Ah, Avignon. The city where popes once fled Rome in search of better light and cheaper real estate. Now, centuries later, the Papal Palace once again welcomes crowned heads—only this time, the crown is the Louis Vuitton logo, and instead of a tiara, we’re graced with sunglasses priced at a modest seven thousand euros.
Nicolas Ghesquière—whose creative genius can only be likened to brutalist architecture: incomprehensible but unwavering—has decided that fashion should stop pretending to be practical. After all, no one really goes to the office anymore, and brunch has become the new sacrament. So why not dress daily as if auditioning for the role of Ophelia in Wes Anderson’s Hamlet?
The collection’s theme was “the garment as stage.” And so, we had capes—because obviously, one doesn’t resolve family disputes without the proper theatrical entrance. There were slips worthy of Lady Macbeth (because who wouldn’t want to scrub out wine stains in pearl-embroidered organza?), and leather cuirasses, as if we were all headed for Agincourt instead of cocktails in a hotel lounge.
The audience—sorry, show guests—sat like a Greek chorus on the marble steps of the Papal Palace, devoutly watching each model’s step as though witnessing a new incarnation of Medea, not the unveiling of a handbag worth a Provençal farmer’s annual salary. The dress code? “Refined extravagance”: silk scarves tied to look accidental but costing as much as a month’s rent in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. They weren’t here for fashion, but for ritual. Because fashion, darling, is no longer an industry—it’s a cult with an LV monogram.
And the garments themselves? Ghesquière, like a modern-day Prospero, conjured up pieces somewhere between haute couture and costumes for an experimental ballet in Berlin. Colors as dramatic as Richard III’s love life, textures heavier than Macbeth’s soliloquies, and details? Cold, sharp, and precise—like the sarcasm of a Vogue critic who sat through the entire show in silence and noted only, “Nice buttons.” In short: nothing you’d wear on the subway. But then again—who even takes the subway anymore?
Perhaps most intriguing of all, the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026 show didn’t feature a single item one could call “practical.” And thank heavens for that. Practicality is for the masses. Here, it’s all about gesture. Illusion. Grandeur. This is fashion that doesn’t clothe—it speaks. If only to a handful of insiders who know that sequins in the Avignon sunset don’t shine beautifully—they shine insolently. But what else would you expect from a house that made excess its core value? As Shakespeare (almost certainly not talking about fashion shows) once said: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026 is not a collection. It’s a one-person play about the existential crisis of luxury, staged in three acts and four pairs of impractical shoes. It’s a spectacle where the seams build the narrative, and tension rises in proportion to the length of the trains. Reflection was not on the program—but the catering was generous, and the champagne colder than the glare of the influencer who found out her front-row seat was actually… second.
Photos courtesy of Giovanni Giannoni/WWD via Getty Images)
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