From the Chiasmus archive: "Louis Vuitton. Pre-Fall 2021. Ready-for-Wear" Posted May 24th, 2021 by CHIASMUS MAGAZINE BLOG

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(Images: Louis Vuitton 2021)

Nicolas Ghesquière retro-futurist modus operandi for Louis Vuitton continues on, in the refining of his craft, while setting a precedence, particularly the high end luxury brands mix and match ensembles.  In similarity to Gucci’s Michele Alexandro’s thrift looks, Ghesquière has aligned a sleeker version of second hand inspired styles and its care free expression of individualist appeal, which can be found in these mix and match aesthetics.  Even though it is set from a luxury benchmark, Ghesquière like Alexandro, have been able to ground their designs into tangible concepts or at least allowing the viewer, even if one cannot afford the clothes, to be inspired by the stylizations.

Ghesquière has, seen with his previous Louis Vuitton collections, a love of cinema and its cinematography, which of course includes the myths, storytelling and concepts that film and its influences can provide to the observer.  But, specifically it is the escapism.   As Alfred Hitchcock once said about melodrama, that it is the story of life, but made to be “more so” through the cinematic experience and I feel that Ghesquière, although he hints at the subtle, within the seemingly expansive budget of the Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group of companies, who owns the prestigious fashion house, has been able to ramp it up into variant degrees of mediums whilst holding to the personal themes that he holds dear.   For the LV Pre-Fall 2021 collection, Ghesquière became the photographer, utilizing the French/English actress Stacy Martin as his muse, shooting the entire collection in and around a French château.

There is a charming intimacy with this collection, with only 12 pieces displayed which will be the precursor for the larger Fall 2021 collection,  Ghesquière’s baroque futurism mixed with the décor of its 15th century château, is his take on reworking parallel universe timelines, which does hold a science fiction appeal.   Inserting a manifested alternative reality modernism onto the historic backdrops, maybe in homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 esoteric sci fi masterpiece “2001:  A Space Odyssey”, particularly the closing scenes.  Whilst photographing Martin’s beautifully natural demure, who, if you are unaware of her ability as an actress, she debuted via the raw intensity and fragility of her character in Lars von Trier's 2013 erotic melodrama Nymphomaniac. 

Ghesquière’s finely tuned attention to specifics is clearly evident throughout the Pre-Fall collection, he is a detailed maestro with his devil-is-in-the-details and its subject matter, yet one cannot dismiss Ghesquière’s ability to balance the oversize fits within its modernist designed arrays, which is of the finest standard.  The color palette is entrenched with its 1960s 70’s retrofuture impression or what Ghesquière has decreed as “Vitamin” colors, the more excessive of the primary colors, that represented an era which lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, offering a possibility of a better tomorrow.  A functionalist prospect, that technology will set us free.  It is only now, in our current timeline of over layered expectations of grandeur and digital inspired freedoms, that we just got a wake up call via a global pandemic.   Maybe exploring fictional concepts may inspire some truths that have been missed in reality.   And it is Ghesquière’s inspiration to manipulate past and present timelines and its aesthetics, whilst reworking color palettes and styles that can reveal, in defining moments, the possibility of an ennobling cue.

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(A.Glass 2021)