A contemporary French female designer, she considered herself an artist rather and shows an incredible liberty of thought. Representative of the avant-garde movement and in constant collaboration with the genius Le Corbusier, her creed, the industry, is detectable even in her accessories. The numerous shots of Charlotte Perriand lounged on her famous Chaise-longue B306 show her adorned with a ball-bearing necklace. The illustrious designer’s obsession: the modular and transformable aspect of her pieces issued from an innovative idea: “make it yourself”. The Bibliothèque Nuage, created in 1950 and carried out by the workshops of Jean Prouvé, another influential designer of the time, offers a perfect example of this personalizable and individualizable system.
It’s from this new conception of art de vivre that Louis Vuitton took a collection unique to each person that adopts it. Available in November, it is based on a text by Charlotte Perriand, written in 1940 upon her return to Japan. Used as the preamble to the catalogue for the Icônes collection, it marvelously summarizes the meaning of this “collaboration”. “A new way of living was waiting for me […]. I built my wardrobe with interchangeable “modules”, just like for my normalization research: for the bottom, 4 long or short skirts, for the top, sweaters, blouses, and bustiers that, put together, gave me at least sixteen combinations. By adding scarves, wraps, unusual jewelry, gloves, I reached a great variety with a good deal of unexpectedness and fantasy – always similar, never the same.” And so the ribs of a leather tunic remind some of the curved wooden slats in the designer’s Salon Tokyo, while the cut of a raincoat evokes the Table Ventaglio for others.
Louis Vuitton is adopting a new game based on these sixteen looks for its Icônes collection. With their pure and combinable architecture, they offer women the freedom to choose the feeling they want to give to their wardrobe. Without departing from pure elegance and accentuated femininity, Louis Vuitton is making us relive one of the most beautiful French references.
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