For Autumn/Winter 2026, Nicolas Ghesquière turned his gaze away from the city and towards the landscape.
Inside the Cour Carrée of the Louvre Museum, the designer unveiled his latest collection for Louis Vuitton within a moss-covered “neo-landscape” conceived by production designer Jeremy Hindle, whose film credits include Severance and Top Gun: Maverick.
Artificial hills rose around the audience, transforming the courtyard into a surreal pastoral stage that felt suspended somewhere between the natural world and speculative fiction.
The premise, though deceptively simple, carried a certain conceptual sweep. Ghesquière framed the collection as an investigation into clothing shaped by nature itself. Mountains, forests and open plains informed silhouettes that suggested endurance, protection and freedom of movement.
Rather than drawing from urban archetypes, the garments appeared as though formed through exposure to wind, rain and shifting terrain.
The opening looks rendered this idea immediately legible. Monumental cloaks swept across the runway, their exaggerated proportions recalling traditional shepherds’ garments engineered to withstand unforgiving climates. Cut in brushed animal hair or leather-trimmed wool, they translated utilitarian protection into sculptural outerwear.
At a moment when many designers are leaning towards pragmatic, everyday dressing, Ghesquière offered something more speculative. His proposition was not realism but imagination. Fashion, here, was permitted a measure of myth.
The collection unfolded as a kind of sartorial anthropology. References drifted far beyond Paris. There were echoes of the Andean highlands, the Mongolian steppe and Himalayan landscapes, garments that seemed shaped by geography and tradition yet refracted through Vuitton’s distinctly modern design language.
Nature emerged not only in silhouette but in material and surface. Tweed jackets carried woven woodland creatures, while canvas and denim were animated with reinterpreted animal motifs. Elsewhere, leather flowers appeared as sculptural embellishments and bursts of vegetal fur framed collars and shoulders.
The craft extended these gestures further. Resin buttons resembled fragments of stone. Heels curved like antlers. Treated leather was embossed to mimic the grain of wood, as though garments themselves had grown from the landscape.
Accessories reinforced the collection’s quiet spirit of exploration. The house revisited the original proportions and colourway of the Noé bag, first introduced in 1932, a subtle reminder of Vuitton’s origins as a maker of trunks designed for travel. Jewellery inspired by the surrealist artist Man Ray appeared as modernist pieces punctuated with the nail-head motifs of a Vuitton trunk.
Ghesquière described the collection as envisioning a “new folklore for the future,” where nature itself becomes the ultimate designer. Not every look seemed intended for contemporary wardrobes; some belonged more convincingly to myth than to metropolitan life.
Yet that tension has long animated his work. Among the most persuasive pieces were cropped leather jackets trimmed with vegetal fur and short dresses assembled from intricate geometric panels, garments that distilled the collection’s expansive narrative into something recognisably modern.
The result was a collection that looked beyond the demands of the present, instead imagining an entirely different landscape.
Newlywed Zendaya attended the show in sweeping bridal white, joined by the house’s familiar front-row constellation, including Ana de Armas, Jennifer Connelly, Alicia Vikander and Léa Seydoux.
Also making a notable appearance was 20-year-old figure skater Alysa Liu, fresh from claiming gold at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Marking her Paris Fashion Week debut, Liu paired her signature bleached halo hair with a brown denim jacket and matching jeans, finishing the look with a monogrammed East West bag.
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