A Whirlwind Recap of Louis Vuitton’s Glittering Events in Monte Carlo and Paris

For reasons delusional, I had somehow imagined that Paris’s haute couture week would represent a quiet reemergence into the barely remembered world of in-person fashion shows and gatherings.  

How wrong I was! Now, on the TGV train to Avignon—in a state of total collapse, exhaustion, and I would have to add still on a euphoric high at the wonders unveiled over the last few days—my whirlwind twenty-four hours in Monte Carlo a week ago to celebrate the unveiling of Francesca Amfitheatrof’s astounding Louis Vuitton fine jewelry collection seems a demi lifetime away. But what a glamorous way it was to begin a week of wonders.

The excitement began at the Hotel Metropole when my windows opened onto a terrace with views over the port. Seagulls whined overhead, and the salty Mediterranean breeze was balmy after the Manhattan heatwave I had left hours earlier.

Gustave Eiffel no less built the 1889 hotel’s magnificent Art Nouveau atrium—a conservatory of swirling iron volutes—the same year that he constructed his iconic Parisian tower. It’s certainly an evocative place to take breakfast, and I wonder how many hapless gamblers drowned their sorrows under the Belle Epoque plasterwork and gilded rococo scrolls in architect Hans-Goerg Tersling’s wildly over the top ballroom? (Prince Philip’s father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and no stranger to the delights of the gaming tables, died at the hotel in 1944).

The celebrations began when we took speed boats to a wave-lapped promontory beneath a rocky hillside crowned with La Vigie, the great white cube of a villa built in 1902. It was once lived in by Princess Daisy of Pless and was later restored, at great expense, by the famous and sometimes Monegasque resident Karl Lagerfeld, who lived in it for some years before returning it to the municipality.

Far below, the tables were set with pale coral and spiky blue and white flowers and I soon discovered that I was very happily seated next to the ridiculously pretty Laura Harrier, who was coruscating in Nicolas Ghesquiere’s Louis Vuitton rhinestones and Francesca Amfitheatrof’s incredible blue-green cabochon opal ring that you just wanted to dive into. On my other side was the equally fun Alicia Vikander in a black ‘Smoking’ mini dress and diamonds. The evening was a perfect tonic for jet lag. Opposite me, artist performer Lousita Cash, with a fistful of amazing rings and a gleaming golden Vuitton mini dress, provided more dazzle.

Monte Carlo is certainly an unusual place; as we looked back across the waters at the city, with its hillside crowded with soaring luxury tower blocks and turn of the century villas—some of the world’s most stratospherically costly real estate—Laura wondered playfully whether there had been a power outage: there were hardly any lights on. Our little promontory, however, was soon ablaze—we had a firework show of our own as a parade of models, dressed in black or ivory satin evening dresses, swept past wearing pieces from the new collection.

The following morning Francesca Amfitheatrof gave us a tour of her latest Bravery collection nearby at the Hotel de Paris, and seeing them up close was a next-level experience. Taking the intrepid and self-made Louis Vuitton’s own odyssey—and his embrace of innovation as inspiration—Amfitheatrof used Vuitton’s patented star-cut diamonds and a mesh of rubies in the La Passion necklace—an Edwardian dog collar fit for Moulin Rouge’s Satine, but if I had my druthers and a Monegasque bank account, the collier (with its astounding assemblage of cabochon Tanzanite, opals, and diamonds) would find its way into my Vuitton jewel case.