FALL 2020 READY-TO-WEARLouis Vuitton
“I wanted to imagine what could happen if the past could check out us.”
Nicolas Ghesquière is that the cohost of this May’s Met Gala and Louis Vuitton is sponsoring the Costume Institute exhibition, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” that the gala celebrates. Ghesquière took as his subject this season the exhibition’s theme: that fashion may be a mirror of this moment—but not an unspecified mirror. At Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton, it’s a funhouse mirror during which eras, attitudes, and flashbacks intersect. And voilà : we flash forward.
This season Ghesquière enlisted the costumier Milena Canonero, a frequent collaborator of Stanley Kubrick’s, to make a monumental backdrop of 200 choral singers, all clothed in historical garb dating from the 15th century to 1950. it had been a mammoth undertaking, and quite beautiful. “I wanted a gaggle of characters that represent different countries, different cultures, different times,” Ghesquière explained beforehand. “I love this interaction between the people seated within the audience, the women walking, and therefore the past watching them—these three visions mixed.” The time-collapsing sensation was heightened by the very fact that the song the chorus performed was a composition by Woodkid and Bryce Dessner supported the work of Nicolas de Grigny, an up to date of Bach’s who never found fame.
Arguably, all of the fashion may be a synthesis of the past, but Ghesquière makes a better study of it than most. He’s compelled by the anachronous. For spring 2018, he clashed 18th-century frock coats and therefore the high-tech trainers of our contemporary period. Here, there was more in play: jewel-encrusted boleros met parachute pants, buoyant petticoats were paired with fitted tops whose designs looked cribbed from robotics, and bourgeois tailoring was layered over sports jerseys. Ghesquière seemed particularly crazy the visual codes of distance and speed—be it race-car driving, motocross, or spaceflight.
The biggest jolts came from the collection’s sporty parkas because they tapped into the language of the road. Seventy years from now, or 600, during a tableau of fashion, the first 21st century are going to be represented by these signifiers of our collective preference for the comforts and simple performancewear. Ghesquière has long been applauded for his sci-fi projections into the unknown, but he’s even as resonant when he’s locked into the here and now.
We asked him what his hopes are for the longer term. “What I would like is everyone to be safe,” he said. “This world can become a touch more serene, that’s what I wish.”
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