Text: Kai Manit @kaimanit

It was an unusually quiet afternoon in Paris, the kind of calm rarely found in the middle of Fashion Week. The sound of traffic along Rue de Rivoli faded as the doors of the Louvre closed behind a select few hundred guests. Their footsteps echoed through the marble corridors toward a room that once served as the summer apartments of Anne d’Autriche, wife of Louis XIII and mother of the Sun King himself.

Restored to its 17th-century glory, the space seemed suspended in time, frescoed ceilings depicting mythological scenes, sunlight filtering through arched windows, and polished wooden panels casting soft reflections of the audience. Then came a voice, low and deliberate, filling the room with quiet seduction:

“Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there.”

It was Cate Blanchett, reading the lyrics to This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads, a song about belonging, reinterpreted here as a whispered mantra. Nicolas Ghesquière called it “a poem about coming home,” and that idea home was the beating heart of Louis Vuitton’s Spring–Summer 2026 collection, aptly titled In Praise of Intimacy.

“I wanted to speak about simple happiness,” Ghesquière told reporters backstage. “About being with yourself, in clothes not made to impress others, but to make you feel good when you’re alone.”

Coming from a designer known for his futuristic silhouettes and architectural precision, the decision to center an entire collection on the act of staying home felt both radical and deeply human. It was a quiet inversion of his own legacy, and perhaps a reflection of our time. In the world after the pandemic, people are no longer searching for garments that take them somewhere else, but for clothes that let them stay, beautifully, with themselves.

Ghesquière has made the Louvre his creative playground for nearly a decade, from the Pavillon d’Horloge in Spring 2018, where 18th-century frock coats met sneakers, to the chandelier-filled Passage Richelieu of Spring 2022, where panniered dresses worthy of Empress Eugénie floated through the halls. This time, however, he took guests upward, to the private apartments where Queen Anne once escaped the Parisian heat. There, among frescoes and marble floors, he built what could only be described as the most luxurious home in fashion history.

Marie-Anne Derville, the scenographer, dressed the rooms like a dream between centuries. Hand-carved wooden tables sat beside Art Deco sofas by Michel Dufet; ceramics by Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat gleamed under ancient chandeliers; a marble vase, like something lifted from a Georges de La Tour painting, stood quietly in a corner. The atmosphere felt suspended between history and imagination, a home no one could truly possess, yet everyone longed to inhabit.

“Home is the place where you hear your own voice most clearly,” Ghesquière said, now one of Paris fashion’s modern elders. “And I wanted these clothes to speak in that voice.”

In this Louis Vuitton collection, home is not a physical space but an emotional territory. Each garment was crafted to be felt as much as seen, from whisper-thin silk organza and delicate lace stitched with visible linings, to cashmere bathrobe coats and wide, curtain-like silk trousers. Even the peignoirs and nightgowns, executed with haute couture precision, carried the serenity of a life lived inwardly yet luxuriously.

Some pieces looked as if they had wandered straight out of a dreamlike living room: tapestry prints, couch-cover motifs, wooden-seamed shorts, even brocade socks paired with sandals as if luxury itself had stepped down from the runway to sit quietly beside us on the sofa. What Ghesquière offered was not nostalgia but rather a new form of archaeology: the archaeology of objects.

“Some of these clothes might look irrational, like a house filled with too many memories,” he said with a smile. “But that’s real life. We don’t live in perfection.”

And that imperfection became the soul of the collection. Each look felt pieced together from fragments of memory, like a room not yet tidied after last night’s party, or the tender chaos of someone’s inner life, still glowing with warmth.

Among the highlights: a long belted vest in pale pink brushed silk that mimicked fur yet was featherlight to the touch, and a beaded fringe set whose gradient shimmer evoked an Impressionist landscape at dusk. Up close, every piece was a study in craftsmanship, precision concealed within softness, engineering hidden beneath poetry.

The show closed as Blanchett’s voice returned over Tanguy Destable’s reworked score:

“Never for money, always for love.”

It felt like Ghesquière’s quiet answer to a fashion world obsessed with spectacle and excess. Because ultimately, what he was talking about was not luxury, but love for the small, intimate things that make life feel like home.

Of course, the irony was never far away. To stage “the art of staying in” within a royal palace once inhabited by Anne d’Autriche is a delicious contradiction, a dialogue between fantasy and reality, between the plutocrats of the 17th century and the quasi-trillionaires of the 21st, some of whom were likely watching from their yachts moored along the Seine.

In strategic terms, the show was a masterstroke of LVMH-level storytelling, part cultural spectacle, part clienteling genius. To invite guests into the Louvre on a day it was closed to the public was an experience of ultra-luxury in itself, a private communion with French history. Combined with Blanchett’s presence and the emotional architecture of “home,” the result was a staggering amount of earned media, both cultural and financial. Louis Vuitton didn’t just present a collection; it staged a global meditation on intimacy.

And in doing so, Ghesquière offered something fashion rarely dares anymore: a soft-spoken statement of power.
In an era when every brand is shouting to be heard, he whispered and the whole world listened.

“I don’t want people to see Louis Vuitton only as a brand of travel,” he said, his voice steady. “I want them to see it as another kind of home; one we can always come back to.”

And perhaps that is the most beautiful conclusion of all: after years of journeying through time, technology, and form, Louis Vuitton has finally come home.