Louis Vuitton's bread and butter are its classic monogrammed bags but that doesn't mean that the luxury maison won't drop the occasional quirked-up oddity. Trompe l'oeil plastic bags? Alphabet-shaped trunks? Painted burger boxes? LV's done it all.
But perhaps Louis Vuitton womenswear creative director Nicolas Ghesquière has finally outdone even himself with LV's truly wild Illusion Ankle Boots, a standout curio from the house's Fall/Winter 2023 collection.
If it isn't immediately obvious from the product imagery, these $2,500 LV shoes are heels... being worn by a Louis Vuitton-socked leg. Talk about a leg up! Ha ha ha ha sorry.
Really, these LV shoes achieve the effect of someone wearing someone else wearing a pair of black pumps. Yo dawg...
Per LV itself, the trompe l'oeil shoes are a tricky feat (or should I say foot) that keeps in line with the FW23 collection's surrealist inspiration. Other seasonal highlights include sleeves that scrape the ground, dresses that metamorphize into coats, and slitted masks that look fit for an Eyes Wide Shut party.
They're actually quite interesting on an artistic level, demanding hours of painstaking precision for LV's atelier staff to convincingly paint the rib of the sock, the shine of the heel.
The Illusion boots hit the runway alongside all of the aforementioned items but didn't have the same impact in the context of the entire collection. Seeing them separately from the rest of the LV line really emphasizes how wild these things are. Some would say that they don't have a leg to stand on! Sorry.
LV's Illusion shoes come in two skin tones and sizes, which makes an already odd item extra limited in appeal. Surely, the point of these things is to actually pass as legs, if there is a point at all.
Louis Vuitton's wacky tchotchkes are sometimes outweighed by its indulgent statement pieces and celebrity co-signs but they've been around as long as the house has had star designers. Virgil Abloh designed LV paint buckets and LP-sized pizza boxes, for instance, and Marc Jacobs cooked up things like $5,000 gold collars.
So, it's less that Ghesquière's disembodied legs are entirely out of hand for LV and more that, well, they're just plain nutty on their own terms.
