Around the world in 80 looks from Louis Vuitton's SS25 Olympics, archetypes and good feelings

One of the most legendary Daft Punk songs, Around the World, is based on the repetition (144 times) of the same phrase. Ironically, it is precisely this repetitiveness and simplicity that made it legendary. And something similar happened with Louis Vuitton's SS25, which took place yesterday on the rooftop of the Maison de l'UNESCO in Paris, where Pharrell reiterated the silhouettes already introduced in his first collection, following a leitmotif that can be summed up in the phrase "around the world". Accompanied by Triumphus Cosmos, a composition by Pharrell himself, the show was animated by a breath of pacifist ecumenism: Louis Vuitton bringing the whole world together and representing universal harmony. A kind of optimism that in other historical situations would have been cloying but today, in times of multi-level tensions between citizens and states, citizens and citizens, states and other states, sounds strangely encouraging. In 2024, saying you want world peace is no longer a beauty pageant cliché but a not-so-trivial statement – although still vaguely rhetorical. After all, Louis Vuitton represents institutions: it is the flagship of LVMH, a group that sponsors the Olympics and has a fairly close relationship with the political world and the public life of the country. Certainly, it sounds idealistic to raise a hymn of peace while the French government is faltering, everyone is discussing the polluted Seine, and Parisians are not taking the advent of the Olympics very well – but fashion either ignores the real world or dives into it headlong, and Louis Vuitton is too big and too important to afford to be cynical or pessimistic.

Difficult not to see, in this show, a demonstration of the brand's strength, a sort of public proof of its brand atelier's capabilities but also almost a radical goodness with which Louis Vuitton began to color itself already since the days of Virgil Abloh. The message is that the brand is not only qualitatively good but also morally – if that makes sense. But after all, which other brand could afford such a flex? Anyway, if Pharrell's approach to ecumenism (using an ecclesiastical term that however reflects well the idea of uniting all peoples under a sign, cross, or monogram) is perhaps completely lacking in subtlety, it must still be said that his ability to communicate the spirit of the brand, to organize and coordinate macro and micro-details in a show that is less a fashion show and more a spectacle in the sense of total work on every single aspect, undoubtedly leaves an impression.