New adventures in style

Fast-acting Virgil Abloh explores animated new fashion paradigms with his SS21 menswear collection for Louis Vuitton, debuting in Shanghai.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the fashion world curtail its traditional show format, Louis Vuitton's artistic director for menswear, Virgil Abloh, has conjured a fast-acting animated antidote with his latest project: a film in which a colorful cast of characters embark on a virtual and literal voyage to discover Louis Vuitton's spring/summer 2021 menswear collection, titled Message in a Bottle.

It's not just Louis Vuitton's new journey into fashion's immediate future, but could signal a new creative direction for a group of its peers, too. The collection is being presented on a voyage of international events, which began in Paris in July and travels to Shanghai on August 6, then moves onto Tokyo later in the year. The format demonstrates Abloh's core values of diversity, inclusivity and unity.

The project started out in July as a short film, shot in Asnières, the ancestral Paris home of the brand's founder. The film follows movers who are packing up Louis Vuitton shipping containers and loading them onto a barge, which sails down the River Seine and departs Paris. Aboard, a loveable group of animated rogues ("Zoooom with Friends") are hiding as stowaways. They've loaded their Louis Vuitton trunks with the finest fineries they could find in the age-old City of Lights and leave a rainbow trace transfixed across the Paris sky behind them as the barge sails into the sun and heads East.

And what of the clothes? The collection proposes four methods of upcycling across Abloh's creative platforms – new looks from recycled material, looks repeated from the autumn/winter 2020 collection, looks created by the studio specifically during the lockdown and new looks created from existing ideas

These principles set forth the premise for the collection's evolution. By taking to the sea, Abloh embraces the global community on his travels in an exchange across cultures and nations, which transcends the traditional rules of fashion and seasonality.

After crossing the oceans, the shipment arrives in Shanghai and the Louis Vuitton spring/summer 2021 men's runway show unfolds in real life. No longer animated, Zoooom and Friends come to life in the collection, which explores Abloh's ongoing theme of boyhood: seeing the world through the eyes of a child. It's refreshing, forward-looking and wonderful old-fashioned fun in this newly refashioned ecosystem.