Louis Vuitton creates campaign inspired by pulp novels and B Movie graphics for Pre-Fall 2020 collection

Louis Vuitton‘s artistic director of womenswear Nicolas Ghesquière has created a campaign and lookbook inspired by the graphic design of pulp novels and B movies. Staring celebrities like Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner, Lea Seydoux, Jaden Smith, Emma Roberts, Chloe Grace Moretz and the pop star Robyn, the Pre-Fall 2020 campaign features 24 visuals that riff on the wild illustrations and retro type of horror, sci-fi and romance novels, with the collection being dubbed a “wearable library”.
Ghesquière, who is a life-long sci-fi fan, worked with creative directors Marie-Amélie Sauvé and Ronnie Cooke Newhouse on the project, which was shot by Collier Schorr. In Jaden Smith’s sci-fi epic, Lost Planet, the model stands in front of a 70s-style painting of a robotic alien emerging from a burning building with the tongue-in-cheek tagline: “You’ll never trust your laptop again. A nightmare techno-thriller, where no microchip is spared!” Zhong Chuxi’s edition, The Haunted Garden, instead features the actor walking the grounds of a spooky county house, with an ornate serif typeface asking: “What if the flower picks you?”

Rather than just a clever way to display the collection, Ghesquière has stated that in many cases the film and book concepts actually influenced the clothes. Speaking to Vogue, he said, “William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, gave us the rights to print the cover of the book [on a T-shirt]. It started there. It’s such a great symbol for me to use a fiction and incorporate it into an outfit. I thought, what’s the reverse? To use the fiction as the illustration of the fashion. It’s a kind of a mirror effect in this action of representing them all in these different characters.”