Louis Vuitton recreates a museum within a museum

Courtesy Louis Vuitton

Nicolas Ghesquière caused moments of profound confusion at his Louis Vuitton presentation last night, ushering guests through the doors of the Louvre only for them to find themselves transported a kilometre to the west, into the courtyard of the Centre Pompidou.

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In collaboration with La Mode en Images, the designer conjured an uncannily accurate representation of the courtyard in front of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ multicoloured museum for his models to stomp around. Inspired by the eclectic, individual styles of pre-Instagram fashion ‘tribes’, the clothes were designed to catch attention IRL. As Ghesquière told The New York Times, ‘I am not designing for a cellphone.’

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By positioning Paris’ upstart modern and contemporary art museum within the walls of the city’s most iconic historic building, and by updating the design house’s traditional understated soigné with dashes of hard-edged modernity, Ghesquière encapsulated the past and the present, the hivemind and the individual, in a show that brought Fashion Month AW19 to a close with fitting ambiguity.