For the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 collection, Nicolas Ghesquière forges a connection — between the distinct identities and realities of Paris and New York, and between the cities within that city: its dichotomies, its dualities.
New York has always been comprised of multiple identities, divergent cultures, and fused experiences. Never singular, it is an amalgamation — uptown and downtown, past and future — a place of alternate sensibilities and simultaneous attitudes. Beautiful contradiction, perfect differences. This is the luxury of paying homage.
A city as pop culture experience, New York in the twenty-first century has an inherent universality. A place of aspiration, it is both a destination and a point of cultural embarkation. There is, equally, a universality to Louis Vuitton — globally known, globally understood. Pop art, pop culture, and pop luxury: the notion of the popular as a powerful medium for the conveyance of messages to all.
The discovery within the Louis Vuitton archives of a 1930s leather suitcase, radically reworked as a literal canvas by the American contemporary artist Keith Haring, connects Louis Vuitton to pop art. This chance encounter reemerges as a fundamental inspiration, with a selection of Haring works featured across clothing pieces and accessories. In turn, these pieces again serve as canvases, honoring Haring’s distinct artistic language and legacy.
Travel between spaces, travel between eras. Here, a travel between identities — a voyage of discovery. Between the salons of the Frick — a charged and meaningful environment embedded in this metropolis — lies a vessel for exploring different times and alternate experiences. As the Frick celebrates French decorative arts through an American eye, diverse expressions of American style are framed here through French savoir-faire, in an ongoing conversation.
Workmanship can elevate actuality; reflections of real wardrobes are sublimated. Blue jeans, jersey, leather — a heritage of American style is retranslated here. Within an American wardrobe is the idea of American women, their character: dynamic, liberated, energetic. The depth of European cultural history and the breadth of the modern American experience — grand masters and pop art, old world and new — are celebrated concurrently.
Different connections, unexpected intersections. Within the clothes, different eras and identities of New York coexist, as they do in the fabric of the city itself. Fragments of pop culture — slot machines, automobile chassis, tooled leather — and echoes of the grandeur of the Gilded Age are recontextualized, embedded in clothes or recreated as accessories: ways to cherish their memories.
Color is vibrant, brilliant, and positive. Graffiti-like passementerie or sequin embroidery crafts unexpected laces. Modern figures move, like ghosts of the future, disrupting spaces reminiscent of the past. In the end, all may belong here.
