Louis Vuitton SS24 Will Be Talked About for Years to Come
Nicolas Ghesquière’s decade at Louis Vuitton as women’s creative director has taken the fashion house to new heights; his ready-to-wear Spring/Summer 2024 collection showcases Ghesquière at his best, bridging the gap between high fashion and the everyday consumer.
Mirroring the hot air balloon-like backdrop created by famed production designer James Chinlund, Ghesquière’s LV SS24 collection was all about volume and movement.
Ghesquière has always shown an affinity for mixing fabrics and styles, demonstrated as early as his 2002 Balenciaga runway, which was filled with embellished tops paired with casual cargos. He’s since brought that vision of marrying the ultra-casual to the romantic to LV, as oversized leather jackets and layered skirts kicked off the SS24 show.
Puffy silk blouses and cowl-neck tops in stripes and plaids came down the runway, chunky belts breaking up the visual windfall. Mesh-like fabric was the choice for what feels like endless layering possibilities of the Louis Vuitton SS24’s first act, closing with a simple black-and-white blazer and tulle skirt.
From there, travel-ready shirt dresses with oversized cuffs and baggy trench coats came out, offering a new off-duty model uniform option. Louis Vuitton’s sleek, structural corsets get relaxed, now adorned with oversized mismatched hooks matched with slouchy pinstriped pants. Ghesquière even designed jeans, coupled with an exaggerated balloon-like plaid top and the SS24 collection’s crisscrossed belt. Louis Vuitton’s ready-to-wear collection can already be envisioned out in the real world, from the airport to the office.
Louis Vuitton’s SS24 collection also showcased some silky, oversized cropped jackets in black, pastel yellow, and off-white with a candy-striped trim. The unorthodox styling of the show was my favorite part: in one look, a model wears at least three trench coats.
These small styling decisions illustrate the core of Ghesquière’s influence. It’s the emphasis of personal style and humanity brought to high fashion, the latter of which can be seen as elitist. In the past, he’s sent Stranger Things t-shirts down the runway and recreated cheesy sci-fi book covers for Louis Vuitton’s pre-Fall 2020 campaign. Ghesquière makes high fashion look achievable for all by combining hyper-editorialized looks with ones that can easily be recreated. By mixing t-shirts with poofy blouses underneath and pairing athleticwear fabrics with tulle, Ghesquière puts the power in the styling where the sky is the limit.
LV’s SS24 show comes as a nice surprise after some clunky 2023 collections. Ghesquière’s SS23 collection paid homage to Louis Vuitton’s hardware but its oversized buttons, zippers, and printed-on buckles felt more cringe than camp. In LV’s FW23 show, Ghesquière’s penchant for wacky and weird was lost in a sea of grey.
Even his 2023 Cruise and Resort collections, although daring with their colorful, warrior-like silhouettes, did not capture the generation-spanning influence that Ghesquière is known for. His SS24 collection, by comparison, feels like a welcome return to form for his 10-year anniversary.
