The real theme of the fashion shows resort, which in recent weeks are bringing the fashion crowd everywhere – with all due respect to the proclamations on sustainability of just three years ago – are the locations. It is the place that tells the story, that impresses, that captivates: the more exotic, the better. Not that in Italy you have to go far to find little-explored wonders and for those who are not Italian, the Bel Paese remains a mine of picturesque places. Louis Vuitton, in the person of the creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, chooses Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore: a naturalistic jewel with a mysterious and crackling charm like a quiver of Baroque stuccos, linked for centuries to the Borromeo family.
Palace, garden, and around the water: there really is enough for a lake-flavoured fantasy. It also takes the heavy rain, which forces the show to be moved indoors, but which gives a patina of romance. «Everything stems from an idea, perhaps a paradox, of a botanical resort – says Ghesquière -. This immediately brought to mind the Borromean Islands, and especially Isola Bella because I had heard amazing stories about it. The very suggestion of the island is a journey. A fabulous destination, with caves covered in mosaics, statues, a unicorn (emblem of the Borromeo family, ndr) terraces, an atrium. It is a place where I find personal affinities like The tales by Hoffmann or the nearby Hanging Gardens, where some scenes of Star Wars which have always been important references for me. Isola Bella is a story in itself, a sort of archeology of the future. The mystery of the lakes that are imagined to be populated by fantastic beings. I imagined a mythical creature, who seduces men by placing jewels on the shore to lure them into the depths. But this time it is she who ventures to the mainland to reconnect with the plant kingdom. The collection follows a progression from aquatic to botanical».
In other words, the place is romantic, dreamy, but the shiny and compact futurism, tinged with nostalgia for 80s science fiction, which is Vuitton’s acronym, remains. However, it is tinged with a perhaps more delicate, pictorial patina, so that neoprene, Ghesquière’s material of choice, is covered with flakes and hand-painted landscapes, like the costume for a school play. With their deconstructed diving suits, liquid drapes stuck in silicone marble drapery, feathered headdresses (all made in Italy) and rock shoes, the aquatic creatures in this collection have a cartoonish quality.
Ghesquière speaks of a union of the ordinary and the extraordinary, evident in a passage of rather simple pullovers worn with shorts, of double coats with an exact cut, as in the use of camperos-type boots even with evening dresses, conceived as giant inflorescences dancing around the body. In fact, however, the collection is an exercise in style, a succession of creations that are difficult to imagine, with their firm and aerodynamic lines, far from the context of the show. Fashion is chiselled down to the smallest detail, but remains almost closed in a bubble, to be read rather as a frame for the main course: accessories, bags in particular, present and central to almost every look. Small handbags, and then buckets, and a quilted model that recalls the interior of a trunk and reconnects to the aesthetics of travel, the foundation for the maison.
Despite his undoubted talent, Ghesquière seems at least partially restrained in a formula that repeats itself without changing too much. It will be interesting to see what the arrival of Pharrell Williams to the creative direction of the menswear at Louis Vuitton (the show of his first collection, on June 20 will open the Paris Fashion Week) will produce in terms of “shock wave” on women . The competition between Ghesquière and Williams could have a positive and progressive impact, indeed a necessary one.