Louis Vuitton menswear gets 30-year book treatment
Three decades of Louis Vuitton menswear will sit between two covers this autumn.
Louis Vuitton Menswear Catwalk is due out on 5 November from Thames & Hudson, the illustrated-book publisher. It will be sold globally in Louis Vuitton stores and online and in a selection of bookshops worldwide, according to WWD. Louis Vuitton is the French luxury house owned by LVMH, the Paris-based luxury group.
The book gathers nearly 30 years of menswear in one place. It runs through more than 50 collections, presented season by season in chronological order. It includes more than 1,200 runway looks, the outfits as photographed on the runway.
That scope makes it the first menswear title in Thames & Hudson's Catwalk series. The series documents the complete collections of leading fashion houses, with catwalk photography and short introductory texts. Each volume is cloth-bound and produced in close collaboration with the house concerned.
The menswear story starts with Marc Jacobs, who created his first designs for Louis Vuitton menswear in 1999. It then moves through the tenures of Paul Helbers, Kim Jones and Virgil Abloh. It ends, for now, with Pharrell Williams, the musician and designer who leads men's design at the house.
The foreword and accompanying text are by fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen. His narrative links the collections in sequence, rather than grouping them by theme. Readers can follow cut, fabric, colour and styling as they change from one season to the next.
The format will be familiar to collectors. Louis Vuitton's earlier Catwalk volume on its womenswear and overall output is a 632-page hardback with 1,350 illustrations, listed by the house in three languages. The new menswear book follows the same idea: a visual archive drawn from the runway record.
Thames & Hudson describes its Catwalk books as official and authorised, with 2.5 million copies in print across the series, according to Thames & Hudson. The publisher has worked with the house before, including on titles about its travel bags. The menswear volume extends that shelf to a part of the archive that has not been collected in this way before.
For fans, this means easy access to a long run. No invitation to Paris required. You can put the sharp tailoring of the late 1990s next to the streetwear-led collections of the late 2010s and the current offer under Williams, and see the joins for yourself.
