The difference between Marc Jacobs Louis Vuitton (1997-2013) and Nicolas Ghesquières Louis Vuitton (2014-future date unknown) is this: Jacobs Vuitton was about travel, and Ghesquières Vuitton is about exploration. The Vuitton story began with trunks made for the wealthy and adventurous, and Jacobs loved to fetishise the rituals of high-end holidays: his shows featured bellboys and chambermaids, hotel corridors and steam trains. Ghesquière is more interested in travel as a mindset and a catalyst for ideas.
The Louis Vuitton fashion show, Ghesquières second for the brand, served also as a glamorous debut for the new Foundation Louis Vuitton, a museum of contemporary art which will house LVMH chairman Bernard Arnaults collection of modern art, and which officially opens later this month. Architect Frank Gehry has compared the building to an iceberg, to sails, and to a cloud. The asymmetric glass and steel arcs, and the waterfall lapping around the entrance, give it a sense of being a fractured-mirror image of the 1899 Grand Palais, that other vast glass-roofed Parisian temple of art, which sits on the bank of the Seine in the centre of Paris.
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