What do Josephine Baker, Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton have in common? Well we know all about my fascination with the inimitable Ms Baker but Mark Jacobs for Louis Vuitton seems to have had the same thought about the lovely lady and channeled her wild Africanesque costumes for the Vuitton show during Paris Fashion Week. I thought this was noteworthy given how I have been rabbiting on about her.

In fact wild animals albeit stuffed were all over Paris fashion week.

The Alexander McQueen show reminded me of this brilliant taxidermy shop in Islington that has the most outrageous polar bear standing in an rather agressive pose that I lust after – I am sure that even the most hardened of Johannesburg criminals will think twice…
Anyway

Here’s Suzy on the subject
Louis Vuitton : Activating desire
By Suzy Menkes in the IHT

With Édith Piaf – that most visceral of Parisian singers – on the soundtrack and fashion channeled from every species of bird feather, animal pattern, reptile skin and ethnic inspiration, the Louis Vuitton show made a bold statement at the Paris summer 2009 collections Sunday.

“It’s not Africa, it’s not anywhere – it’s all about Paris,” said the Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs backstage, although you could have knocked down with a parakeet green feathered skirt most of the audience, who saw tribal diversity in the totems on shoes, in the carved wooden earrings, in the bags with leopard spots melded with the house logos and in the plumes of a brief dress.

Maybe Piaf’s soulful French spirit melded with Josephine Baker’s innocent Africana in the fertile mind of Jacobs. But whatever his inspirations, this was a cracking good show, which caught the season’s African vibe and produced for Vuitton not just stunning accessories – each in a similar spirit but totally individual. It also created a wardrobe of classic-and-more clothes, bringing back soft, easy pants, marked with polka dots, while the abandoned jacket had many new incarnations.

At the end of a week in which fashion direction had seemed as unstable as the economy, Jacobs caught in these clothes a bravura and joie de vivre. Sure the skirts were ultrashort, the better to show off the walk-tall sandals with their fantastical decoration. This was a rosy, optimistic view of dressing, with a hint of the Folies Bergère to add showgirl fun and to tint colors from metallic purple to grass green and orange. Let’s just call Jacobs’s stellar effort to make fashion feel good and to make sense after four weeks of turbulence “La Vie en Rose.”

This pic is purely gratuitous because I think he looks so damn cute.
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