Luxury house LOUIS VUITTON presented their Men’s Pre-Spring 2023 Collection that explores the coming-of-age theme through the mindset of a musical youth. The collection was conceived by the late designer Virgil Abloh, and carried out by the brand’s creative team. With the collection the brand explore the metaphorical image of a music school, where new generation study and reimagine music history. It explores young man’s musical journey, and the dialogue between the codes of the past, the present and the future. The collection is divided into two chapters: The Concert Goer, and The Music Student. It portrays two phases in musician life, the youthful experimental phase, and more mature phase, when musician finds his own sound.
“In the first chapter of the collection – The Concert Goer – the premise of boyhood informs an oversized silhouette evoking the lines of garments yet to be grown into. They are loosely inspired by the youth-centric idea of adapted thrift store finds. Suiting is pieced together from codes native to workwear like cargo trousers or distressed denim, while a leather jacket is imbued with the fade and patina of time. A curvy letter pattern mimicking camouflage adorns a generational shirt-and-skirt workwear suit and a boyish shorts-suit as well as shirts, and garments founded in the military and sports wardrobes such as a fil-coupé bomber jacket and a transparent-effect windbreaker.
The second chapter of the collection – The Music Student – constructs a coming-of-age silhouette characterised by traditional suiting invigorated by the generational layering of garments familiar to the sportswear wardrobe. A fitted suit is worn with a football scarf, a Damier-patterned relaxed suit is styled with a monogram leather puffer jacket, and a taupe workwear suit is casualised with a hoodie. Similarly, a double-breasted fitted suit appears under a fleece-and-tech jacquard puffer jacket emblazoned with fragments of a blown-up houndstooth print, which also materialises in a cargo suit with drawstring pockets. A new take on the ‘hybridtooth’ recurrent in the work of Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, a ‘birdstooth’ pattern symbolic of freedom appears all over a grey skirt suit and on a tracksuit.” – from Louis Vuitton
Fashion photographer Osma Harvilahti captured the lookbook featuring models Andrea Eyrolle, Babacar N’doye, Cosme Voisin, Leo Comanescu, Matthew Seymour, Sunmoon Jung, and Teo Fortin. In charge of styling was Marq Rise, with beauty from hair stylist Christian Eberhard, and makeup artist Christine Corbel.
