At 9:30 p.m. Beijing time on January 20, Louis Vuitton's Fall/Winter 2022 Men's Wear Series Show was held at the Paris Men's Week. Hundreds of guests gathered at the Paris Templar Market to witness Virgil's final work.
The theme of the series is Dreamhouse, the runway is based on light blue, and a large bed is placed in the center of the venue, together with the lamp, chair and the "half-cut" room behind the bed, bringing a strong warm atmosphere to the fashion show. After all, what could be more of a brand's tribute to the brand than these runway installations that are both warm and perpetual to Virgil's artistic language?
Louis Vuitton's Fall/Winter 2022 menswear collection
At the same time, these runway installations are also named "8", which represents Virgil's eighth collection for the brand's menswear, but also implies a circular, continuous meaning, because putting 8 down becomes a symbol representing the meaning of infinity ∞.
As the symphony orchestra played, the dancers began to use the runway as a stage to leap freely. They walk between the models, and although there is no direct interaction between the two, the carefully choreographed dance movements and interspersed with each other still make the whole fashion show look like a large-scale fashion dance show, which is the same as the previous autumn/winter 2021 men's fashion show. Symbolizing different identities, people with different skin colors and ethnic backgrounds gather here to form a contemporary community under the diverse perspectives that Virgil has built for the brand's menswear.
And what these "community members" wear is the legacy of Virgil who has completed 95% of the design progress before his death. Therefore, in the overall look and feel of the series, it is not much different from the previous series, which still continues Virgil's luxury street style and once again metaphorically describes the boy's growth story.
Louis Vuitton's Fall/Winter 2022 menswear collection
The pure white kite backpack shape that debuts in the finale is full of innocence and innocence of childhood dreamers; the shape of wearing a patchwork contrast print motorcycle jacket with loose wash jeans is a street teenager who has just grown up; the straight-leg cut and the suit style of the women's waist design is the beginning of the teenager's entry into society. A history of the growth of boys under Virgil's design portfolio, telling him what he has repeatedly emphasized in the past "Boyhood Ideology" (Boyhood Ideology) -- based on Boyhood Ideology, Virgil looks at the world from a childlike and pure perspective, through which the gap between reality and imagination no longer exists.
Backstage of Louis Vuitton's Fall/Winter 2022 menswear collection
LV has done a lot around the show, trying to continue Virgil's narrative style and inviting the wider community to come together to look at the present through Virgil's lens.
In addition to the real-time global live broadcast of the Paris physical show, LV also conducts multi-platform synchronous live broadcasting in the Chinese market on Douyin, Station B, Weibo, WeChat Mini Program and Kuaishou. It is worth mentioning that the live broadcast in Kuaishou is the first live broadcast by LV as an official account, although the brand has also done live broadcasting on Kuaishou before, but it is a "backdoor live broadcast" and has not opened its own official account. This move also seems to indicate that the brand will adopt a more active strategy in the digital communication of the Chinese market. As of 24:00 on January 20, the total number of lv 2022 autumn and winter men's clothing show videos on the Kuaishou platform has exceeded 36.26 million, and the number of viewers of Douyin and Weibo is 24.8 million and 17.3 million, respectively.
Lv 2022 Autumn/Winter Men's Wear Show video has been viewed by more than 36.26 million people on the Kuaishou platform, and lv has attracted more than 720,000 fans in less than two months after entering the Kuaishou platform
Prior to the release of the fashion show, LV also invited brand ambassador Gong Jun to shoot a set of show trailer blockbusters and short films. Gong Jun's personal trailer Weibo has exceeded one million retweets and more than 2.7 million likes. In addition, the addition of celebrity publicity matrices such as Wang Hedi and the Times Youth League also boosted the volume and exposure of the LV men's clothing show.
Gong Jun
In Station B, LV chose to join hands with the official account of "GQ Zhizu" to broadcast live to reach more Generation Z audiences. Judging from the live broadcast of the live show for the Chinese market, it is clear that the brand has achieved the goal of radiating brand power to a wider range of Chinese consumers through different communication channels, and through the star brand ambassador, LV has also created a huge voice on social media.
LV joined hands with the official account of "GQ Zhizu" on the B station to broadcast the show live
Different platforms have built a complete communication chain of LV in the Chinese market, and its own vertical penetration of China's social media ecology has also determined that it can transform these platforms and digital attempts in the platform into opportunities for interactive dialogue with Chinese consumers.
LV brings together communities of diverse backgrounds through multi-platform live streaming to share with them about Virgil's values and fashion beliefs. If it is only limited to digital communication, LV obviously cannot fully continue Virgil's narrative style, so LV also continues Virgil's focus on social issues such as racial equality.
