By Virgil Abloh’s motto is “good style is always off-putting”. He likes loud music, and his favourite colour is taupe. For him, shoes are the ‘wardrobe component most immediately indicative of an era or movement” and he was an early appropriator of the glitter sock made famous by Michael Jackson.
This much (and more) fairly intimate detail we now know thanks to The Vocabulary According to Virgil Abloh, a six-page 'definition of terms and explanation of ideas' that lay waiting for each guest on the benches at yesterday’s Spring/Summer 2019 show in Paris, Abloh’s first as artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear.
We knew quite a lot about him already, though, and the collection too. A designer not only from the Instagram generation, but one of its great towering figures, Abloh has been leaking snippets of the collection over the past few days. Classic LV bags reimagined in clear materials or pure white leather, fitted with thick chain-link straps, subdued tailoring styled with bold combat vests, baggy pants and high-top trainers.
The rainbow runway stretched almost the full length of the Palais Royale Gardens (so far that the scrum around Kanye and Kim before the show was but a dusty melee on the distant horizon), so everyone had plenty of time to take everything in. Maybe too much time. Look one – a double breasted white mohair suit with big pleated pants – came into sight, and was followed by 16 further all-white outfits of varying form. Skinny pants, belted field jackets, chunky overcoats, little shorts, big shoes and one especially chic kimono-style blazer.
And then came the colour. First camel, with flashes of white and neon, then a dusty pale sage, vivid tiger streaks of purple and pink, loud red, aquamarine blue, more flashes of neon, and finally a Wizard of Oz motif that began with Dorothy-amongst-the-poppies printed shirts and ended with a metallic poncho fit for the Tin Man.
On first glance, the collection didn’t feel as luxurious as one might expect from a Louis Vuitton show, but then this morning (after the technicolour dust had settled), with all the clothes hanging in a room off the Rue de Louvre, we could touch the fabrics and inspect the construction, and it’s pretty special. The hyper-elevated streetwear milieu Abloh operates in has ascended further and now features the rubber stamp of the LV monogram, plus all the tactile, rich, unyielding textures and colours that come with it. Even the neon harness/bib hybrid things felt as bullet proof as they looked.
For me, the best of the collection was that cast in the pale sage. It’s a very chic colour, good for the tonal dressing espoused in this show, and it works as well in double breasted tailoring as it does in a hoody and overcoat.
The latter was modelled by rapper and producer Kid Cudi, and the show featured a series of Abloh’s high profile pals including Theophilus London, Dev Hynes and Blondey McCoy. In the glossary, he says that his presence at Louis Vuitton is ‘ironic’, and as the show came to a close and he went straight for a long and tearful embrace with Kanye West it felt like a new force, previously estranged, had swaggered into the boardroom of high fashion, flanked by his band of disruptors, and laid down a marker. Roll on Autumn/Winter 2019, and all the collabs, capsules and happenings that will come before it.
