Haim and Nicolas Ghesquière share an old love—and leather pants that can withstand high kicks
While preparing for the long-awaited One More Haim Tour for their album Women in Music Pt. III and the outfit market—“usually on trips we just wear what’s in our suitcases, but for this one, we really wanted a uniform,” says Alana—they love a pair of pants black leather by Vuitton. Women’s fall/winter 2022 collection, buttery and belted with high-waisted silhouettes. “There was nothing but high kicks going on on stage,” Este said. “And I think the big question is can we do these high kicks in these leather pants? And the answer is yes.”
“Then we actually found out that we were the only ones who had these pants,” Alana said. After the runway model, Louis Vuitton only produced three pairs according to women’s measurements. They wore black bralettes (also by Vuitton) and performed, they say, more than 60 shows in them, from Las Vegas to London—where they were joined by good friend Taylor Swift, former mobster and Easter egg layer, to combine their song “Gasoline” with her “Love Story”. She also wore leather pants. “We have three and there is one that she wore,” Alana said. The two sisters still own their pair. The fourth has returned to Vuitton’s archives.
All major fashion brands catalog their past, amassing an archive of brand codes and bygone collections. But for Vuitton, a historic trunk maker that only expanded into fashion in 1997, this archive holds special significance—it is a fashion brand emerging from the beautiful ruins beautiful in its history.
In the mid-1830s, it took the teenage Louis Vuitton two years and nearly 300 miles on foot to get from his childhood home in Anchay, France, to Paris; There he apprenticed with a master box maker, began working for the queen, and in 1854 founded the company that would bear his name for many years to come. The brand’s rise coincided with the tourism boom of the 20th century. “People wanted to explore the world to learn from others, from abroad, from foreigners,” says archivist Samuel. . “So they started thinking about great expeditions.” Vuitton created luggage to accompany these travels, but the family were also self-mythologizers and collectors. Louis’s son Georges created the iconic and linked LV monogram his son, Gaston-Louis, was attracted to antique chests and objects related to travel.
Many fashion houses began to seriously consider preserving their archives in the 1980s, when the rise of fast fashion and industrialized techniques created an underlying fear of loss. “At this point, people discovered that the know-how, the know-how, was important to preserve because it had started to disappear,” Samuel said. With Gaston-Louis, the Vuitton archive is off to a remarkably good start. And the past has long been a source of inspiration. In the 1900s, Louis Vuitton began producing perfume decanters, small boxes with structured compartments designed to hold perfume bottles—in the 1920s, it released its first scents . “The first idea was to package the perfume and then we produced the perfume,” says Samuel.
In this year’s fall/winter collection, which marks 10 years of designing for the brand, Ghesquière created a whirlwind of transformation and reconsideration of the times, not just replicating motifs from previous collections but also printed images of historic trunks—including a 1924 automobile trunk used by Citroën—on silk and cotton to create sculptural trompe l’oeil dresses and on the modern shape of the new handbags. In his first Vuitton collection, Ghesquière miniaturized storage trunks, including one custom-made for 19th-century banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, into petite boxy wallets. lovely: the iconic Petite Malle remains one of Vuitton’s most famous bags.
From left: Ghesquière fall-winter 2024 sheath dress; Kahn’s 1929 photographic trunk, one of LV’s first custom projects; Petite Malle, an instant It bag introduced in 2014 and inspired by Albert Kahn’s trunk.Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
