The Louis Vuitton AW26 collection has found its natural habitat. Shot for the cover of 10 Magazine Issue 77, the editorial takes Nicolas Ghesquière’s mountain-inflected vision out of the Cour Carrée du Louvre and into genuinely open air, with model Siri Elmelund navigating the collection’s most arresting looks across an outdoor landscape.
Photographer Cedric Buchet and fashion editor Sophia Neophitou are behind the images, with hair by Hiroshi Matsushita using Oribe Hair Care and make-up by Pep Gay. The issue, themed Future, Legacy, Heritage, arrives on newsstands on 18 September and is available to pre-order now.
From the Louvre to the Landscape: The Louis Vuitton AW26 Collection’s Origins
Ghesquière presented the Louis Vuitton womenswear collection on 10 March at the Cour Carrée du Louvre in Paris. The show’s landscape was not quite Parisian, however. The design language drew from traditional garments of mountain peoples across Peru, Nepal and the Mongolian steppe, distilling something ancient and geographically vast into a collection of contemporary silhouettes.
For the show itself, production designer Jeremy Hindle, whose work includes the series Severance, transformed the Cour Carrée into what LVMH describes as an abstraction of nature. The result was a setting that felt neither strictly interior nor exterior: architecture dissolving into something rawer, a stage that met the collection’s preoccupations halfway.
The details are where the collection earns its conviction. According to LVMH, buttons appear like minerals and heels resemble antlers throughout the range. These are not decorative conceits grafted on after the fact. They point to a coherent material logic, one where the body is dressed as though the natural world has had a hand in the tailoring. A button that looks quarried from the earth reads differently to one that merely closes a jacket. The distinction matters, and Ghesquière knows it does.
The Louis Vuitton AW26 Collection in Silhouette and Proportion
The silhouettes carry the weight the references demand. Shapes informed by high-altitude dressing tend towards volume, layering and a certain pragmatic generosity of cut, and the AW26 pieces are no exception. There is something in the shoulder and the drape of the outerwear that speaks to garments built for altitude rather than occasion, adapted here for a different kind of elevation.
Elmelund, represented by IMG Models, carries the clothes with the ease the editorial requires. Buchet’s eye has always worked well with the space between a garment and the body it moves with, and the outdoor setting gives that relationship room to breathe in a way a studio would not. Wind and light are not controlled here. The collection is asked to hold its own.
Neophitou’s styling makes considered choices throughout. The standout looks selected for the shoot cover the collection’s tonal and textural range: the harder mineral references sit alongside the softer, more draped elements, so the editorial functions as a genuine survey of what the Louis Vuitton AW26 collection offers across its full breadth.
10 Magazine Issue 77 publishes on 18 September. All clothing and hats throughout are Louis Vuitton.
