IN AN extraordinary coup de theatre at the Louis Vuitton show in the Louvre yesterday, designer Marc Jacobs went back to the company’s 19th century roots in the early days of mechanised travel to construct a make-believe railway station complete with a replica steam engine. It chugged into the tent on real tracks, all billowing smoke and hooting whistles, to disgorge its well dressed passengers and their copious luggage from their carriage on to the platform.
As a way of promoting the winter collection, its new bags and a major exhibition opening tomorrow in Les Arts Decoratifs on the brand’s history and modern transformation, it certainly wowed the audience.
The clothes, in sumptuous fabrics and colours, sparkled with jewelled adornment, with flaring cutaway jackets in tinsel tweeds and long coats of patchworked leather.
The longer A-line shapes and flamboyant velour headwear defined the silhouette which in its scale and proportion revived the elegance and optimism of the Belle Époque, but in a modern and glamorous way.
The bags, based on historic shapes and carried by liveried porters, came in luxurious leathers decorated with crystal and sequins with the same opulent glitter as the clothes.
The show not only ended Paris fashion week on a high note, but copperfastened the new layered look of skirt suits or dresses worn over tight, narrow pants, a prevailing trend on the French catwalks.
The Vuitton collection came in the wake of a very romantic show from Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, held in Salle Wagram under a canopy of fibre-optic lights. Burton’s freewheeling, frothy confections of ruffs, ruffles and fluttering layers of feathers and organza celebrated the lightness and weightlessness of ultra feminine fabrics. For daywear, white coats in laser cut leather accessorised with hammered metal belts and silver visors had a harder edge, but it was the lavish dresses in pink, and crimson that stole the show.