French actress Léa Seydoux has made her Louis Vuitton debut in the brand’s SS16 travel campaign, shot by acclaimed photographer Patrick Demarchelier. The campaign sees Seydoux, who is best known for her roles in Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), model the label’s Pre-AW16 collection at a building designed by Mexican architect Luis Barragan.
As evidenced by the Instagram post below, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of women’s collections Nicolas Ghesquière is a fan of Seydoux – and the feeling is very much reciprocated. “I deeply admire Nicolas Ghesquière’s work, especially his newness,” she said earlier this year. “His incessant search for novelty is also highly impressive.”
This is something that marks Ghesquière’s vision for Louis Vuitton. “I love to project things that are very surprising to me at first,” he said in a recent Dazed interview. “‘Have I experienced that before?’ ‘Have I seen that?’” This trail of rhetorical questioning then leads to an imaginary ‘she’. “‘What does she eat?’ ‘How does she live?’ I’m always building that kind of story in my head.”
The unveiling of this campaign, however, comes shortly after Louis Vuitton’s announcement that it will be staging its Cruise 2016 show at the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum – another building designer by a lauded architect, Oscar Niemeyer. While the ad may represent Seydoux’s Louis Vuitton debut, it’s not her first foray into modelling – she was formerly the face of Prada’s Candy fragrance and Miu Miu’s Cruise 2014 campaign; she also starred on the cover of AnOther Magazine’s SS11 and SS15 issues.
