SHOW REVIEW: Louis Vuitton Spring 2021 Menswear

SHANGHAI, CHINA — Virgil Alboh‘s Louis Vuitton menswear show took place on a dock in Shanghai on August 6th.

Abloh, now at home in America, nor anyone from L.V.’s Paris headquarters had traveled to China for the show.

According to Vogue Runway, the show “began within the animation Zoooom With Friends, a video populated with cartoon animal “stowaways” who’d jumped aboard L.V. shipping containers. They were last seen in July, floating away on a barge along the Seine at the end of the wildly popular YouTube project he’d commissioned from the Black animation director Reggie Know in L.A.”

The barge had docked, and the models were livestreamed walking from real shipping containers stacked on the Shanghai port, and a connected pontoon floating in the river. “Three or four weeks ago, Ibrahim Kamara and I styled and packed everything in Paris and sent it off as you see it,” said Abloh. There was an opening parade of men in turquoise overalls and matching bandana face masks holding aloft clouds and seagulls. Giant inflatables of the L.V. cartoon creatures lounged on the red-painted sea containers.

Midway through the show, a screen appeared in the side of a container to reveal a filmed performance by Lauryn Hill, a rare coup which is based, as Abloh announced in a video finale, in a collaboration with the MLH Foundation, “to benefit Black businesses affected by COVID-19 and other hardships“.