On Tuesday, the Perot Museum held more than nature and science discoveries when the museum flaunted a bit of fashion history. The Louis Vuitton Women’s Cruise 2023 Collection, originally unveiled at the Salk Institute in San Diego in May, highlighted the Perot Museum on November 15th with two fashion shows.
The sun shone through the structural glass of the Thom Mayne–designed building to create a shimmering backdrop as models showcased the silhouettes of the season which included a mixture of road-ready warriors and cropped-top interstellar travelers. There were gladiator skirts, tops in silver metallic fabric, long belts encircled bellies, as well as cargo pants and jackets adorned with a reflective golden fabric. There is even metallic embroidery that oxides, changing the appearance overtime.
These smaller collections-cruise, capsule, or resort have become synonymous with exotic locations that inspired them, like the south of France, the Italian Riviera, or the Amalfi coast. The ideal backdrop for the Louis Vuitton’s Cruise 2023 collection, outside of the beautiful contemporary brutalist Perot Museum, of course, would be the set of Mad Max.
Like Mad Max, there exists a battle between technology and Earth in the collection. Though the materials look as though they could survive interstellar travel, they are actually composed of natural fibers such as cotton, silk, and linen. The metals, silhouettes, and patterns included feel as if they were derived on a walk from the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art to the Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge (both in Roswell, New Mexico.) Though, the prints themselves were inspired by Salk, rugged cliffs, West Coast skate culture, and nautical elements that were then photographed using a thermographic camera.
This event continues the Maison’s architectural journey of staging cruise shows in some of the world’s most remarkable architectural structures and settings, each of which reflects genuine sources of inspiration for Nicolas Ghesquiere, the Artistic Director of Women’s Collections. Past venues have included the Bob and Delores Hope Estate by John Lautner in Palm Springs, California (2015); the MAC by Oscar Niemeyer in Niteroi, Brazil (2016); the Miho Museum by leoh Ming Pei outside Kyoto, Japan (2017), and the TWA Flight Center by Eero Saarinen al JFK airport in New York (2019), Salk Institute in San Diego (2022), among others.
It was AWESOME