So there we were, sitting in a purpose-built plexi-walled tube, gazing out on two black reflecting pools from which silver and gold beams shot dramatically toward the night sky. Around us, the historic walls of the Palais du Louvre glowed ghostly in the neon light.
Then — boom! The spring collections ended, and Space Force arrived.
Not the Trump/Pence kind, the Louis Vuitton-by-Nicolas-Ghesquière kind, dressed up in little silk dresses with maxi shoulder impact, printed with splotches of robots and classical statuary like rips in the space-time continuum. Through which later emerged … sleeves. Enormous billowing sleeves orbited by their own rings of Saturn, sleeves like padded astronaut gauntlets, sleeves bristling tiny shards at the shoulders.
Among all the sleeves were ground control jackets and aviator trousers in pale pastels (some almost perfectly androgynous), sparkling mesh overlays, graphic rubberized cocoon coats and metallic floral brocade. Also some egg-like helmet/caps. They had a ticket to ride.
Louis Vuitton is, as the brand founded on trunks endlessly reminds us, about travel. Fashion is, as all of us sitting in the spring 2019 shows during autumn 2018 know, about the future. Put it together and you get: laser-focused women on an intergalactic tour to the halls of power!
If they also occasionally looked like clubbing extras from a 1980s sci-fi adventure flick, that’s O.K.
Fact is, it’s about time we started aiming higher, instead of embracing the lowest common denominator. There’s enough of that going on without fashion adding to the mix. Eyes to the stars (which does not mean Cate Blanchett and others in the Vuitton front row).
Ultimately, perhaps that was the most lasting story of the shows: Not the continued embrace of the 1980s and ’90s (yawn), or yet another return of boho deluxe in patchwork and fringe (easy), or the growing fascination with gender (sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes trite), but rather the re-emergence of design as a core value; the clawing back up the slippery slope of casual. The belief that a well-dressed body can facilitate a well-dressed mind, and that is something to which we should all aspire at this moment.
As Miuccia Prada said after her Miu Miu show: “It’s about what people are discussing now: elegance, glamour, tailoring. Not sport.”
That might be taking it a bit far. People are discussing lots of things besides elegance and tailoring but, on one level, she was also right: There was barely a hoodie in sight. The sneakers that had shown up as shameless market bids on so many runways in New York had disappeared by the time we got to Paris. It may seem like a small thing, but it was striking.
Certainly they weren’t present at Miu Miu. Instead, on a set filled with giant puffy letters that spelled out the brand name but were stacked around willy-nilly like marshmallow mountains, Ms. Prada gave us silk faille slips wrapped around the body and secured with big rosettes at the shoulder or hip, left half undone to expose bra straps at the back and the waistbands of tights. Rough-cut denim bias dresses and sequined shells paired with transparent skirts to show the big pants and knee socks underneath. Cardigans cropped at the ribs and full gray skirts. Tailored leather.
The collection questioned seduction, in an intriguing way (designers are still so skittish around sex it’s always kind of a surprise). It was definitely not athleisure, and that was intriguing, too.
“By the nature of fashion the future is the present, and you always have to project your present into a future you hope will be the present when the time comes,” Mr. Ghesquière said after the Vuitton show, which sounds like some sort of convoluted “Interstellar” hooey until you think about it. Essentially, he acknowledged fashion is all a wing and a prayer; designers are crossing their fingers and betting they get the mood right six months down the line.
And what they are guessing, in this case, is that we are about to get a little more demanding: of our clothes as of our selves and the world around us. Maybe that really is a moonshot. But, you know, it looked pretty good.
