With his new 2019 Fall/Winter pre-collection for Louis Vuitton, the brand's artistic director of men's wear Virgil Abloh looked to Jamiroquai as a partial influence on the exploratory vibes of the featured pieces.
In an interview shared this week in promotion of the new collection, Abloh outlined his vision as one of an "investigation" into the basic definition of luxury. "It was a matter of, like, my call and response to what is luxury clothing?" Abloh said. "You know, not fashion. So my investigation has been sort of like, what's at the root of clothing in, like, a human sort of desire? I was infatuated by this idea of the great outdoors and then there's a little bit of influence from sort-of muses like Jamiroquai."
The singer, Abloh added, represented a genreless approach to merging different creative mediums that inspired him. "[He] opened my mind about what music can be and it turns out that he had a strong fashion sensibility," he said.
The collection’s motif is described in a press release as "the cultural melting pot of Tokyo." The graphics themselves, seen in select campaign images released this week, pay homage to Japan. The ideas of boyhood, the great outdoors, and the analysis of the relevancy of "Fashion with a capital F" also serve as inspirations.
Below, see select pieces in action. A digital lookbook is available here.
