EXCERPT: LOUIS VUITTON. RESORT 2023

"Nicolas Ghesquière held his Resort 2023 collection at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, which if one knows their architectural history, encapsulates that 1950's and 1960's Béton brut architecture or in a more direct term, Brutalism.  Designed  by the late architect Louis I. Kahn who passed away under tragic circumstances in 1974.  Kahn, although not a prolific architect, designed and created over his tenure what could be considered to be the epitome of brutalist structure.  His monolithic buildings resonated a humanistic and spiritual connection to our place within nature, which at the end of the day is a structural defiance, if we are to survive nature's ferocity.  To be that beacon in the dark even against our own human nature and levity.  The building was dedicated to American Virologist Jonas Salk, who discovered the vaccine for polio, saving millions of children from this viral scourge.  In the last years of his life he dedicated himself to find a cure for the AIDS virus.

I have reviewed Ghesquière's previous Louis Vuitton shows and noted his fascination with the dawn of the Nuclear Age that was the 1950's, in all of its hope, particularly after the ravages of Word War Two, it seemed briefly that technology would set us free.  This is Ghesquière's Utopian aesthetic, which offered, at least from a romantic perspective, the possibility that we may envision human triumph over what has recently occurred, post the global pandemic.  But, the obliquity of human ignorance before and after this viral outbreak with its obsession with economics that unfortunately has taken precedence over the sociological.  We were lead by a maelstrom of misinformation, conspiracy theories and general anti-science in lieu of theCOVID-19 pandemic, which came to the fore via our digital relays..."

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Full review: https://chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/2022/05/louis-vuitton-resort-2022.html 

(A.Glass 2022)

Fall 2023 review soon.