Opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton

Last Monday, October 27th 2014, the Fondation Louis devoted to contemporary art opened its doors in Paris' Bois de Boulogne, the famous park on the west side of Paris, located next to the Jardin d'Acclimatation.

 

My Instagram of Fondation Louis Vuitton for the occasion of the 

LOUIS VUITTON Spring 2015 presentation in September

An immense vessel in glass, wood and metal, it is the brainchild of Frank Gehry, the American architect to whom we owe the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Prague’s Dancing House. A daringly architectural cloud, it has been intriguing visitors to the Bois de Boulogne and lovers of contemporary art for several months, long before it opened to the public today. The Fondation Louis Vuitton was conceived by Bernard Arnault, President of the LVMH group and Christian Dior SA, to promote contemporary art by housing both his own collection and two temporary exhibitions annually. It’s a major project, reflected in the dimensions of the grandiose dream it contains. Building it required six years of work, 13500m2 of glass panels, but especially some great feats of technical innovation.  

'We wanted to offer Paris an extraordinary space for art and culture and pull out all the stops when it comes to boldness and emotion by entrusting to Frank Gehry the task of creating a building that would be emblematic of the 21 ^st century,” explains Bernard Arnault.

In addition to the permanent collection, which gathers together works by the greatest names in 20^th and 21^st-century art, visitors will discover an exhibition devoted to the building itself. It offers a daydream promenade, courtesy of Janet Cardiff and George B. Miller. It boasts a light installation by Olafur Eliasson, who has taken over the pool area surrounds. There’s also a musical sculpture created by Cerith Wyn Evans, which seems to transpose the building’s characteristics into sound. And that’s just for starters. So many works celebrating creativity and daring in all their forms and which Dior's creative director Raf Simons, a great lover of contemporary creation, came to admire at its glittering inauguration event.

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Photo Credit / Source: Fondation Louis Vuitton

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'LOUIS VUITTON Spring/Summer 2015 Presentation
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As a brand, Louis Vuitton is about travel, and Nicolas Ghesquière is shouldering the responsibility for that as much as Frank Gehry did in the shape of his building. Ghesquière made the smart decision not to compete with the architecture (who could?). Instead, he led his audience below stairs into a darkened ship’s engine-room. The lights went off, the walls lit and became video screens. Huge projections of the faces of girls and boys of many ethnicities spoke in unison in words synthetized from 20 voices. Right here and now, they announced, Louis Vuitton was about to “explore any part of the universe without moving.”

My Instagram of the digital art installation at
LOUIS VUITTON Spring 2015 fashion show

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The New Casualness by LOUIS VUITTON F/W '14/15

In what was undoubtedly one of the most eagerly anticipated moments of the fashion season that began in Manhattan this spring, Nicolas Ghesquière unveiled his debut collection for LOUIS VUITTON. Ghesquière let the sun shine in literally, as the solid-seeming walls of the temporary structure in a courtyard of the Louvre opened like Venetian louvered blinds on a room that was conspicuous in its neutral arrangement of fawn upholstered, double-tier stepped seating and gray carpeting. That decor was a precursor to the surprising sobriety of a collection that focused on quiet details rather than bravura statements.

Eschewing the focused theatrics of Marc Jacobs’s memorably staged shows for the house, Ghesquière considered another proposition. “I didn’t want to do a theme or a story,” he explained backstage in a greenroom stylishly appointed with chrome seventies furnishings. Instead, “I tried to express an easiness,” he said, a mood that he feels is emblematic of the way a modern woman dresses.

In a thoughtful open letter given to all the guests, gracefully acknowledging Marc Jacobs’s formidable legacy, Ghesquière spoke of the house’s “inspiring history that looks to the future and to the world,” and of “the quest for authenticity and innovation.”

Backstage, Ghesquière expounded further, claiming that he was looking at a vision of a Vuitton woman dressed with “a new casualness, a way of mixing the clothes casual with formal who carries these codes in a very cool and functional way, too.” Perhaps as a riposte to criticisms that Ghesquière’s innovative design concepts have been at times more visionary than commercial, this collection was resolutely real-life and pragmatic, with more of an attitude of a resort show than a big-statement, main-season one. But that seemed to be the point. Ghesquière defined his vision as a holistic one that focused on “this transition between leather goods and ready-to-wear,” and claimed to have learned and been inspired by “the extraordinary savoir faire of the atelier workshops,” who fashion those all-important leather goods. For the first time, he asked those craftspeople to work on elements of clothing, a collaboration that resulted in details like the leather plastrons and yokes that added an armorial dimension to otherwise soft dresses, or emphasized the linear shapes of jean-jacket-seamed coatdresses. Zippers, rivets, and bands of welted-leather trim were further allusions to the house’s leather goods. The small purses included some worked with the quilting once used to line the company’s famed steamer trunks in the nineteenth century, and miniaturized versions of those cases.

There was a respectful nod to his predecessor as he explored the stiff silhouette of a Chelsea girl on the cusp of the sixties and seventies an era dear to Jacobs’s heart with boxy, double-face little coats, jerkins, and swingy skirts (everything cut dolly bird–short) worn with vinyl-effect Chelsea boots. The flou pieces, meanwhile, with elaborate inset detailing, and the use of solid fabrics juxtaposed with the Victorian wallpaper prints that Ghesquière loves, seemed closer to his established aesthetic.

There was also a gentle game of trompe l’oeil, subtle and overt, as Ghesquière pushed his textile designers to create knit worked to look like fabric, and fabric to resemble textured knit. Swaths of dense, dimensional embroideries in a curve-seamed panel skirt, meanwhile, suggested elaborate feather work, while other glittering examples on a high-waisted jacket or coatdress simulated fur pelts. But the sober palette (that evoked seventies menswear or decorating schemes) kept even these flights of fantasy as restrained as a whispered confidence rather than a manifesto shouted from the rooftops.

Discover the LOUIS VUITTON Fall/Winter '14/15 runway show at the end of this post!

LoL, Andrea 

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Photo Credit / Source: VOGUE
Photography by Monica Feudi (FeudiGuaineri)

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LOUIS VUITTON Cruise 2015 Presentation in Monaco' 

The coast of Monaco might be dotted with soaring skyscrapers, but there’s still nothing to rival the view from the Prince’s Palace of Monaco. Tourists who ascended the Rocher earlier this evening would have been surprised to find an awe-inspiring, glass-paneled salon that looked like it landed from out of space smack in the middle of the Palace Square. As the first fashion presentation to take place on those grounds under the patronage of HSH Princess Charlene of Monaco, Louis Vuitton’s resort show was a landmark occasion.

 

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