HORIZON

World headlines were already on Rio de Janeiro, the city of the 2016 Olympics, and the controversies that came with it. And yet, the global sporting event was merely a moment in the great history of this 451-year-old grand metropolis landscaped between the mountains and the sea, with the 30-metre statue of Christ the Redeemer keeping watch on some 6 million cariocas from the peak of the Corcovado. Today, Rio is a modern paradise, a powerful BRIC nation that balances precariously on the precipice of dynamism and danger, of beautiful people with superhuman bodies running-sunning-jumping that glorious sandy stretch from Ipanema to Copacabana, a multi-ethnic diversity set in this urban-meets-rural jungle, all set to a samba beat. The scene had already been set for Louis Vuitton’s Cruise ’17 collection, but the stage was essential to spec. For Nicolas Ghesquière, the avant-garde creative director who has been pushing the 162-year-old French luxury maison into a fashion-forward, hyperconnected dimension, the destination functioned to frame the actual location. Architecture ... innovation ... “environmental utopia” inspire Ghesquière, reflected in his fashion and how he presents it. For Cruise ’17, he discovered all these in the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, designed by iconic architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1996, refurbished last year and reopened with the international fashion event this May. The monumental edifice is so outworldly with a wide cylindrical walkway leading up to its UFO-like structure hovering above a reflective pool (aptly named Boa Viagem—“Bon Voyage”), it could only have been created by a fellow futurist. And yet, the beautiful nature that surrounds it, perched on a cliff by the Atlantic Ocean, opening out to the lush Amazonian green and wide open sky with views of Sugarloaf Mountain and Guanabara Bay, makes the first point in Ghesquière’s play on beautiful paradoxes. “I so admire the power of Oscar Niemeyer’s conviction. His vision, radicality, utopia. Being able to show a fashion collection in such an architecturally powerful space is a sensorial experience,” said Ghesquière. “In Rio de Janeiro, what I saw most of all was an explosive energy that lives somewhere between modernism and tropicality. I was fascinated by the constant duality between nature and urbanism, and the pictorial explosion it creates.”