and the team visited architect Bijoy Sain of Studio Mumbai, with whom they collaborated on elements of this collection, the visitors were inspired by the loudly singing amphibians that filled his garden. A nuts zip-up hoodie was made in hand-stitched pixels of mink, mostly white but peppered with orange and green, each five millimeters across. Details-wise, the closer you were able to look, the more you were able to see.
Panning out a little, a modification of silhouette seemed to be at play in this collection. There was still some turmeric toned suiting in the narrow and cropped jacket-meets-flared pants situationship that has been such a prominent part of Williams’s house version of dandyism. But tonight it was refreshingly diversified into much more loosely flowing shapes often delivered in purple indigo. Some of this suiting, as well as the loose and silky combat pants sometimes worn below it, was edged with embroidered metal and stone: souvenir handicrafts acquired through the conceit of this collection along its way.
The team developed a new denim in which the undyed weft was countered with a warp not in indigo but LV-damier brown. There was a strong emphasis on prince of wales check, slightly confusingly but very attractively. On one early suit the pattern erupted upwards mid-jacket from fabric to embroidery. It was used in the lining of a cool pale khaki overcoat to exactly match the suit below. It was also hidden within the metallic shine of some apparently 95% metal yarn technical pieces, whose more conventionally technical collection-mates—outdoor jackets—were part of a broader aside related to mountaineering. Other garments were patterned with screen printed text designed to give the patchy impression of having been hand-painted, like the street advertising Williams and his team observed in India.
The second game featured in tonight’s collection was cricket, the English colonial import that is an Indian national obsession. The ties were meant to echo club colors and there was a fun cricket jumper with jewelry lining its v-neck. This begged a cricket metaphor: on luxury’s sticky wicket, Williams played tonight’s collection with a straight bat, delivering plenty of assured shots and unleashing the occasional cracking boundary. After an innings comprising 76 looks, he seemed by no means all out: This was a strong session.
