Impulse toward loucheness and mystery is an about-turn from last season's Paris Fashion Week show
It is late at night, in a grand hotel in Paris. A door opens and Kate Moss emerges, wearing only a semi-transparent dress over knickers. She sashays the length of the corridor, opens the door to a different room, and closes it behind her.
Marc Jacobs, it is fair to say, knows how to get the attention of a jaded world. This was the vignette played out at his Louis Vuitton show at Paris Fashion Week on Wednesday morning.
Instead of a traditional catwalk, Jacobs had a theatrical set of a hotel corridor built, complete with chic pale blue wallpaper, thick carpet and 48 wooden doors. The lights dimmed and doors began to open, each revealing a woman dressed with glamour but a hint, or more, of impropriety.
Sometimes there was merely the suggestive flash of a lace slip visible under an elegant wool coat, or a deep split in a pencil skirt; at other times a dress was no more than a negligee, held up by the flimsiest of straps, or a coat covered nothing more than a pair of – what else – French knickers.
Hotels are rich territory for Jacobs because the Louis Vuitton brand is built on luxury travel, and grand hotels are where luxury travel meets sex appeal. (As each door opened, a vintage Vuitton trunk could be glimpsed in the room set as the model emerged.) So it was appropriate that Jacobs dressed for the occasion so as to suggest he felt very much at home, taking his bow in a pair of silk pyjamas. (Not any old pyjamas, naturally; a collaboration between British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and Kim Jones, Louis Vuitton's menswear designer, they will be in stores next season.)
Backstage after the show Jacobs said the show was about "a woman who gets dressed up, but then decides she'd rather stay in her hotel room. There's a certain decadence to that. I had in mind certain friends of mine, who walked in the show but shall remain nameless, with whom I've spent many, many nights getting dressed up in hotel rooms."
A gentlemen never tells, but the name of Moss, a close friend of Jacobs, hung heavy in the air.
Jacobs likes to make the fashion world race to keep up with him. The impulse toward loucheness and mystery was an about-turn from last season's show, which was based on checkerboard grids and orchestrated with military precision, the models delivered to the catwalk in pairs, on synchronised escalators.
"Everything's a reaction," agreed Jacobs. "Last season was so conceptual, very much about rigidity and not about feeling. So of course this is a contrast, a show about romance and emotion and eroticism."
He named Gloria Swanson and Juliette Greco as muses of the season. "It's Left Bank, but also Hollywood," he said. If the exquisite lace slips and quietly expensive handbags were quintessentially Parisienne, the ankle strap sandals, mink trims and maribou feathers added a sense of starlet glamour.
The sense of deliberate anonymity was echoed in the season's handbags. Classic handbag styles of the label, such as the Speedy holdall and the sleek Pochette, were tucked under almost every arm, but the Monogram and Damier motifs that have been prominent in recent seasons were nowhere to be seen.