Watching how fashion brands have had to pivot from live show to live-stream has been fascinating. Some have struggled, able to illustrate the clothes and how they came to be, but unable to emulate the fleeting energy of a live event. Others have flourished in the new parameters. I think back to last June and the tight-budgeted ingenuity of some designers at London Fashion Week. Priya Ahluwalia’s online pop-up interactive art gallery, for example, demonstrated that a brand doesn’t need a runway to deftly translate its vibe. It doesn’t necessarily need clothes, either.
A quintessential creative of our age – mixed media, collaboration, iconoclasm etc – Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuttion’s artistic director of menswear, must surely relish this opportunity to explode tradition and explore new mediums. Has he done that for the Autumn/Winter 2021 “show”? Yes. Did we expect him to dabble in film noir? Absolutely not.
And yet, there we were, in a nondescript alpine region, watching a lone man move through the snow carrying a chrome LV-monogram briefcase. It was, Abloh explains, inspired by James Baldwin’s 1953 essay Stranger in the Village, in which Baldwin discusses his experiences as an African-American man in a Swiss village and his life in America. The film (titled Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light) deftly moves the protagonist from glistening peak to gritty precinct. As he moves through the abstract city, our man shuffles cautiously amongst commuters, businessmen, loiterers and those seemingly left behind by society, all eyeing him with ominous suspicion. “Defining the ‘normal’ characters of society,” read the show notes, “Virgil Abloh investigates the presumptions we make about people based on the way they dress: their cultural background, gender, and sexuality.” It is tense, eerie; like watching an incredibly stylish adaptation of Raymond Chandler.
And Abloh’s style was very much on show. Despite the American’s “streetwear” pedigree, his last two LV shows were tailoring-heavy, and celebratedly so. This was no different, although the suits here are somehow… suitier. Perhaps it was the hardboiled-ness of everything – the pinstripes and the trilbies (or variations thereof), the briefcases, the black oxfords. (I’m happy to say the tone-on-tone ties, which debuted at A/W’20, remain – they’re at once classically smart but reliably un-boring.)
There is artful drama in the formality, too, but perhaps not as much as the New Wave fluorescence of the S/S’21 collection we saw in August. No, the colours are more subdued for this new collection, orbiting a palette of emerald green, pale grey and cold white. But there texture and layering abound. Leather, poplin, polythene, wool, silk; much of which is realised in a marbled print, or in some iteration of the LV monogram, or emblazoned with a new logo. This one comes with an exclamation point.
Perhaps it’s the eeriness of the film, or the seriousness of its source material, but this feels like a more grown up Abloh-Vuitton than we’ve seen in the past five or so seasons. But then you look closer and see that his boyish sensibilities endure. Aeroplanes feature throughout, be they as buttons on a coat or as a bag, with wings, and then there are jumpers cut from what look like scale models of iconic buildings. At one point, a man peers out from within his sweater, almost obscured by an Eiffel Tower nestled neatly on his chest. The progression of boy-to-man is a common theme in Abloh’s work at Vuitton, and sometimes, gleefully, it seems as though the clothes have been drawn from the unencumbered minds of children.
With any luck, we’ll be watching the next Louis Vuitton show from within a Parisian showspace. But in the meantime, Abloh (and many of his contemporaries) are showing that new collections don’t need to be unveiled in a moment. They can take their time.
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