In the world of fashion, having a book documenting your work published by Assouline is the ultimate seal of approval. It’s all a bit of a surprise for Faye McLeod, the Scot who acts as Louis Vuitton’s visual image director.
In the six years she’s worked at the luxury French fashion house, McLeod and her team have brought her fantastical imagination to life in the windows of Louis Vuitton stores all over the world; from gilded dinosaur skeletons clutching LV bags, to spookily lifelike waxworks of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and giant faux ostrich eggs hatching Vuitton wares.
Louis Vuitton Windows is an epic, suitcase-sized tome that celebrates these remarkable feats of creativity in all their glory, detailing the thought and design process behind them via beautiful illustrations and hand-tipped images.
Though daunted at first (she couldn’t understand why anyone would want a book of her extraordinary work, but was eventually persuaded by Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion force Linda Fargo), McLeod realised that she wanted people to know her job existed.
I want people to want my job,” she says. “I’m not scared of anybody taking it if they’re really good at it. People don’t know that jobs like this exist in our industry — and the world needs more creative people.”
After completing a degree in fashion design McLeod began her career in windows at Selfridges on Oxford St, before moving on to Topshop, then Liberty. With those three window-dressing giants under her belt she made the move to New York and eventually ended up at LVMH, the luxury conglomerate that is home to Vuitton, Dior and Celine, to name but a few. Here she found her perfect match in Vuitton.
“I think my team and I have been really successful because of the respect for creativity and the freedom they give me to do that. Most [corporations] want to control their creatives but LVMH don’t. With windows they give you room to breath and room to create,” she says.
This has allowed McLeod and her team free reign. They search the world for people who can create exactly what they want. “Without Google we would be in trouble,” she jokes. They’ve commissioned, among many other things, a Chinese dinosaur factory (yes, there is such a place) to create gilded dino skeletons, Indian craftsmen to make arrows with just-the-right-colour fletching and UK-based film prop specialists to make incredibly convincing animals including baby deer, giraffes and zebra.
She has a particular fondness for animals; her next challenge is to include a pangolin, a scaled anteater she discovered recently while on safari with Kim Jones, Louis Vuitton’s head of menswear.
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Some of her greatest memories are working with the artist Yayoi Kusama, who collaborated with the brand in 2012. To celebrate, McLeod commissioned a number of extraordinarily convincing waxworks of the 86-year-old to place in Kusama-themed windows. So convincing were they that passers-by were sure it was the actual Kusama partaking in some sort of installation.
It is ideas like this that have made Vuitton’s windows perfect Instagram fodder, a true mark of success in this social media-obsessed age. “I’ve worked for so many big companies but I’ve never, ever seen as many people engage with a window as I do at Vuitton. When I started I was like, I’m going to make damn good window so that you’ve got a great background!” says McLeod.
She and her team — which includes people from all sorts of disciplines; illustrators, architects, product designers — also design and create the sets for the always-spectacular Vuitton catwalk shows. Among their accomplishments is the life-size steam train created for the March 2012 show — it was actually made of MDF — and the giant fountain that formed the centrepiece of former Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs’s final show for the brand.
The only idea McLeod’s yet to realise is getting things to float in space. “I’ve not worked that out yet. One day,” she says. We don’t doubt her for a second.
— The Telegraph
• Louis Vuitton Windows is available now, published by Assouline.
