Why is protesting at a Louis Vuitton event not focusing on our sustainability goals?

Nicolas Ghesquires’ vision for Louis Vuitton that concludes Paris Fashion Week is a pure fashion moment that perfectly represents the times in which we live. Louis Vuitton was the last fashion show to take place before Covid shut it all down eighteen months ago, and this collection is a triumphant post-lockdown finale. While an activist from Extinction Rebellion stormed the runway holding a banner that read Overconsumption = Extinction, his voice was the only voice of dissent in Richelieu’s Louvres Passage chandelier room. A wave of approval from the fashion elite welcomed Ghesquieres’ proposal for Spring 2022.

It’s clear that the fashion show’s visual feast is back on top despite all the hyped digital potential. The unanimous verdict after a year and a half of virtual presentations and online display books, showing in boxes a la JW Anderson or runways with la Moschino dolls, is that there’s nothing like the real thing: audience reaction, that emotional connection, that’s the expression of craft and art. on beautiful models for a breathing appreciator space. Anna Wintour likens going to a fashion show to attending a live theater.

Ghesquire is a designer designer who performs theater like a master. Ert, Marie Antoinette, Paul Poiret, art nouveau and Empress Eugnie are all inspired in this collection of dresses with beaded panniers, oversized frock coats, flared capes, paired with denim and wrestling boots.

For those who believe the pandemic will make us rethink fashion radically, the Louis Vuitton show will probably be received like a poke. Expensive clothes that are not practical are displayed for the few who have exclusive rights to extraordinary sensations. In other words, the status quo. Susie Lau posted a video on Instagram from the front row where she can be heard screaming enthusiastically with fellow influencer Bryanboy, as the designer picks up his bow, and screams Nicolas Ghesquire until I die. Lau, who along with Bryanboy have more than a million Instagram followers, wrote in an attached post that the collection gave him a fashion twist and marked Ghesquires’ handling of the past and a long look at fashion’s scope.

Of course the gatecrashing eco-warrior adds an extra vibe to the live show of the whole thing, something he couldn’t achieve via Zoom. But are Louis Vuitton shows really the most effective venues for protest? He’s counting on causing a huge publicity stir, but will it make a real change where it matters, sparking a real conversation? We chose LVMH symbolically because it is one of the most influential houses, he said afterwards, LVMH became the parent company of Louis Vuitton.

Nicolas Ghesquires’ creativity focuses on sustainability

Muse Ghesquires, read the press release, is a person who travels through the ages, adapting to the dress code of the era, but this can also describe the designer and his approach to fashion. The clothes Ghesquire made 20 years ago when he relaunched the then-defunct Balenciaga are now in demand by collectors, at high prices. The striped fencing top from 2003 is currently priced at $6500 while her patchwork dress from 2002 is priced in the tens of thousands. Mode describes items from his 12-year tenure as mandatory items that must be owned. Ghesquire told Vanessa Friedman about New York Time during an On The Runway panel discussion, weeks before his show, that his past creations were worn together with his present, clothing that came from two different maisons but from the same hand. I encourage this circulation, she says, adding that rewearing items is a very chic way to have today’s fashion. He prefers to call these vintage pieces a living archive, and is pleased that they continue to deliver something meaningful to the younger generation.

Combining vintage Vuitton with new pieces is just one of several functions of this living archive. Ghesquire mentions revisiting the fabric, something her designer partner, Miuccia Prada, has done with great success in her latest collection. I see a real opening there, he says, also citing customization and inventory control as an important strategy in creating with responsibility. He believes that designers should stop giving ridiculous discounts on clothes mid-season which then makes customers question the value of the pieces at their original prices.

This can be interpreted as a return to exclusivity, elevating clothing to an artistic expression, just as we finished patting the back on how democratic fashion has become. But, according to Anna Wintour, at the same time NY Times The panel, the sheer number of young designers selling fashion at more affordable prices, featured during New York Fashion Week for Spring, is a testament to the ongoing democratization of fashion.

Three Rs retail

Three Rs is expanding across luxury to encourage consumers to view fashion purchases as collectibles and investments are resale, rental and restoration services. Brick and mortar stores such as Selfridges and online retailers such as Farfetch of used and vintage figures into their businesses and WWD announced in July that Valentino was in touch with a global top vintage retailer for a project to be unveiled designed to create a cycle of loyalty and additional service to its customers.

There’s no denying that the fashion industry has a huge job to do to offset its global emissions, to implement circularity, to design timeless pieces that will be passed down from generation to generation, to produce less. But Jos Neves, founder and CEO of luxury retailer Farfetch, in response to the points made by Ghesquire and Wintour, added the following sentiment that cuts through the noise of out-of-place protests. Fashion is part of civilization. Fashion is part of the culture. These are not second-class citizens as some believe. Some think it’s not even part of the culture, that it’s just an industry.

Maybe that’s the conclusion: read the room, my sustainable-minded partner. If you thwart the fashion show of the 167-year-old maison built on excellence, craft, history and spectacle, that stuns fashion connoisseurs, whose designers value and promote clothing as collectibles, perhaps your message about overconsumption and extinction is misplaced. . -target. Beneath the cacophony you generate, those who want to say something will be heard. Or maybe, after a tough eighteen months, you just want to make live theater too?

Fashion editor Jackie Mallon is also an educator and author of Silk for the Feed Dogs, a novel set in the international fashion industry.