Luxurious French fashion house Louis Vuitton unveiled its Autumn/Winter 2021 collection and it’s wild.
For this collection, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director for the brand responsible for menswear presented the collection as performative arts, expressing poetry, dance and music, featuring an all-star cast.
To employ fashion as a tool to change predetermined perceptions of dress codes, Abloh presented puffer jackets covered in 3D buildings and landmarks.
Some of the jackets featured notable buildings from world-famous cities such as New York, Paris, and Chicago.
The Paris jacket has the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame cathedral and the famous pyramid from the Louvre.
The collection also features pinstripe suits, paired with leather bags that appear as if made out of newspaper print.
In an interview with Vogue, Abloh spoke about his Ghanaian background, which also influenced the collection.
“When I grew up, my father wore Kente cloth, with nothing beneath it, to family weddings, funerals, graduations. When he went to an American wedding, he wore a suit. I merged those two, celebrating my Ghanaian culture,” he told the gloss.
When asked about the diagonal green-on-white print on a leather motocross suit, he said: “It’s a memory of the wax print fabric my mom had around the house when I was growing up. She was the one who taught me to sew, and she had learnt it with a tailor in Ghana.”
Abloh also followed James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village”, to explore the themes of origin and ownership through the figurative notion of the art heist.