Louis Vuitton. Spring 2023 - Paris Fashion Week.

(Images: Louis Vuitton 2022)

With all the doom and gloom in the world, you have to admire Nicolas Ghesquière's fixation with 1950's and early 1960's retrofuturism of a time that was fueled with hope and stability via the beginning of the nuclear age.  It was to offer, under the family values template, a utopia of advancements in technology and urban living.   For its historical worth, the 50's was an era of what appeared to be social and economic calm, even though it was the beginning of the Cold War (part 1), its allure continues to resonate today.  

Ghesquière's other idée fixe is costume design, to which there have been a many showings for Louis Vuitton to which the French fashion designer has shown his adeptness in representing cinema and set design.  Not unlike Demna Gvasalia's Spring 2023 collection for Balenciaga, which represented a broken muddy landscape of beaten down looking models, walking through their war-torn apocalypse.  Ghesquière's expansive movie-esque set designed by contemporary artist Philippe Parreno mirrors Ghesquière dichotomy to Gvasalia's doom, with Parreno's large symmetrical tent like structure constructed within the grounds of the Cour carrée du Louvre in Paris.  In its Utopian similarity to the 1967 World Fair in Montreal, Quebec, when visionary German architect and futurist Frei Otto created reinforced tents for the German pavilion.  

Ghesquière inspiration for his Spring 2023 collection for Louis Vuitton, is certainly leaning towards the modernist 1960's with large dashes of counterculture rebellion.  Dare I say there is an element of the avant-garde being mixed in here?  Exaggerated zips and deconstructed motifs and late 60's proto-punk look's with mini-skirts and leather.  There is a fusion of timelines as noted from Ghesquière's Fall 2022 collection, challenging his stalwart futurism styles, further drawing from when society began to rebel against conservative mindsets.   His styles for Louis Vuitton are becoming less modernist and more risqué, which could be reflective of the times we are living in.  Despite our own jumbled up aesthetics and influences, we do lack a sufficient counterculture with homogeneity still the main play.  And designers, such as Ghesquière, may continue to draw from the past to find that contumacy from fashion, which is fine.  But, it may end up just being a continued simulacrum.

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A.Glass 2022