It was a Monday afternoon in Paris, and at the Louis Vuitton show, a young woman in a densely constructed Vuitton dress, her hair in a cherry-on-top ponytail, posed in front of an enormous statue of Eve in the hall of the Musee D’Orsay. She placed her bag gingerly at the base of the pedestal and threw her head back with pleasure for the lens of her friend’s iPhone, as the statue—a Eugéne Delaplanche marble depicting Eve, twisted into uncomfortably horny distress after taking a bite of fruit that’s laying at her foot—stared ahead in epic turmoil. Was Eve gazing down at the sins she had brought into the world: vanity, luxury, consumerism? Or was she, suddenly aware of her nudity, just totally jealous of the woman’s incredible dress?
Louis Vuitton, under the palm of Nicolas Ghesquière, has moved from the Louvre, its longtime venue, over to the Musee D’Orsay for the foreseeable future, where statues like that of Eve will serve as the set. It’s a fabulous idea—one, because you zero in on the clothes, and two, because mythology and the juicy capers of the Bible have such a hold on the moral imagination.
Though the troubles of the world are horrifyingly macro—nothing less than war and plague—our understanding of them often happens in terribly micro terms like memes and threadbare Twitter cliches. It enhances the sense that daily life is a banal slog of indignities and petty grievances, when in fact our quality of life has swiftly declined under world-historically bad circumstances. Looking at all that creamy marble—the eternal material!—depicting ancient stories made me think about how much we overvalue things that feel relevant, right, or “in touch” with some wordlessly agreed upon mood or sensibility.
Before I could ponder the fall of man any further, out marched Ghesquière's girls in macho boyswear: a galloping woman with shiny unstyled hair, in a bomber jacket, blousy skater pants, and a floral tie. She was followed by a bevy of models in skatepark chic: sparkling sack dresses with huge pannier-like pockets, boxy borrowed-from-my-older-brother coats, dense rugby smocks, and gowns worn with a little hightop sneaker. There were even photographs by the great youth whisperer, David Sims, printed on satin panels on thick sweaters in Alsatian floral prints and all over big Ghesquière boxy-dresses; a pretty swishy baby blue hippie dress with a lipstick red sweater tied around the waist.
Now here’s what’s funny about this show: it had all the codes of streetwear, that free attitude of skating and the sense of endless leisure, but it wasn’t really streetwear. It wasn’t cloying, and it wasn’t pandering. The finishings, the shapes, and the color palette were all wholly adult and totally sophisticated. So was what I can only call the Ghesquière of it all: the way those youthful dresses with pannier pockets and the sweaters around the waists were used to create that signature Ghesquière silhouette that’s boxy and strong at the hips.
I felt sort of astonished, especially seeing the pieces up close the following day, at how familiar the street gestures felt, without seeming at all like pandering to the streetwear that designers think everyone wants to wear. (Many designers have fallen prey to that.) One of the show’s pieces was a classic Ghesquière invention—which is to say, basically a whole new garment—that sat like an apron on the shoulders and fluttered open in the back, its front falling into two long panels that made an arc shape. Layered on top of printed pants or long shorts, it looked like both a carefree tank top and an 18th-century robe polonaise. So awesome.
I wonder if Ghesquière thinks about fashion as having, or even being, a sort of mythology. That is not to say he’s interested in making “epic” clothes, but rather making clothes with a sense of eternal creativity that touches something deeply human. This week’s collection was 1990s- or ’80s-ish, I suppose, but really it was about how the designer takes a set of codes and adapts them to his needs to provoke a feeling of something much bigger than this moment, just as playwrights and musicians have done with all the great myths for the past zillion years. The clothes aren’t intended to make his clients feel young, per se, nor were they appealing to vanity, though a taste for vanity is almost always present in good fashion. Rather, he was expressing the need for freshness, for newness, even the spirit of naïveté and that period in life when it feels joyful that everything is new or changing.
Ghesquière has done ultra-must-have fashion—when he helmed Balenciaga, every woman in fashion wore his stuff. That made it all the more fascinating that he chose to take up as his muse the most overdone cliches of contemporary fashion, streetwear and skateboarding, and give them a different feeling. Now he seems to be creating on a higher key, expressing a primal need for sensation and pleasure, and most of all, for exquisite technique. Like a great statue, it can speak to the strangeness of today’s world, but only because it tells a story about something at the foundation of culture.
