Louis Vuitton fall winter 2021/22 man breaks down prejudices and stereotypes

Once upon a time there was an American author named James Baldwin who in 1953 published the essay “Stranger in the Village” in which he talked about his brief experience as a homosexual African American artist in a Swiss village. Dwelling for a moment on the comparison with his life in the United States, he soon comes to the sad realization that he himself is an unwanted foreigner in his country, in his home. The black man of the diaspora, heir to American slavery who, even today, after some time, lives in a world created in the image and likeness of a Eurocentric and white vision.

On the basis of this premise, we must therefore ask ourselves when those prejudices will cease to exist, those preconceived concepts according to which a certain dress reflects a certain role and therefore a certain social profile? Who has the right to be an artist and must necessarily dress as such to be one? Is the belief that the habit makes the monk still valid? But especially when will the black population win an au pair position?

Answering these questions and talking about inclusion within a system as elitist and exclusive as that of fashion is paradoxical. Yet Louis Vuitton for the new Fall Winter 2021/22 menswear collection is attempting the arduous undertaking. Four archetypes are placed at the center of attention: the artist, the salesman, the architect and the vagabond.

They might initially seem like the protagonists of a joke but in reality they are just the votes of a corrupt system, false myths that society has created over time. The goal of the designer Virgil Abloh is in fact to undress them and unmask them of their presumed eternity and purity, to reinvent new dress codes linked to certain roles and professions, but above all the human values associated with them for a happy coexistence of diversity.

From here, James Baldwin‘s essay is carried on the show becoming a leitmotif for the entire collection. The show opens onto a snowy landscape with rapper Saul Williams acting out a narrative. Then you enter a minimalist building, the Tennis Club de Paris in which green marble structures stand and then turn into a station where the models walk or sit waiting, mingling with each other.

Credits: Saul Williams

A preponderance of tailoring and streetwear makes its way with plastic dresses or marble-effect prints, impressive overcoats paired with fedora hats and cowboy-style boots. Bomber jackets and sweatshirts with the aphorisms of the artist Lawrence Weiner (You can tell a book by its cover or The same place at the same time) alternate with accessories decorated with the motto “Tourist vs Pourist“, in honor of outsiders.

Following metal garments finished with LV mirrored monograms, sculptural pieces such as a jacket representing the most ancient French monuments and a bag in the shape of an airplane, and again the Kente cloth of Ghanaian origin which now appears declined in tartan, confusing even the most ancient traditions.

More than a fashion show it would seem like a real performance that, through fashion, poetry and scenography, invites us to a new normal without gender, race and sex inequalities. Looking at the video of the collection to the end, it therefore seems inevitable to take a moment and ask yourself a question: Who can I really be? Whoever you want, Virgil Abloh seems to tell us.

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JW ANDERSON collabora con Juergen Teller per la F/W 2021

Posted By

Irene Larussa

Irene è diplomata in fashion styling presso l'Istituto Marangoni. Di origini calabresi, vive attualmente a Milano. E' alla costante ricerca di stimoli nuovi da cui trarre ispirazione per alimentare le sue più grandi passioni: styling, grafica e scrittura. Il suo sogno è infatti lavorare nella redazione di un fashion magazine.