While here in the UK we’ve had an extremely mild autumn and stores grumble that they haven’t sold enough AW14 coats, the fashion-forward customer is onto other things. Namely, Cruise. The Cruise 2015 collections arrived in November and continue to sell all the way until June. It’s a well known fact now that Cruise (and pre-fall) collections sell more for stores than the more directional spring-summer and autumn-winter collections.
Last week I went to Louis Vuitton to check out the SS15 collection. The press day was help in the private ‘apartment’ on the top floor of the Bond Street Maison. Afterwards I went for a nose around the store as I haven’t been in since Ghesquiere took over from Jacobs. Although it wasn’t that busy customer-wise, the store staff were being very industrious keeping their regular clients up to date with new deliveries. As they explained to me, the Cruise collection had recently arrived and was flying out as soon as they informed their customers.
This makes sense for obvious reasons – the Vuitton customer likes to be in the know and first off the starting block. However, due to the November delivery, it also means that Cruise collections are perfectly timed for ‘holiday’ – thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year – giftgiving. Hence they warned me that the jewellery items I asked about were running low already, and if I was interesting in buying anything, not to leave it too late. This was a Wednesday, the subtext being that if I waited til the weekend, I might be disappointed. What I liked was that these items (recapped below from the press day in July) weren’t merchandised as Christmas gifts, so they don’t come across as the obvious ‘it’ items to buy. And that of course, makes them all the more appealing…
WORDS AND IMAGES: Navaz Batliwalla/disneyrollergirl
