Phoebe Dynevor watches Louis Vuitton’s power dressing Cruise show in Barcelona
“I like to dress women for their power moments,” says Nicolas Ghesquière, who recently celebrated 10 years as Louis Vuitton’s creative director.
There have been a fair few Vuitton power moments at the 2024 Oscars and most recently, the Cannes Film Festival, with Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone and Léa Seydoux wearing Vuitton on the Croisette.
When he arrived at Vuitton a decade ago, from a successful stint at Balenciaga, Ghesquière had little experience of red carpet dressing. “Dressing women for every day is the ultimate goal,” he continued. “But for this Cruise collection, it’s very dressed up.”
It’s also very 1980s, with wide shoulders, satin puffballs, shawl necklines – and a soundtrack featuring Gary Numan and Duran Duran. It could just set all those ‘90s obsessed Gen Zs on a whole new path.” Creating clothes that last a very long time – that’s very important to me. I’ve seen young people buying vintage pieces I designed 20 years ago,” said Ghesquière.
The designer was speaking before his show in Barcelona, a city he has long loved. He is a fan of Spain, especially its most famous architect, the Catalan Antoni Gaudí, a designer renowned, like Ghesquière, for his singular vision. When it came to choosing a location for this Cruise show, Park Güell, designed by Gaudí and opened to the public in 1926 – was an obvious candidate. A series of lush gardens and equally lush, borderline-crazy, Gaudí buildings, the park cascades down Carmel Hill, affording spectacular views of the city and sea.
Financially, Cruise (or Resort, as they’re also called) collections are, in economic terms, probably the most important of any label’s ready-to-wear these days. And Vuitton is a very large fashion label – the biggest in the world. Last year’s revenue topped out at over 20 billion euros. So when its designer expresses a wish to show in a Unesco World Heritage site, this comes to pass. Hundreds of guests and dozens of celebrity brand ambassadors including Emma Stone, Jennifer Connelly, a newly engaged Phoebe Dynevor (with her mother, who held a longstanding role on Coronation Street), Sophie Turner and Ana de Armas came to watch it unfold.
“Cruise collections began as a way to design clothes for customers who were going on holiday somewhere warm in the middle of winter,” muses Ghesquière, explaining how they differ from the Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer Ready-to-Wear collections. “Now they’re in the shops from November to June – longer than all the other collections. You can do anything you want in them. They almost transcend fashion”.
Ghesquière’s design has always marched to its own beat. This beat had a distinctly Spanish tempo however, with black lace and black fringing, Spanish riding hats worn at a rakish tilt, off-the-shoulder taffeta dresses reminiscent of Ingres portraits, pearly iridescent mini dresses that brought to mind a Gaudí interior, the piercing cobalt blue of a Miró painting and whimsical fringed ankle boots that looked like horses’ feathered hooves.
If this sounds like dressing-up-box anarchy, the styling is rigorously controlled and the craftsmanship superb. That also seems quite Spanish.
Ghesquière concurs. “When I think of Spanish elegance, I think of grandeur and strictness.. but also craziness.”
Some of that craziness was on display beyond the gates to the park where even though it was 8pm and after opening hours, noisy demonstrators protested the temporary take-over of their park by Big Fashion. On the other side of the park, fans cheered every time a celebrity, or near-celebrity, pulled up. Eventually the protestors drowned out the cheers. Was that the sound of a gunshot? Possibly. Vuitton PRs looked tense, but that could just be because they were trying to locate a getaway car for Sophie Turner. Later there were reports of a heavy-handed police clamp-down on the protestors.
“What do the protestors expect?’ a Madrid-based magazine editor commented dismissively. “The Catalans protest about everything, all the time. They’ll be here again next week.” The clothes though, will have disappeared, like a colourful, explosive hallucination.
More from the show...
