Fashion Film: Louis Vuitton A/W 21 Menswear

Captured between Paris and a village in the Swiss mountains, the Louis Vuitton A/W 21 menswear fashion film, Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light, is informed by James Baldwin’s seminal essay Stranger in the Village (1953) through a series of performances expressed in dance, ice skating, poetry and scenography. The cast includes Kandis Williams, Tosh Basco, Saul Williams, yasiin bey, Black Cracker and Steven Sowah.

In Stranger in the Village, Baldwin draws parallels between his experiences as an African American visitor in the Swiss mountain village of Leukerbad in the 1950s - the only person of colour - and his life as a Black citizen of America. It deals with the experience of being recognised and gazed upon as different, illegible; even alien. Emblematic of this circumstance, Stranger in the Village also illuminates the experience of being Black in Europe, and being a Black artist in the birthplace of European art.