Louis Vuitton. Resort 2022 (A.Glass June 18th 2021)

As film becomes one of the main themes in what could be an emerging trend for fashion in 2021, it is undoubtedly Louis Vuitton’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière who has shown his capability of leading the charge in orchestrating movie inspired concepts. Merging fashion and costume design whilst being able to portray these collections in an innovative and original way, has occurred within our pre and post Covid-19 world. Devised through lookbooks and film clips, runway shows are now almost solely an online experience and for the lucky few who can recall what it was like to attend an actual live Fashion Week back in the day, is all, at this point time, just a memory.   Yet, the surreality of a viral pandemic continues on as does the desire to create styles for future seasons, Resort 2022 being one of them and this is Ghesquière’s 3rd Resort collection.  While noting his 2nd Resort showing in July 2020, Ghesquière stripped down some of the more extravagant of past shows, offering a more subdued collection under his lookbook presentation, yet his sophisticated modernism and sexual overtures of an early 1980s parallel universe remains evident, as does Ghesquière’s imprint of redefining women’s styles for the famed fashion house.

Ghesquière’s love affair with science fiction maintains its admirable keepsake, portrayed through his romanticism and escapism of shaping, aesthetically, the possibility of human ingenuity within his modernist and futurist styles.  Which in its dichotomy, does indeed run counter to the avant-garde and its own future stylizations or dare I say, postmodern concepts of what might very well be the opposite to a modern Utopia, that being a Dystopia to which a many scifi writers have written about for over a century.  However, even if the said looks are now becoming the dominant styles for 2021 and 2022, it is set within that paradigm that not only are all living in a exaggerated reality of technological hope, it could also be deemed as a retrofitted and broken world.   Despite the parallels of fiction and reality coalescing and Ghesquière’s homage to his optimistic futurism, it is nevertheless his skills as a designer that supersedes with or without the science fiction narrative.

His latest collection for Louis Vuitton was held at the Axe Majeur complex as a crowdless runway show, just outside of Paris, created by Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan (1930-2021) and the modernist master architect Ricardo Bofil.  The grounds of Axe Majeur represent that optimism that was the Renaissance with its new found technological modernism, as society moved out of the dark ages of superstition into a new modern era of science and reason.  So it is fitting that Ghesquière inserted his own take onto the Utopian fixture created by two great urban designers to which he has complemented the architectural setting perfectly.  Delivering an array of his finest and well crafted pieces to date.

A truly stunning collection, with some absolutely incredible detailing, and yes, it holds Ghesquière’s early to mid 80’s esque delineations, with an attentive focus of casting the overall styles to suit the theme, which would be close to what could be considered a flawless runway show.   With silks, leathers and synthetics, all merged with a finesse allowing Ghesquière’s color palette to say within his chosen primary colors, mixing the combinations, yet keeping it regimented and direct gives the collection a lot of exuberance and in quoting Ghesquière himself,  “very optimistic” and “joyful”.