The guest of honor at the Louis Vuitton cruise show, held Thursday evening at the Salk Institute in San Diego, was not the Olympic skier Eileen Gu, though she walked the runway. It was not the brand ambassador Gemma Chan, though she was in the front row. It was the sun.
The sun? The ball of hot plasma 93 million miles away that happens to make life on earth possible?
Yup. Perfectly framed by the teak and concrete buildings created by Louis Kahn in the mid-1960s that accordion out around a central plaza, reflected in the ocean where the cliffs drop off into air, the sun presided over the show like a benign monarch. Combined with the ethos of the campus itself, dedicated to scientific advancement, it was hard not to think that the natural world and the efforts to change the disaster we have wrought would be on the agenda.
And they were, kind of. Though not in the 80-percent-of-the-fibers-are-recycled way we’ve come to expect (the way fashion so often talks about climate change and its role in it these days).
Rather, if the royal court of a time-traveling post-apocalyptic society was trying to figure out what to wear to a rave in the desert, here was the answer. It was celebratory and ominous all at once — full of goddesses and gladiators born in a Marvel action figure moment.
