Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2018 Ready-To-Wear Collection....Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

You can get no closer to the surreal feeling of time travel than going into the crypt at the Louvre. Here, the remnants of the first fortress built on the grounds in the 12th century by Philip II to protect Paris against the Vikings still stands.
In the bright white lights of the Louis Vuitton show, the curved underground towers looked almost futuristic.... too pristine to be old, too distant to be new. Maybe it was the four weeks of fashion shows coming to an end, but the space and time of it all were a bit mind-boggling. Nicolas Ghesquière could have found no better frame for his anachronistic Louis Vuitton show than this limbo of history.

Full-sleeved musketeer shirts were trapped under 18th century frock coats and long Louis XV waistcoats threaded in lurex brocade for a sparkly, electric majesty that wasn’t of our time - or a time we’ve ever known. Ghesquière had visited the Met in New York and fallen in love with a collection of original frock coats from the Baroque and Rococo eras. He thought, “What category of clothes can I explore to try to make a surprise with this flamboyant feeling?” The designer instinctively made the historical garments part of his contemporary urban world, he said backstage, by assimilating them into sportswear.Well, I consider them sports clothes but they’re integrated into all our wardrobes today so they’re street clothes - they are our clothes.” You could say the same for historical dress. Ghesquière referred to his historicism as “costume”, a term associated with clothes beyond the norm, but in a fashion time where anything goes, where do you draw the line between costume and real clothes? All you had to do was look around outside by the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre where the street style set was getting their last few minutes of fame before the spring/summer 2018 season took its bow.

In the eyes of unsuspecting civilians, surely these people must look like they’re in fancy dress. And if they’re lucky enough to get their hands on one of Louis Vuitton’s futuristic frock coats for next season’s shows, the case will be much the same - at least for now. In fifty years time, of course, we’ll all be looking more outlandish than we do now, and the fashions of 2018 will be a faint costume memory. In that sense, Ghesquière’s collection was an interesting comment on the futuristic tendencies, which have hovered over the season. But it was also one of his clearest collections in a long time.It was quite quick, the attitude and the look,” he said after the show, and his impulse served him well. In all its regal shine, this was an uncomplicated collection, fuss-free and stripped of stuff that could disorientate from the product Ghesquière was delivering: mainly those ornate and rather striking frock coats, armour-like dresses, trainers fashioned in the image of men’s court shoes, and a Stranger Things merch t-shirt, which somehow found its way in there as well. In this unlikely case, less turned out to be more.