Downtown met uptown as the Gilded Age opulence encountered East Village graffiti in a memorable cruise show by Louis Vuitton, showcasing a collection that underlined the relevance of travel to style today.
Staged among the most important private art collection in the Americas, the Frick Gallery on Fifth Avenue, the show’s leit motif was the art of Keith Haring, the Lower East Side street artist currently enjoying a retrospective in the Brant Foundation downtown.
Vuitton’s women’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière decided to stage the show in the Frick after a trip to New York in November when he marvelled at architect Annabelle Selldorf’s fresh and critically acclaimed $220m renovation of the famed Beaux Arts mansion, built in 1914 for the greatest steel baron of the early 20th century.
“As a foreigner, I am always impressed by this duality in New York. There are two cities in one – a downtown and uptown confrontation where you continually ask where is the limit? Where is the frontier? Where do they merge?” said Ghesquière in a pre-show preview with Elite Traveler.
After returning to Paris, the designer was served further inspiration by a documentary on Keith Haring, and the street artist’s graphic characters populated the show: the radiant children, flying devils, and barking dogs.
The brand’s archivist revealed LV had purchased a 1930 leather Vuitton suitcase that Haring had decorated in 1984 with his most loved icon – the radiant child. The original Vuitton/Haring case appeared in the show’s opening look: a red silk cardigan, slouchy jeans, and the first of many Space Age “liquorice leather” boots.
A baby crawls over the latest distressed leather mini Vuitton bag, images of which could be seen on bus-stop advertising panels throughout Manhattan even before the show.
The whole color palette featured what the designer termed Haring’s “non-neon, not completely fluorescent” bright colours – here seen in very delicate, transparent acid-hued knitwear, with black Haring-style graphic outlines. For cocktail hour and Coachella, Haring’s barking dogs or Big Apple motifs were implanted on intriguing origami satin silk tops. Elsewhere, the artist’s signature squiggles were reinterpreted as sexy spaghetti-like labyrinth cocktail dresses in stretch taffeta or guipure lace.
“It’s a homage to casual sophistication, the foundation of fashion in America,” underlined Ghesquière, who teamed double-denim Levi’s jeans and jacket with worker boots when he took his bow.
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As ever with Ghesquière, the collection was a meeting of active sportswear, chic futurism, and couture-quality French fashion, which was best seen in the finale with remarkable athletic jumpsuits, burnished denim trackpants, or a macramé leather skirt. A skirt was paired with a remarkable leather intarsia jacket featuring a barking dog biting a human figure, a reference to Haring’s activism in defending a gay community under attack, and raising awareness about safe sex. Haring died at 31 of AIDS in Greenwich Village, but his influence on the art scene remains significant, and his murals can be found throughout Europe and the U.S.
In terms of tailoring, the designer echoed the prim tuxedos of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, when the United States overtook Britain as the world’s largest economy. Ghesquière showed truncated tuxedoes with superhero lapels in Haring’s electric blues and crimson red. Plus, he played on the museum’s cameo brooches in flowing jacquard hand-embroidered tops, though worn with stretch leggings and rolled liquorice leather sneakers and boots – uptown topping downtown again.
“It’s the two worlds of New York, combined but never in a simple way. Keith Haring started downtown with street art, before his graffiti evolved into shows in galleries uptown and then everywhere around the world. He was a pioneer in liberation in many ways and expressions for many people. And I think we all need that right now,” he said.
New York’s punchy winner-takes-all culture reverberated with a trio of boxing glove bags in pebbled monogram canvas. The Frick’s famed collection of objets d’art inspired several Ionic-column leather handbags.
“The Frick is such a unique place and experience. I almost felt there was a ghost here inspiring us this season,” chuckled the 55-year-old designer, whose previous cruise show in New York seven years ago was in a diametrically opposed setting – Eero Saarinen’s sweeping concrete TWA terminal at JFK airport.
Ghesquière’s clothes will always be attention-seeking fashion. They are rarely an easy wear, and demand panache and acres of self-confidence to pull off, which helps explain Nicolas’ cult following among actresses and celebrities. Jennifer Campbell, Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Cate Blanchett, Iris Law, and Amy Adams all sat front row dramatically in Vuitton.
In an interview in Elite Traveler’s Spring issue, CEO Pietro Beccari insisted that “Vuitton is not a fashion brand,” and this collection was proof of that. Vuitton is a luxury lifestyle travel marque, and what makes Ghesquière the ideal designer for Vuitton is that he constantly voyages into fresh territory, blending artistic imagery, bravura technique, and dramatic silhouettes to take clients and admirers into new worlds. This is ideal for a cruise collection. Above all, these clothes made you want to book a vacation immediately, so one could wear them somewhere fabulously new.
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A youthful cast dashed around Frick, which, like the Gilded Age, featured clear social distinctions. Movie actresses and K-pop stars in the West Wing beneath the oils of Rembrandt, Velásquez, and Turner. Editors in the Garden Court between the classical bronze busts. VICs in the East Gallery with Hogarth, Constable, and Renoir, or marching down Selldorf’s new cantilevered stairway in veined Breccia Aurora marble, which the New York Times described as “decadent in a dolce vita sort of way.”
The setting bizarrely juxtaposed with the music – a selection of electroclash hits by Peaches. Post-show, guests feted Ghesquière inside Maxime’s, the exclusive Anglo-Chintz super club that is Robin Bierley’s new outpost on the Upper East Side. Luxury may be suffering from a downturn this past year, but one had little sense of that at Maxime’s, where security covered mobile phone cameras with tape, and guests dined on oysters smothered in caviar, Dom Perignon, and the best whisky sours in town. Ghesquière’s Gilded Age indeed.
