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Nicolas Ghesquière closed Paris Fashion Week inside the Louvre, and Loïc Prigent got the camera backstage for all of it.
On October 1, 2019, Louis Vuitton staged its Women’s Spring-Summer 2020 show inside a custom pavilion built into the Cour Carrée at the Musée du Louvre, the traditional finale slot of Paris Fashion Week. French filmmaker and fashion journalist Loïc Prigent was granted all-access to document the hours before, during, and after Nicolas Ghesquière’s presentation for Louis Vuitton’s own channels. The result is less a highlight reel than a fly-on-the-wall record of what a flagship luxury show actually looks like from the inside — hair and makeup chairs, last-minute checks, and a front row full of famous faces reacting in real time.
- The set was built from sustainably sourced French pine, designed from the outset to be donated and reused after the show rather than scrapped.
- The runway’s floor-to-ceiling screen played an extended, specially arranged version of Scottish producer SOPHIE’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry,” reworked with French director-musician Woodkid.
- Front-row guests captured by Prigent’s cameras included Indya Moore, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Chamberlain, Ruth Negga, Chloë Grace Moretz, Laura Harrier, Zhong Chuxi, Cody Fern, and the K-pop group ITZY.
Belle Époque Tailoring Meets a Sustainable Set
Ghesquière built the collection around the Belle Époque and Art Nouveau eras, sending out tailoring with deliberately exaggerated shoulders, sequined sweater vests, and dandy-style three-piece suits alongside floral motifs pulled straight from turn-of-the-century decorative art. It’s the kind of reference point that reads as costume-drama nostalgia on paper but came off sharp and modern on the runway — a signature move for a designer who has spent years mixing period silhouettes with futurist accessories.
Those accessories did plenty of the talking. Louis Vuitton sent bags shaped like VHS cassettes and monogram “egg bags” down the runway, objects strange enough to generate their own conversation among the editors and buyers seated around the pavilion. Prigent’s footage lingers on these pieces backstage, where stylists check placement and models wait with the bags already in hand before the lights come up.
A Louvre Courtyard Built to Be Taken Apart
The choice of the Cour Carrée wasn’t just about scale — the pine-wood structure erected inside it was planned from the start for post-show donation and reuse, a detail Louis Vuitton emphasized as part of the production’s environmental accounting. Prigent’s cameras catch crews assembling the minimalist pavilion in the hours before doors open, a contrast to the ornate stone facades of the Louvre wrapped around it.
That contrast between the 18th-century courtyard and the stripped-down interior staging is part of what made the show’s visuals land. When the screen behind the runway lit up with Woodkid’s arrangement of SOPHIE’s track, the room got the kind of hush that a fashion week finale is supposed to deliver.
SOPHIE’s “It’s Okay to Cry,” reworked with Woodkid, filled a floor-to-ceiling screen built inside a pine pavilion designed to be dismantled and donated the moment the show ended.
The Front Row Prigent Captured
Part of what makes Prigent’s coverage valuable is the guest list he had access to. Indya Moore, Jennifer Connelly, Ruth Negga, Chloë Grace Moretz, Laura Harrier, Zhong Chuxi, and Cody Fern all sat front row as Louis Vuitton ambassadors, while Emma Chamberlain and the members of ITZY gave the show a crossover pull beyond the usual fashion-week crowd. Prigent gets candid reactions from several of them before and after the presentation, the kind of unscripted commentary that a straight runway stream never shows.
Readers interested in how Louis Vuitton got to the point of staging shows at the Louvre at all might look at the story of the brand’s founder, whose 19th-century trunk-making business eventually became the house Ghesquière now designs for. For more from the collection itself, Louis Vuitton’s own recap of the Spring-Summer 2020 show fills in what came down the runway piece by piece, and the brand’s fashion coverage tracks how each season builds on the last.
Ghesquière has closed Paris Fashion Week for Louis Vuitton season after season now, and the Cour Carrée setup — built to be taken apart and given away rather than stored or trashed — is the kind of production detail that tends to carry over. Whatever comes next from the house, expect Prigent’s cameras backstage again, because Louis Vuitton has made a habit of letting him in.
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