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Virgil Abloh announces LV menswear show with an animated gang of stowaways
As digital Milan and Paris menswear shows begin taking place today and we all get used to this ‘new normal’, artistic director Virgil Abloh has announced that a physical Louis Vuitton menswear SS21 show will be taking place on 6th August in Shanghai – titled Message in a Bottle – as part of a “voyage of international events.”
It all kicks off tomorrow via a short film blending live-action with animated characters, shot at the Louis Vuitton Maison de Famille in Asnières, the ancestral Paris home of the house’s founder. Here, we see movers packing up massive LV shipping containers and loading them onto a barge, set for Shanghai. But smuggled aboard are a motley crew of animated characters called Zoooom with friends, hiding away as stowaways amongst the covetable cargo.
Focusing on LV’s global community alongside a strong commitment to sustainability, Abloh told WWD that the collection contains 30 looks designed from new material, 25 crafted from recycled material, and 25 looks from the previous collection. “This next show is probably the biggest leap that I’ve made in terms of proposing a new system, how it lives and operates,” Abloh told WWD. “It’s probably the most fully packaged from the clothes itself and the craftsmanship, to the things you’ll see with the films and how it activates,”
“I’m on a lot of different panels that were sort of questioning what fashion can become in an urgent sense,” the designer continued. “Instead of the doom and gloom, sort of panic approach, I looked at it like, ‘Oh, this is the new frontier that we’ve been asking for in fashion.”
The SS21 short film will be streamed tomorrow on the Federation’s website at 14:20