Jonathan Tagle meets Vuitton’s visitors.
The recent Louis Vuitton Series 3 event near London’s Somerset House, entitled Past, Present, Future exhibited the Autumn/Winter 2015 creations of Nicolas Ghesquiere, who joined the French Fashion house in 2013. They were exhibited inside a series of temporary spaces as part of what was described as an ‘experience.’
I was greeted by an enormous LV logo fragmented across a series of long mirrors, and a group of men and women in neat black suits, one of whom took me into the first of the exhibition’s thirteen rooms.
My favourite space was the Accessories Gallery, housed in a white room populated by white avatars modelled on Ghesquiere’s muse Marte Mei van Haaster.
But who were the people milling among the manikins, and what did they like to wear? Outside I decided to talk to some, and take their pictures
Joshua Nelson, 24 and his friend Shaquille Williams, 19 were both stylists from East London. They’d come not just to see the clothes, but also to learn something about the history of the LV brand.
Yishy Chen and Kun Qian, both 19, were students at the nearby London School of Economics who got bored in their lecture and decided to come here instead. Aspen Barrera, also 19 and also a student, was visiting during a day off from doing Business Studies at Kingston University. Another Business student at Birkbeck was Christina Vukovi with her friend Bojana, who studies Criminology at Westminster. As expected to attend are Fashion students, a pair that I’ve met are Bennie Khuat, 19 and Nusrat Ricci, 25 from London College of Fashion.
There were also lots of couples. Jeff Hsiao came all the way from Oxford to visit with with his girlfriend. And Ben Dean, a 32-year-old Paul Smith tailor, was visiting with Amy Qu, a 34-year-old a retail manager with Mango. And not everyone was young. Michael St-Aubyn arrived hand in hand with Diane Day. They were both 64, and she confided that the exhibition had tempted her to buy her first LV bag.
This was the third in a series of LV exhibitions that have taken place across Shanghai, Tokyo, LA, Beijing, Seoul Rome, and now London.
If there’s a fourth one I want to be there!