On January 26, LV announced that an online auction of 200 pairs of The Louis Vuitton and Nike "Air Force 1" by Virgil Abloh sneakers will run through February 8 through February 8 through sothebys.com, with a starting price of $2,000. The proceeds from the auction will go to the Virgil Abloh "Post-modern" Scholarship Foundation, which partners with the Fashion Scholarship Fund to support the academic education of outstanding black, African-American, or African-American students.
The Louis Vuitton and Nike “Air Force 1” by Virgil Abloh 球鞋
Recently, LV also opened the Spring/Summer 2022 Menswear Limited Time Space Event in Shanghai, Beijing and Hangzhou, and launched the series of limited-time stores in the WeChat Mini Program. The design of the offline limited-time space venue is inspired by the birch forest dream of the series of runways, and the chess board, which is an ancient metaphor for human survival, is also the symbol of this menswear series. Extending from the runway to the offline, lv in this corner of the online lower time space allows people to see more creative possibilities, while also allowing offline communities to walk towards each other in the store and understand Virgil's narrative.
LV opened the 2022 Spring/Summer Men's Wear Limited Time Store on WeChat Mini Program
Since the Spring/Summer 2022 Menswear Show in Miami late last year, LV's campaign to pay tribute to and honor Virgil has continued uninterrupted, with "Virgil was here" and a grand fireworks display to mourn him, and now to pay tribute to Virgil again. To some extent, LV abandons the cold-blooded ruthlessness and forgetfulness in the fashion business world, and uses humanistic feelings to protect Virgil's victory.
So what exactly does Virgil leave for LV and the fashion world?
First, he, like other peers who came from the streets to the top of the fashion power pyramid, subverted and inspired the creative output model of the fashion industry by integrating online culture, youth culture, art, streetwear and luxury symbols. They broke the boundaries between the traditional mainstream fashion world and the street trend, making the haute couture of the street trend justified.
Virgil's design language seems straightforward, but he is like a book, and after careful reading, he can always come up with some experience that is either abstract, or figurative, or reflects reality. Yet, as critics have criticized, "superficiality" is almost the most concentrated point of criticism of him by all critics. But after the bad news of his sudden death last November, all the controversy and criticism surrounding him disappeared, leaving only consternation and mourning. Many of his former staunch critics have also suddenly realized that Virgil may not be the honest person who makes clothes under the traditional system, but it is what he deserves to be remembered and repeatedly discussed when he breaks through the walls of the luxury world with one foot on the accelerator and the new fashion rules he has created.
After all, fashion is ultimately a business, and we should see how Virgil, behind the success of this business, transforms pragmatism into a creative thinking that can arouse the desires of young consumers and how to use practical actions to achieve a rational narrative of multiple values. In his limited tenure, What Virgil wants to do is like a hot air balloon rising at the end of the Spring/Summer 2022 menswear show, exploring endlessly, and if he is not plagued by illness, he will do more.
His so-called "3%" approach of appropriation of reproduction, repetition, and simple symbolization (he believes that adding 3% innovation to the original can become his theory of original design) has not only brought him commercial success, but also made LV and the fashion industry realize that they need designers like him who dare to challenge traditional fashion values. From the moment he joined the LV menswear department, he knew that he was not a fashion designer in the true traditional sense of the word, and he was not here. In his LV menswear debut notes, he describes it himself: "I don't call myself a designer or an image maker. I don't reject any of the labels. I'm not trying to put myself on a pedestal right now, nor am I going to be more. I wanted to be a new art director with different era definitions. ”
So after joining LV Menswear in 2018, Virgil began the process of building a voice for itself to achieve bigger goals.
At its LV menswear debut, Virgil invited more than 700 art students to watch the show on the spot; in 2019, Virgil curated the first group exhibition "Coming-of-age" after joining LV, and invited photographers and young artists from different fields to present a boy's growth process from toddler, adolescence to adulthood from their own diverse perspectives. In the 2019 LV men's autumn and winter advertising campaign, students wearing different colors of T-shirts and carrying LV backpacks replaced the previous models and stars as the protagonists of the advertising blockbusters.
