Super nature. That was Nicolas Ghesquière’s opening gambit for Autumn/Winter 2026, defined from the onset by a jagged, Roblox-y reimagining of nature as backdrop to the fantastic voyage of his Louis Vuitton models. The set was devised by the production designer Jeremy Hindle, responsible for the coldly dystopian surreality of the television series Severance. You thought of that programme’s goat-strewn, unwieldly-monikered ‘Dept of Mammalian Nurturable,’ its rolling pastures green trapped inside an anonymous office building. Vuitton’s beyond-natural nature was built in a glass petri dish, plonked inside the Cour Carrée of the musée du Louvre. It felt like a melding of the landscapes we all know with something distinctly alien, a friction Ghesquière revels in. Show us what we know, like we’ve never seen it before.
That’s kind of his whole idea at Louis Vuitton, the 170-something year old Maison currently celebrating 130 years of its never-changing, ever-popular monogram. Each season, Ghesquière jolts us out of our complacency to reconsider this luxury behemoth. In a sense, its ever-familiar name is a Trojan horse to expound some of the most progressive ideas around fashion today. This show was no exception – it had a grand scheme, big ideas. “A form of anthropology through fashion,” was Ghesquière’s take, swooping around the globe to examine the dress of different and diverse cultures unified in their fundamental shaping by the elements. Think shepherds, farmers, high-on-the-hill lonely goatherds, cowbells trilling.
If that sounds like some pastoral, ferme ornée splendour, forget it. The show’s extreme, mountainous silhouettes, that looked part Klaus Nomi and a whole lotta Claude Montana, actually originated in the Turkish steppes, in the thick, tent-like felted capes called kepenek, evolved rather than designed to deflect wind and rain. As Ghesquière put it, “nature is the greatest fashion designer.” Its broad shoulders, though, are fundamentally Ghesquière, and that mountain man silhouette sliced through the verdant green of his fractured landscape like a razor. It was, however, only the start of a voyage – very Vuitton – through different places, spaces and identities. Women were cloaked in shearling like wild wolves in lumberjack checks and milkmaid ruffles.
This wasn’t some folkloric box-ticking – although that is a mood of the season, grass cropping up underfoot at a clutch of shows, and feet often shod in interpretations of mountain-man boots. Ghesquière’s, by contrast, were in sharp court shoes, but often heeled with an apparent spear of horn. Actually, those were resin, and buttons that resembled minerals were three-dimensional printed polymers – in line with another stated notion, of expressing a “folklore of the future”. Staffs were wrapped with Vuitton monogram, handbags dangling resembling traditional bindles, while leather was intricately grained to resemble wood rendered magically malleable. But the clothes were the main event, their architectures extraordinary, their stories unfolding.
Ghesquière is a dab hand at that – it’s defined his approach to fashion, which in turn has helped define fashion full stop. His influence continues unabated: his back catalogue does brisk business, vintage pieces shot by stylists, worn by women, and referenced by other designers. They cropped up earlier this week in the Vaquera show, while an LVMH Prize finalist, Gabriel Figueiredo, first got a flurry of attention for his De Pino label with fabulous pastiches of Ghesquière greatest hits. “It is so funny to see how much they are alive,” he himself told me. “It shows that what we do is not disposable.”
So there was also a reclamation of Ghesquière’s own territory, a few throwbacks to forms and shapes he’s explored before – his own nature, as it were. He’s often characterised as a futurist, with the implication that that means he doesn’t care about getting clothes on people’s backs. That’s never been true. There were immediately wearable cropped bombers in leather, rounded cocoon coats and bubbly little suits, while the sweet ruffled pantalets that sat under half-a-dozen looks had all the indefinable yet still-tangible cool of his sloppy-Joe cargo trousers from a quarter-century ago. The interesting thing was that, dissected from the mayhem of the show, the models’ passage through the brutalist grassy knolls, those pieces had an immediate and decidedly urban desirability, weathering the extreme luxury climate of right now. Likewise, the doubtless sell-out collage dresses, some comprising some 25 different fabrics, that were fundamentally Ghesquière, the kind of grail pieces fruitlessly searched for on resale platforms globally. Vuitton has its monogram, Ghesquière has those exceptional, sensational signatures. Super, indeed.
