Out of a ‘Bond lair’ and into the forest come very elegant Hells Angels
OUTSIDE Kyoto, atop a bridge between two valleys, Nicolas Ghesquière held his fourth Cruise show for Louis Vuitton. It was the most spectacular as well as the furthest flung of shows. Guests travelled for 24 hours to watch a 20-minute carnival of style. The pristine white-carpeted catwalk was so long that it incorporated what looked like airport-style conveyor belts to speed things up.
That’s as it should be – because Cruise collections are really for women who prefer to spend the winter in tropical countries and have a lot of experience of airports and no use at all for a fluffy coat or woolly jumper.
Ghesquière has always chosen world-beating modernist buildings for his Cruise collections, but for sheer drama this surpassed even Bob Hope’s house in Palm Springs – home to the Cruise show two years ago – or last year’s Niterói Museum in Rio. That was simply a spaceship perched on a rock by the sea. This year’s was set on a causeway through thick forest into what looked like a Bond villain’s lair.
Stars, including Michelle Williams, Jennifer Connelly and Game of Thrones’s Sophie Turner, sat on steel benches to enjoy the designer’s take on Paris-meets-japan. No one will say how much the extravaganza cost, but other designers estimate it was about £5 million for those few theatrical minutes.
Sparkly sequin mini-dresses were emblazoned with kabuki masks. Japanese manga had an outing in the prints on trouser suits. There were jackets and trousers made from the material of obi kimono belts. Embroidery on a series of jackets and dresses looked like a classical Japanese landscape of clouds and pine trees. After all, this was the culmination of Ghesquière’s 20-year love affair with Japan.
But the Vuitton woman is defiantly urban and there was a lot of street style in the tie-waisted dresses, leopard prints, leather shorts and punk studs on nipped-in leather jackets. Those, though they looked like something an elegant Hells Angel might wear, were, in fact, inspired by a Japanese women’s biker film – Stray Cat Rock – which Ghesquière had watched on an early visit to Tokyo. And perhaps those biker girls also wore the cowboy boots that accompanied every look.
This being Vuitton, there were gorgeous accessories aplenty – neat black city bags on chains and, in a nod to anime, playful little clutches with eye cutouts. But there was more to the show than the location and the sharp cut of the designs on show.
The I M Pei-designed building that hosted this Japanese jaunt houses the Miho Museum of antiquities. It is the project of one of Japan’s richest women, Mihoko Koyama, who also founded a spiritual movement which has a temple in the forest nearby. And this was Ghesquière’s most personal show in all his four years at Vuitton. The guessing game now is working out exactly where he’ll take the label.
‘The white carpeted catwalk was so long it incorporated what looked like airportstyle conveyor belts to speed things up’