Louis Vuitton Cruise Was Like Nothing You'd Ever Seen Before

A Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 show stages a contrast between downtown and uptown New York through clothing and styling choices. The setting is the Henry Clay Frick mansion, repurposed for the event, while the collection’s concept centers on “two cities in one city.” Opening looks combine elements associated with different social and cultural worlds, including denim overalls styled in a way uncommon for the Upper East Side. A 1930s Vuitton suitcase is paired with Keith Haring devices, turning an archival object into a contemporary street-art statement. The show’s overall effect is a confrontation of pop art energy with gilded-age refinement, expressed through deliberate clashes in fashion.

"Azzedine told me, 'You're very good at patchwork.' Nicolas Ghesquière told me that once - and, if Azzedine Alaïa told you something, you listened. Because he was always right. That wasn't specifically connected with Ghesquière's latest Cruise collection for Louis Vuitton. But, weirdly, it makes sense - not because this collection was some scrappy, Hobby Lobby ode to American folk craft, but because it stitched together the seemingly opposite, opposing and jarring. And that, really, is what Ghesquière is very good at: a patchwork of ideals and outlooks, not just cloth."

"Thus was the case in New York, where Vuitton took over the Vermeer and Fragonard-filled former gilded age mansion of robber baron Henry Clay Frick - which, since 1935, has been a jzuzhy museum in his name - and let a bunch of miscreants maraud through it. "There's two cities in one city," said Ghesquière backstage before the show, speaking specifically of New York. "A confrontation. I thought it was very interesting to bring downtown uptown.""

"In a sense, that was literally there in the opening look - not just the denim overalls folded down around the model's midriff (never mind the gilded age, even today that's a look rarely seen on the Upper East Side), but the suitcase she was toting. It's a Vuitton case from the 1930s, but tagged with devices by Keith Haring, the daring 80s New York contemporary artist born out of the city's graffiti scene. How did Ghesquière persuade the house's archivists to let a model tote a literal work of art around? "It was an operation of seduction," he laughed."

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