Louis Vuitton’s latest campaign is made for Gen Z

Looking like something straight out of an ‘80s horror show, Louis Vuitton’s pre-fall 2020 campaign perfectly caters to Gen Z’s obsession with Stranger Things and all things vintage.

The Gen Z demographic has been an especially tough nut for fashion and beauty marketers to crack, but they finally seem to be getting the hang of it. A generation of digital natives that accounts for 40% of all consumers worldwide, it’s an invaluable market to tap, but the question is: how do luxury brands successfully pander to a younger audience that has shunned conformity and traditional marketing tactics in favour of unique storytelling and edgy, visual displays?

Louis Vuitton’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière has the answer, choosing to put the concept of his campaign first, and the clothes second. Instead of lifting aesthetics with minimal thought, or capitalising on cheap nostalgia as many other brands are relatively prone to doing, the fashion house’s latest campaign is pure, unprecedented retrofuturism, an homage to both past and present and one that perfectly caters to Gen Z.

Wholeheartedly embracing vintage sci-fi, the star-studded lookbook is a gallery of horror film posters and pulp fiction book covers. Modelled by a plethora of familiar faces including Scream Queens’ Emma Roberts and Billie Lourd, Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner, American Horror Story’s Cody Fern, and Suspiria’s Chloe Grace Moretz, the campaign is very clearly targeting the 14 – 24 age range, acknowledging Gen Z’s love of Netflix shows and those on other streaming platforms like it. Scattered with fantasy references, LV pre-fall 2020 also features Gugu Mbatha-Raw from the iconic Black Mirror episode San Junipero, which memorably channelled some serious 80s vibes, and Deepika Padukone, the first-ever Bollywood actress to appear in an international Louis Vuitton campaign.

Ghesquière’s penchant for all-things sci-fi is obvious and his previous collections, particularly SS18, which sent Stranger Things down the runway, are proof of this. The creative director has also welcomed the fashion-gaming crossover with open arms, famously orchestrating a collab with Riot Games last year for a League of Legends capsule that was the first of its kind.

This time around, LV pre-fall 2020 draws its primary inspiration from The Exorcist (1971) written by William Peter Blatty who gave Ghesquière the rights to print the cover of the original cult novel on a series of graphic tees.

‘It’s such a great symbol for me to use a fiction and incorporate it into an outfit,’ says Ghesquière. ‘I thought, what’s the reverse? To use the fiction as the illustration of the fashion. It’s a kind of a mirror effect in this action of representing them all in these different characters.’