LV Mens fall/Winter 2019 advertising campaign
Much of his attention to his students and teenagers stems from his review of his own growth trajectory. As he put it in his manifesto ahead of the launch of LV's Spring/Summer 2021 menswear collection, "I see the LV menswear collection as a platform for creative definition, which conveys the rise, the rise and the progress. I take my youth as a lesson and hope that young people of color can see the dawn of hope before feeling the oppression of society and bring them a positive impact. ”
In addition, Virgil created the Virgil Abloh "Post-modern" Scholarship Foundation, which aims to promote inclusion and equity in the fashion industry for blacks by providing scholarships and career guidance to black, African-American, and African-American students. In the LV AW21 menswear collection, Virgil featured only 5 white models, with the rest all of them of colored models. At the same time, in the series of short confessions, Virgil also emphasized the importance of minorities such as the black community through The Dictation of Saul Williams. It is almost certain that he has built a cultural community with a sense of mutual identity that can feed back to his brand as well as to LV.
As an unconventional "outsider" and the first African-American artistic director in LV history, Virgil, who broke into the center of power, was clearly more pragmatic, and the practical actions he did revolved around the trajectory of life he experienced, the minorities he represented, and his focus on the creative power of the next generation. While the fashion industry has been discussing these issues more widely in recent years, there are very few activists like Virgil who are now pragmatically pushing the industry forward.
In the process of Virgil reinventing LV menswear, both sides are profiteers. From a commercial point of view, Virgil has achieved the brand's expectations of him, LV menswear has successfully opened up the young market at a speed that is visible to the naked eye, with a variety of explosive products to become synonymous with the "tide" in the minds of the young generation, and let the men's products that account for a small proportion of the brand's revenue composition begin to assume a more important incremental role. Commercial success has given Virgil the capital to use LV to express its concerns about social issues, and LV has used Virgil to advance into a more substantive multicultural discussion.
In July, lvmh also announced the acquisition of a 60% stake in Off-White, with Virgil holding the remaining stake, a move seen as a sign of the group's support for Virgil and its positive confidence in him.
Therefore, as mentioned earlier, in just three years, Virgil has long regained the right to speak from those who have criticized him, and has been highly recognized by the capitalists behind him, which is why LV is so "long-term". In other words, LV, the world's largest luxury group's leading brand, may have appointed a new Virgil successor long ago, and the fast pace of the fashion industry and the cold-bloodedness of the business world have reduced designers to pawns in the gamble of capitalists.
But the reason LV shows humanity this time is that Virgil has set a clear and feasible development path for the brand's men's wear. Virgil's commercial success and appealing luxury style among young consumers have made Bernard Arnault, Chairman of the Board and CEO of the LVMH Group, a capital tycoon, realize that the gamble against Virgil has been successful, and that keeping his legacy and inheriting his unpaid ambitions are the top issues facing LV now.
So who can inherit Virgil's mantle?
This is an open-ended question. Faced with this problem, LV Chairman and CEO Michael Burke said in an exclusive interview with WWD that the brand is not in a hurry to find a successor to Virgil. "The LV is large enough that it can run on its own for a period of time." At the same time, he also stressed that the brand will not limit the gender, orientation, race, age restrictions of Virgil's successor, or even exclude the appointment of the first female LV menswear art director.
The outside world is obviously more willing to make more bold guesses on this issue than THE CAUTION OF LV. From Chitose Abe and Jonathan Anderson to Grace Wales Bonner and Samuel Ross, and even American rapper Ye (formerly kanye West), who hugged him after his debut at Virgil LV and left a classic picture of the fashion world, is also on the speculation list.
Ye hugged Virgil after his LV debut
All this speculation revolves around the question of who will be the second Virgil. For outside viewers, it does not matter who can keep Virgil's business achievements and who can make good clothes, they just want to see who can be like Virgil, when seeking power, continue to break the wall of power in the fashion industry; and for brands, continuing the Virgil-style road is a shortcut to keep business reputation, whether this person is born in a class is not so important, whether it can get the recognition of the same community is more important.
Burke also told WWD in an exclusive interview: "Lv is so big, so big that he doesn't belong to any one person. So when a new designer comes to LV, the responsibility she/he has to take on is enormous compared to the past, compared to the cultural values that exist here. "So it's not a job that just picks a designer to be competent." Lv used to bet on Virgil, but now if you bet on a new person and start all over again, the cost in the short term is too high. Therefore, on top of Virgil, recreating a Virgil may be a more preferred choice for brands at this stage.
To be sure, LV Menswear, which has been infused with soul and character, will continue to maintain a dialogue with contemporary culture, thus achieving a greater transformation and ushering in the next peak. Virgil's story is far from over, his inspiration will continue to influence the fashion industry for a long time, we have reason to believe - the unpaid Virgil is coming to an end, but more "Virgil" will be on the stage is already an unstoppable trend, how these ambitious "fashion revolutionaries" will rewrite the rules, we wait and see. WWD
Content Planning Huayi Tomorrow Fashion Content Center
Written by Jason
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Image source provided by the brand