Louis Vuitton’s Supersized S/S'23 Show

Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière played with proportions this season, from oversized zips to magnified textural details. Below, see Anders Christian Madsen’s key takeaways from the French fashion house’s spring/summer 2023 show in Paris.

 

The show took place under a massive flower

“Honey, I shrunk the kids!” As a red curtain went up around the centre of the Cour Carrée – the courtyard of the Louvre – circled by the Louis Vuitton runway, a giant flower was revealed. There we were, downsized by Nicolas Ghesquière in a sweeping surreal gesture that put the whole world into a new perspective. Granted, four weeks of fashion shows also make you somewhat delirious, so the experience was trippy: models came out in dresses that supersized the details of coats, from gigantic zips to colossal epaulettes, massive buttons and enormous poppers, and magnified details of hardware printed on garments. The soundtrack ordered us to “work it!” You felt a little bit like the Ant-Man.

Nicolas Ghesquière played with scale and perspective

Over its four-week course, the seasonal month of ready-to-wear shows has a tendency to minimise your perspective. Because everything is so packed and frantic, you can easily feel like you’re losing touch with the reality of the outside world. Sitting under Ghesquière’s scaled-up flower – created by the artist Philippe Parreno – and taking in those larger-than-life clothing details felt like a much-needed mind-expansion after a month of shows in the shadows of quite dismal real-world events. They need no elaboration, but between the Russian annexation of eastern Ukraine, the human rights conflicts in Iran, and the momentousness of the Queen’s death, it’s been a pretty shattering month.

Textures were magnified microscopic details

You could have studied the details of Ghesquière’s collection for days, or at least longer than what a passing runway look allows. The technical merit was insane: fabric and leather surfaces manipulated through treatments and embellishments to resemble minute elements seen through a microscope. The density was dizzying but, because of the collection’s conceptual approach, never nauseating the way too much surface decoration can easily come across. On the contrary, the addition of those magnified outerwear details – like tops and dresses with giant zips down the front and on the cuffs of sleeves – imbued the proceedings with an abstraction that quickly became magnetic to watch unfold.

The collection echoed the season’s theme of simplicity

With his macroscopic micro world, Ghesquière was giving us a new perspective. But there was another sensibility to the collection, which echoed an undercurrent present in other shows this season. Like Miuccia Prada, whose Prada and Miu Miu collection investigated ideas of simplicity, the message of the Louis Vuitton show very much seemed to be a reflection of our present-day capacity – or lack thereof – for understanding nuance. Nowadays, if you want anyone to listen to you, look at you, buy your clothes – or vote for you – you have to exaggerate and inflate your point to get it across. It’s true for the public debate, for politics, and for fashion, too. Like Prada, Ghesquière didn’t appease that idea, but staged an intelligent comment on it.

The product game was strong

In the upscaled process, Ghesquière threw in some pretty awesome pieces: a grey cocoon coat with massive pockets and a supersized zip, a textured brown leather trench coat with overblown epaulettes and giant industrial push-buttons, big wide 1980s belts, chequerboard boots, and augmented clutch bags that puffed up the Louis Vuitton monogram to new proportions, too. It’s a phrase oft-used but never more meaningful than in this instance: you’d have live under a rock not to be impacted by Ghesquière’s collection.