All day long, editors wondered where the Louis Vuitton show was and why a shuttle bus was required to arrive there. Why weren’t we back in the Louvre, comme toujours? The location turned out to be L’Étoile du Nord, the former headquarters of a train company that predates the national railway of France. It’s recently been refurbished, but in advance of the new tenants moving in, Nicolas Ghesquière took over the place. Next door to the Gare du Nord train station, it was an utterly fitting spot for his new fall collection.
“I started with the idea of something very collective, which is the platform of a station,” Ghesquière said, “where people meet, where people separate, where people are happy to be together again, where people are sad to leave each other. People you see just for once in your life with a certain look that you might never forget, that might influence you, which is, I think, my case somehow.”
He got the concept off the ground by asking his studio team for their favorite movies involving trains. Ghesquière had his own list: Wong Kar Wai’s 2046; Snowpiercer; The Brief Encounter, a film noir from the ’40s, “which is amazing”; Casablanca; and a French movie called Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront Le Train, “a story about going back to your family in the countryside.” The younger members of the team mentioned films like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter. “So we decided that everyone would cross: decades, time, emotion, looks,” Ghesquière explained.
There were no obvious links between the movie references and the outfits that wended their way down a runway lined with low seats of the kind you might sit on in a train hall; instead Ghesquière gave us characters. Some were headed home for the holidays in a city-country mix; others were on fishing trips wearing blanket coats and pannier bags on their hips, or out for a day hike in LV gorp core. A few were booked on the Orient Express—“the Concorde of trains,” he said—and dressed to match in hand-painted velvet dévoré. Then you had your commuters in a sturdy trench or sporty jacket carrying hard case bags.
Naturally, a TGV employee was in the picture, modeling a jumpsuit and a floppy train attendant tie; Ghesquière remembers the train’s inauguration from when he was a kid. But most clever of all was the Kraftwerk hook-up, the German electronic brand being famous for a 1977 hit “Trans-Europe Express.” “We collaborated with them on a very small edition of clothes and handbags, it was great,” Ghesquière said. The song was playing as the crowd shuffled in.
Ghesquière seemed to be really enjoying himself here, relishing the unexpected juxtapositions that are one of his signature moves, while keeping the clothes more down-to-earth than what we usually see at his Louis Vuitton. The crystal strewn tops and dresses? Those looked like cotton T-shirt material, and a snug little officer’s jacket was most definitely cotton, washed and faded with rich “changent” colors.
To end, rather than send the models out for a finale, he directed them up onto the balconies above the venue. Throughout the show the windows did double-duty as screens, displaying scenes of travelers walking to and fro, sometimes crossing paths, other times walking in the same direction in unison. “The models will watch the show with you guys,” Ghesquière said. “There’s no separation. We’re all together. That’s what is important.” On the second to last day of Fashion Month, he sent us on our way with a message about community and the power of the collective that really resonated.
Editor
Nicole PhelpsCredit
Lead image: Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
