Sept. 30, 2025

Louis Vuitton’s
Indoor Opulence

WORDS ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN

LOUIS VUITTON

Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2026 collection by Nicolas Ghesquière.

It’s a big season for homebodies. Around the capitals, designers have been romanticizing loungewear and sleepwear, drawing the proverbial blinds and putting their feet up in mixed emotions of escapism and relaxation. If you live like Anne of Austria, you can see why you’d want to stay in. Louis Vuitton staged its show within the Louvre’s newly refurbished apartments of the 17th-century French queen — and mother to Louis XIV — which will soon be opened to the public. Their ornate marbled walls and heavenly gilded ceilings added a certain opulence to Nicolas Ghesquière’s home-wear, which embodied the season’s courtly oomph as well. “The apartment was very influential,” he confirmed after the show.

Entering Ghesquière’s house, of course, is like walking through a portal to a different dimension. Within his regal housecoats, glamorous cami dresses, sculptural track pants, eccentric nightgowns and bejeweled bathrobes, the collection traveled through eras and genres. A bowed peignoir with sequined sleeves and metallic embroidery easily qualified for 17th-century sleepwear, while a little nightie with razor-sharp collars and cuffs felt like some sort of Victorian abstraction. There was a series of cocoonish dressing gowns with matching turbans that evoked the seductive notion of the 1920s and ‘30s at-home entertaining. You could visualize Greta Garbo greeting you at the door to her hotel suite.

LOUIS VUITTON

“The atmosphere I wanted to share with you was this serenity that you can feel when you’re in the comfort of your home,” Ghesquière said. “But today, when you dress and stay home, it’s not only joggers. You can dress sophisticatedly at home for yourself.” It was nice to see him going to town on a reference so full of material, from the beautiful to the abstract and the humorous, too.

A sculptural knitted jumpsuit was the embodiment of people who say they live in their sweaters, and treatments like the color-faded fringing that covered a homey top-and-trouser set seemed to adapt the elements of the interior itself into the wardrobe. The show was scored with an original soundtrack featuring Cate Blanchett reciting the lyrics of David Byrne’s This Must Be the Place over music by Tanguy Destable.