EXCERPT: LOUIS VUITTON. RESORT 2025 - BARCELONA

 

"Following on from Nicolas Ghesquière’s immersion into Utopian architecture and its conceptual ideas.  The French fashion designer clearly has a fascination of not just the 1950s, but also the late 1800s and 1900s pre World War One, on the possibilities that human endeavor and our technological wonders would reflect that period of Enlightenment.  Which was deemed to be the premodernism Utopian desires, that the French Utopianists devised in an early manifestation of socialism, seen as interconnected networks of workers and industrialists living side by side, within atheistically pleasing environments.  Such was its founder Charles Fourier, who believed that structural foundations hold the key to humanist harmony.  Later inspiring Karl Marx, who removed the harmonized elements of French Utopianism, and inserted his class struggle to be an updated call to arms.  Marx removed architecture from the Utopianist template, viewing structural design purely as functionality.

Ghesquière's Louis Vuitton, after a decade of giving the iconic fashion house an infusion of 20th Century idealisms, has very much offered a positive slant for the luxury brand.  Holding the recent Resort show at the famous Art Nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi’s, Park Güell.  Constructed in 1900 with the idea of building a vast Park inspired complex in Barcelona.  Gaudi reworking of Neo-Gothic and classical Greek architecture which was seen throughout Europe, whilst in tune with the Art Nouveau movements of the day.  Gaudi’s Utopian spectacle was interrupted by the onset of World War One, and was never completely finished or realized as a sanctuary per se.  In the decades that followed, the Park Güel Utopia became nothing more than a tourist destination.  Gaudi's utopian visions were seemingly lost in time..."

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Full review: Louis Vuitton.  Resort 2025 - Barcelona 

(A.Glass 2024)

Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear review soon.