Paris Men’s Week: Louis Vuitton

Vienna’s Wiener Werkstätte, a century-old community of visual artists, set Louis Vuitton—or rather, its men’s studio director Paul Helbers—on a constructivist mission: to bring the artist’s wardrobe of characters like Franz Kafka and Egon Schiele up to speed for fall. And so he invented a new hybrid, “bleisure” (business + leisure), a mix of tailoring and casual clothes layered for maximum comfort. Cashmere sweaters as soft as T-shirts showed under cubist leather coats in mixed blacks and browns, tweeds were flecked for a paint-splattered look and leather anoraks were waterproofed with taped seams. Jackets were short and square and some of them featured waterproof leather insets at the waist, or across the shoulder. Add to the mix the new LV duffel bag and a stiff rectangle backpack in chocolate brown calfskin and you have a show that was very, very Vienna. Suddenly we’re hungry for a sacher torte!

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