For the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 collection, Nicolas Ghesquière forges a connection – between the distinct identities and realities of Paris and New York, and between the cities within that city, its dichotomies, its dualities. It is a dialogue that has always felt inevitable, charged with the kind of creative tension that only the most considered fashion can hold.
New York has always been comprised of multiple identities, divergent cultures and experiences fused into something greater than the sum of its parts. Never singular, it is an amalgamation – uptown and downtown, past and future, a place of alternate sensibilities and simultaneous attitudes. Beautiful contradiction, perfect differences. This, Ghesquière reminds us, is the true luxury of paying homage.
Pop art, pop culture, pop luxury
A city as pop culture experience, New York in the twenty-first century carries an inherent universality. It is a place of aspiration – both a destination and a point of cultural embarkation. There is, equally, a universality to Louis Vuitton itself: globally known, immediately understood. Pop art, pop culture, and pop luxury converge here in the notion of the popular as a powerful medium, a vehicle for conveying messages to all.
It is the discovery within the Louis Vuitton archives that lends this Cruise 2027 collection its most electric charge. A 1930s leather suitcase, radically reworked as a literal canvas by the American contemporary artist Keith Haring, connects the house to the full force of pop art. This chance encounter reemerges as a fundamental inspiration: a selection of Haring’s works is featured across clothing pieces and accessories, each piece in turn becoming a canvas of its own, honouring Haring’s distinct artistic language and enduring legacy.
Travel between spaces, travel between eras
The setting of the Frick – a charged and meaningful environment embedded in the metropolis, a vessel for exploring different times and alternate experiences – frames the collection with quiet eloquence. As the Frick celebrates French decorative arts through an American eye, so Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 presents diverse expressions of American style through the prism of French savoir-faire, in an ongoing, ever-enriching conversation.
Workmanship elevates actuality. Reflections of real wardrobes are sublimated into something extraordinary. Blue jeans, jersey, leather – a heritage of American style is here retranslated with precision and poetry. Within the American wardrobe lives an idea of the American woman: dynamic, liberated, energetic. The depth of European cultural history and the breadth of the modern American experience – grand masters and pop art, old world and new – are celebrated concurrently, neither diminished by the other.
Different connections, unexpected intersections
Within the clothes, different eras and identities of New York co-exist, as they do in the very fabric of the city itself. Fragments of pop culture – slot machines, automobile chassis, tooled leather – and echoes of the grandeur of the Gilded Age are recontextualised, embedded in garments or recreated as accessories, becoming tender manners in which to cherish their memories.
Color is vibrant, brilliant, and unequivocally positive. Graffiti rendered in passementerie or sequin embroidery craft unexpected laces with the energy of the street. Modern figures move, like ghosts of the future, to disrupt spaces reminiscent of the past. And in the end, as Ghesquière’s vision unfolds across the salons of the Frick, all may belong here – past and future, Paris and New York, the storied and the radical, together at last.
