This Was Virgil Abloh's Most Surreal Louis Vuitton Show Yet

Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton show is undoubtedly the event of Paris Fashion Week: the goal is both to see great fashion and be seen in it. Accordingly, the audience included seemingly the entire fashion industry plus some of the biggest names in entertainment and style: Quavo, Takeoff, Bella Hadid, Alton Mason, Dev Hynes, Takashi Murakami, and Tyga, to name just a few. Fashion-world reticence was nowhere to be found. “THIS DRIP!” Daniel Kaluuya said to Alton Mason, wowed at Mason’s snow-white boots, shorts, and brown fur—all Vuitton—before Diplo plunked down next to them in a look from Vuitton’s Fall 2020 collection.

We had all crammed into a heavenly cloud-print box to see what the show notes described as Abloh’s study of “the evolving anthropology of the suit and the reprogramming of traditional dress codes.” Accordingly, suits were carved up and sliced open; jackets were constructed of layers of haberdashery and neckties; and Abloh gave Rene Magritte’s cloud motif streetwise slickness on a series of suits, bags, and even the models themselves. Those bags had additional surrealist touches, like a built-in slouch on a carryall, while crossbodies took a curved shape so that your next it-bag will hug your body instead of smacking against it. All about “twisting” the corporate system, as the show notes read.

So what did the crowd think? In the front row, Quavo and Takeoff, the latter keeping himself cool with a personal fan, nodded at several looks in approval, mouthing “THAT’S SO FIRE!” to each other too many times to count. And at the end, when a crystal-embellished cloud-print suit came by? Quavo let out a “WOWWWW.”