The luxury game has been battling a losing streak recently; as one retailer put it this afternoon: “flat is the new up.” So it seemed startlingly appropriate that the snakes were much more prominent than the ladders upon the enormous board that Louis Vuitton constructed as the set of this evening’s menswear show.
Snakes and ladders originated in India, the great nation that inspired this collection. Pharrell Williams first visited the country in 2018 and returned with the LV design team this year to prepare this collection, stopping in Delhi, Mumbai, and Jaipur. “We make fashion, but we’re a house of travel,” he observed in the backstage area in the Pompidou Center pre-show. He added: “I charge my team with refinement. There’s a lot of houses that focus on trying to make statements, you know? You’ll see things that are, like, loud and avant garde, and there are ones that do it that I absolutely love, but that’s not my strong suit. My strong suit is in the details.”
To suggest that Louis Vuitton isn’t loud seemed as rich as the many, many VIC clients who joined Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a show that was beautifully (and resoundingly) soundtracked by Voices of Fire and l’Orchestre du Pont Neuf. However there were absolutely many beautiful and thoughtful details here. Vuitton aficionados will justly be excited by the recreation and expansion of the 2006 luggage set Marc Jacobs designed for Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. The animal illustrations drafted for the original designs by Eric Anderson—elephants, antelope, zebras in rapid transit between palm trees—were also transposed to damier check canvas bags and garments. These included an absolutely lush vicuna overcoat, a seven-layered poplin coat with hand-embroidery, and full denim looks that were also modeled this evening by Williams’s watching family: preppy with a twist.
Accessory highlights included the deeply dyed blue and orange hued Speedy 40s and yoga bag, plus some lovely carpet bags also in the Speedy shape. Sunglasses came edged with the rounded metal protectors that featured on the Darjeeling trunks. The animal motif of the season was a frog; when Williams and the team visited architect Bijoy Sain of Studio Mumbai, with whom they collaborated on elements of this collection, the visitors were inspired by the loudly singing amphibians that filled his garden. A nuts zip-up hoodie was made in hand-stitched pixels of mink, mostly white but peppered with orange and green, each five millimeters across. Details-wise, the closer you were able to look, the more you were able to see.