In the past few months, the fashion world has been changing to safely adapt to the restrictions caused by the pandemic. With many more fashion events going virtual, the industry is reinventing itself. But it’s never too early (or too dangerous) to start planning a return to physical shows.
As the first-ever digital couture week is still underway, and Milan and Paris menswear shows are set to take place online towards the end of July, Louis Vuitton unexpectedly announced that its 2021 menswear collection will be displayed in a season-less and itinerant tour of fashion shows around the globe, debuting on August 6 in Shanghai as part of a public event and in Tokyo at a later date.
The collection, titled ‘Message in a Bottle’, will mainly focus on sustainability: speaking to WWD, artistic director Virgil Abloh revealed that the collection is composed of 30 looks crafted with new material, 25 looks made up of recycled and repurposed material, and 25 looks carried over from the previous collection. Every reconditioned piece will show the Upcycling Signal Logo which is a new emblem of the brand.
The second aim of Virgil’s collection is to reinvent essential fashion components and apply them to modern times, thus relating them to the needs of people working from home. “I want to urge the industry not to just focus on easy-to-sell garments that we know work commercially”, the designer said. “This next show is probably the biggest leap that I’ve made in terms of proposing a new system, how it lives and operates. It’s probably the most fully packaged from the clothes itself and the craftsmanship to the things you’ll see with the films and how it activates,” Abloh told WWD.
The Adventures of Zoooom with Friends from Official Louis Vuitton Youtube
There are high expectations for this new project since it will be one of the few events which will physically take place around the world.
Vuitton plans to start off the international tour with the screening of the short film ‘Adventures of Zoooom with Friends’, starring animated characters in a live-action world and now available on YouTube. The French fashion brand shared the prologue on social media, promoting the event with a series of colourful posters and posts showing the characters hiding inside shipping containers as the cargo ship sets sail. Words by Gennaro Costanzo
Graphics by Georgia Walters
