Spring 2019 Ready-To-Wear: Louis Vuitton

For Spring 2019, Nicolas Ghesquière sent out a collection that was uniquely personal – a transporting, confident return to the futuristic forms of his early work. “I felt the need to dig into my obsessions,” he said during a preview at LV headquarters on the Rue du Pont-Neuf.

In a season of solutions dressing, in which designers have been emphasizing the real-world applications of their clothes, Ghesquière was in a world of his own at the show – saying he was interested in the edge between the virtual reality we experience through our social media streams and real life. That played out via 1980s callbacks (the decade’s exaggerated silhouettes are recurrent motifs in his work), high-tech fabrications like molded rubber, space suit sleeves, Memphis Group prints, and the Parisian savoir faire of sculptural dresses in sequinembroidered mesh.

It wasn’t a single-message collection, but rather an eclectic series of propositions: a wardrobe for the first wave of SpaceX flyers printed with images of (I’m riffing here) terraforming colonies on distant planets and toxic lakes on the planet we’ll have to leave behind. As always, there was sharp, compelling tailoring. His new jacket zipped up the middle with wide peaked lapels, and his pants, which were worn by a trio of androgynous models some mistook for men, were straight-legged and hipslung; these were the grounded foundation around which his sci-fi experiments rotated.

To finish, Ghesquière showed a trio of “space suits” in metallic floral jacquards, like virtual gardens, lush and hopeful. Nature triumphant? Ghesquière is agnostic on the subject, but this was not dystopic cyberpunk. There was a clever, thematic offering on the accessories front, including a space-capsule evening bag and an egg-shaped style that instantly conjured Aliens. Best in show was a top-handle trunk puzzled together from several of LV’s popular Petites Malles.