Louis Vuitton - Resort 2021

(Images: Louis Vuitton.  All credit)

As designers begin to release their latest collections for 2021, Couture, Resort and Spring (men's) being the first after the quarantine lockdowns, it has being mostly a lookbook affair, with the only runway show to occur so far, was for the brand Etro, as a liberazione d'Italia performance in Milan, under the ever growing threat of a reemergance of Covid-19, which killed so many Italians, Spanish and English.  Europe and the rest of the world is dying, literally, to reopen into what was once the normal.  And as mentioned in my previous reviews of the 2021 collections to date, there will be on and off again 'lockdown' process when breakouts of infections occur again, while the Mediterranean is almost completely reliant on tourism as an income.  One cannot dismiss the recent images of drunk British tourists dancing on cars in Magaluf, Spain, which casts a doubt if lessons have been learned from the pandemic.  That there will not be a return to the normal.  With the spill over of frustrations and human nature in all of its confusion, continues to reveal the flaws of ebullience.  The virus lurks in the old continent.

Nicolas Ghesquière returns for Louis Vuitton with his edgy modernist and retro-homage to the 1980s, noted with over-the-top extravagance of the last show (Fall 2020) for Paris Fashion Week in March, before Covid-19 tore through everything.  Ghesquière's lookbook array is dramatically less indulgent, set within its compressed idea of the office environment, he has simplified and created a rawer setting than his previous shows.  Undoubtedly, like Ghesquière, the romanticism of the 80's holds true for many looking for an inspirational jolt post lockdown, to what appeared as a carefree time and that sweet spot of the late 1970s disco era pre the early 80's AIDS epidemic.  All the while the cold war was still in effect. Ghesquière's latest stylizations, although simple in their overall arrangement, reveals in his latest collection an endearing aspect to the offices of yesteryear, which have changed dramatically over the years and after the pandemic settles, they may never come back to what we remember them to be.  Still, the amorous theme of a Wall Street secretary and an inter-office extramarital affair has always been a tantalizing draw card for vampy 80's styles, to which Ghesquière has portrayed in his enthusiastic tribute to the hedonism of over thirty years ago. 

Yet it is a fairly muted collection at 18 pieces, despite being described as Resort, it may be a prelude to the later 2021 Spring styles, so it becomes a sort of lookbook testing ground. Which Ghesquière has, as mentioned, drawn on his love of 1980's with dashes of his 1990s street looks.  The fusion is precise, as is the tailoring, the clean and defined lines that Ghesquière Is famous for and the reworked pop culture concepts, keep the styles on show in a defined clarity.  But, I feel Ghesquière could have explored more of the risqué corporate tryst, even though there are elements portrayed, the overall collection falls short of  a renewed sophistication.