Victory, as they say in Paris, travels in Louis Vuitton. And this Paris Fashion Week, the Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2026-27 show traveled further than most, all the way to the Cour Carrée du Louvre, where Creative Director Nicolas Ghesquière erected a gigantic glass box housing an entire mountain landscape, lush green peaks, mossy prairies and razor-sharp summits flooded with the light of an artificial sunrise.
Zendaya, Catherine Deneuve, Léa Seydoux, Lisa of Blackpink, Alicia Vikander, Ana de Armas, Jennifer Connelly, Marina Foïs, Actor Chase Infinity, Figure Skater Alysa Liu, Stray Kids member Felix and Stylist Law Roach were all installed in the front row as the soundtrack opened spectacularly with Apparat's Goodbye and Ghesquière's nomads began their descent.
Futuristic Folklore at the Louvre
The inspiration was deceptively simple and the execution was anything but. Ghesquière drew from the story of Louis Vuitton himself, who left his native Jura mountains at 14 and walked 450 kilometers to Paris in 1854. And from that single biographical detail, he built an entire visual universe spanning Georgian shepherds, Mongolian steppes, Peruvian trilbies, Kyrgyz kalpaks and Ilocano hats. The set, designed by Set Designer Jeremy Hindle, the decorator behind Severance and Zero Dark Thirty, transformed the Louvre's most iconic courtyard into what Ghesquière described as "nature placed inside a museum, within a museum itself. Not mimicking nature but sublimating it."
The first four slooks evoked Georgian shepherds and their V-shaped sheepskin capes, immortalized by Georgian Painter Niko Pirosmani. High fashion shepherdesses followed in scarf skirts and ruffled blouses, several carrying crooks and shepherd's staffs. Mini peacoats and tunics in real fur, shearling treated as fur and woven plant-based fur alternated with high-altitude technical trousers, cigarette pants and ruffled culottes. The girls had folk souls and athletic builds in equal measure.
Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2026-27 - Paris Fashion Week
Man Ray, Wicker and the Wildest Hats of the Season
Ghesquière had already telegraphed his intentions before a single model stepped out. The invitation arrived as naive paintings of lambs in military boots by Artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko, whose partner walks for Louis Vuitton. Absurd, specific and completely deliberate. Then came the accessories. Elongated necklaces and earrings created in collaboration with the Man Ray Foundation added a surrealist jolt to the folk narrative. And then the hats. Thirty-centimeter cones worthy of medieval potentates. Enormous fabric feather nests a meter wide. Giant Ilocano hats. Chinchero trilbies straight from Peru. Oversized Kyrgyz kalpaks. And two wicker constructions so large they looked like the beach club baskets you see stacked outside Italian lidos in August. Ghesquière was not accessorizing a collection. He was building a world.
Ghesquière on Nomads, Shepherds and the Force of Nature
Asked about the collection backstage, Ghesquière, dressed in a black Levi's denim jacket, jeans and boots, was characteristically precise: "We wanted to find a common point rather than specific cultures. So we looked at functions, like that of the shepherd. Folklore serves to fight against the force of nature. We wanted endurance, protection and freedom of movement." And the show's closing sequence, set to Mark Lanegan's Looking for the Rain, pulled his nomads into what felt like a vortex, a disappearing act that left the audience in the Cour Carrée with the distinct feeling they had just witnessed something genuinely original. The most original womenswear collection by a billion-euro brand this entire 30-day season.
