Neat jackets and A-line dresses grace Louvre courtyard catwalk as designer ‘obsessed with empowering women’ closes fashion week
“Every piece that I designed for this collection, I asked the question: is it powerful for a woman to wear this? Does it give her strength?”
You don’t get to be the designer who closes Paris fashion week without having something to contribute to the cultural conversation. Nicolas Ghesquière, whose collection for Louis Vuitton was staged on a catwalk in one of the elegant internal courtyards of the Louvre, said this show was “about my obsession with empowering women. In the last two months the question of what it means to be a woman has felt so important so, this time around, I wanted to make that the only criteria. There is no other narrative to this collection, no story. It’s just about dressing women to empower them.”
If you have never been to one of Ghesquière’s catwalk shows for Louis Vuitton, try picturing what Coco Chanel might wear to a Star Wars convention, and you start to get the idea. Elite Parisienne travels to space is Ghesquière’s signature aesthetic. “It’s not an armour, it’s more like a shell. It’s architecture, it gives strength.” The silhouette is always neat, as if mindful of economy of space, although the travel theme that dominates the history of Louis Vuitton is more often than not abstract these days: where once it sold steamer trunks, the house now sells miniature suitcases barely larger than a passport, and clutch bags in the shape of spaceships.