What if all of the innumerable eras that nourish fashion could come together in the here and now? And what if, in the present moment, we could confront history with contemporary freedoms, staged for the pure pleasure of fashion? A clash of styles, unexpected pairings, subverted functions, dressing without protocol. The Louis Vuitton A/W 2020 collection is like a sartorial tune-up in which personality takes precedence: everyone can pen their own history.
Featuring a mixture of fabrics and silhouettes from different eras such as ruffles, androgynous tweed blazers, graphic leather pieces, bombers and jumpsuits, the collection really is an ode to individuality and mixing things up, your way. Louis Vuitton’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière shares insight behind the collection.
What is the inspiration for this collection?
In fashion, the notion of time is primordial. I wanted different eras to be confronted with another one, our own. All of these ‘pasts’, embodied by a gallery of personalities in period dress, converge in our present. We are all together, looking at a collection that itself recounts a living, perennial, stylistic clash — and everything we can do with clothes by mixing and free-associating them. It’s sort of an anachrony of genres. It can simply be the pleasure of dressing and its many possibilities, free of protocol or constraint. Taking what we already have at home and mixing it with what we like that’s new. This collection is about an ‘anti-total-look’ that draws on individual personality, on the agility one experiences when confronting one’s own closet. A piece of functional clothing can be part of formal dress, and vice versa. It’s a proposition I wanted to be open, energetic and spontaneous. This collection is about sartorial ‘tuning’.
Where did you find these characters?
We worked with the talented costumer Milena Canonero, who notably worked on Stanley Kubrick’s films A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining, among other highly successful films. She created 200 characters, there’s music composed by Woodkid and Bryce Dessner, who also worked on time clashes. Their piece is called Three Hundred and Twenty, a reference to the number of years between the various movements in the baroque composition that’s also been injected with minimalist, repetitive music. They resurrected the composer Nicolas de Grigny, a contemporary of Bach, who was never recognised by his peers and who never had the chance to play at the Louvre. Today, centuries later, he’s finally being heard! We’ve revived him. The performance was orchestrated by theater director Francisco Negrin.
Please can you explain the accessories?
There’s the Keepall; a pure, vintage piece that acquired a beautiful patina over time. We just customised it with a new strap. There are also small satchels, mini-totes and strange little streamlined minaudières. Shoes also illustrate a very free rein: revisited boots and metal cap-toe pumps that evoke wheel rims on a customised car.
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