"Imminent Departure." If I didn't know his contract just got renewed, I would have thought the title is an omen.
My sense of his Vuitton is that in the absence of a substantive RTW archive/design history, he tends to turn to/narrativize its history as a purveyor of luggage & leather goods. In this case it is the wearer/carrier of Vuitton who, like a bag or trunk, is ready for "Imminent Departure." I think this sort of framing explains a lot about his RTW, because it frees him from needing to reference specific periods (the 20s-30s of Schiaparelli's Surrealism, the 40s-50s of Dior's New Look, the 80s of Jil Sander, etc) or locations (the Parisian salons of haute couture, etc). Instead he can move between time periods and locations precisely because of Louis Vuitton's status as
the luxury brand of globalization.
We can date this as far back as the late 19th century, when Louis Vuitton was participating in world's fairs and universal exhibitions, and receiving luggage orders from locations as distant as Japan. But I think it also brings us closer to the present: if he's appealing to and referencing Asia and the 1970/80s at the same time, surely we can imagine that he's revisiting Vuitton's entry into those markets at that period (during the rise of the Asian tiger economies)? Moreover, we might say he's allegorizing or situating Vuitton's status as a globalized brand to make it even more appealing to consumers in non-European markets. The Vuitton consumer isn't being given a narrative of the Frenchness of the brand (though that's always there), but is instead being
included in its codes by way of history. Put otherwise, I think he's claiming an Asianness for Vuitton by emphasizing a commitment to & dependence
on Asian consumers dating back to the 19th century. Even the iconic LV monograph has ties to French
Japonisme—it has always been global!
In this sense, the consumer is like the trunk: she is everywhere. Think back to Annie Leibovitz's famous ads for the brand (though I think Ghesquiere's narrative is more sophisticated). The central rhetorical claim of those ads was that Vuitton was
universal: on a boat in Cambodia with Angelina Jolie, in Africa with Bono, driving past the Berlin Wall with Mikhail Gorbachev, etc. Ghesquiere's work functions similarly, insofar as it understands the brand's heritage to be a question of travel and global consumption, rather than something like the specific cut of a Balenciaga suit.
