Farewell Virgil! For about 30 minutes, Louis Vuitton‘s A/W 2022 Men’s Collection, held last Thursday at the landmark 19th-century Carreau du Temple in Paris, was the very centre of the fashion universe. Indeed, this was creative director Virgil Abloh‘s very last collection for the luxury behemoth, and as such, it was an evocative tribute and last farewell which once demonstrated not only his visionary take on fashion, but also its connections to other disciplines and thousands of cultural connotations. The venue saw a surrealistic scenography with a specially designed ????? Dreamhouse™, a creation spawning from Abloh’s unbridled child-like fantasy and curiosity, and a cinematic prelude directed by Caleb Femi which imagined a metaphysical space of possibility, and a theatrical – or should we say acrobatic? – piece directed and choreographed by Yoann Bourgeois.
Abloh’s creative vision informs a collection that tears up and transmutes the dress codes popularly tied to societal archetypes – tailoring, sportswear, dresses – and patchworks them in new ways. Imagery of natural, supernatural and spiritual forces – time, magic, creation – appear as childlike depictions: wizard motifs, animal elements, angel wings, cherubs, clouds, climbing holds on sky-blue bags, and cartoons of the Grim Reaper. Investigations into Olympian sportswear contemplate the superhuman. An animated cat carrying a bindle nods at an idea of the outsider, forever on the move to the next challenge. Interestingly, in a dialogue between realism and surrealism, two paintings grace garments as tapestries and prints. It’s The Painter’s Studio (1855) by the realist Gustave Courbet which depicts the artist working on a painting, flanked to his left by people from all levels of French society, and to his right by members of high society.
Applied to Abloh’s Tourist vs. Purist analogy, the meta presence of the painting within the collection unites his own diverse audiences: the Tourist, who aspires towards an esoteric domain of fashion and art, versus the Purist, who already occupies it. And then there’s Giorgio de Chirico‘s Souvenir d’Italie (1914) which portrays the classical lines of an Italian square through an uncanny and subversive lens. Devoid of time and context, the motif is eternal and mysterious: a metaphysical reality. A part of the artist’s Melancholia series, in which he repeatedly painted the same square and deliberately dated each work incorrectly, the painting’s presence in the collection reflects the topics of originality, provenance, reference and self-reference often examined by Abloh. Shown here area eleven looks from Louis Vuitton‘s elaborate A/W 2022 Men’s Collection that we particularly like.
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
