‘It is strange, to be afraid of someone you love’
‘It is strange, to be afraid of someone you love’, said Louis Vuitton’s Creative Director, Nicholas Ghesquière HERE.
As the Marie-Antoinette-inspired actors peered over Louis Vuitton’s A/W 2020 women’s collection, they saw the last fashion show before Covid hit and lockdown measures were introduced. This quote from Ghesquière is I think the most accurate - hit me where it hurts - wrapped up in everything - sentiment I have heard about this past year.
It captures what was so fundamentally difficult. To show someone you loved them was to not hug. It was to stay far away. It was to not know when you would next see your loved ones, and for many, sadly never again.
The communality of humans, our innate need to share everything and form a community, was taken away from us in a moment, and we had to settle immediately into seeing our loved ones in a pixelated screen that would cut out and become clear again at the mercy of wifi.
A year and 6 days later. A year and 6 days later? It literally hurts to write that down.
I’m sitting here thinking everything has changed in a million different ways, and yet I’m still trying to figure out how to be close when afar.
How will we feel together when we are apart. We need a communal continuity, we need a mutual ally of sorts as we try and fight this pandemic every day.
It is this ethos, guided by the principle of needing to be close somehow and sharing something beautiful together to help us forget about the circus that is happening in the outside world, if only for a moment, that led us to bring together 15 U.K art institutions to stand alongside one another, digital hands held, in a united front. Marching with big foot steps into the phygital era with our eyes wide open taking in the double vision of the Physical and the Digital side by side!
We hope that these 15 seminal exhibitions coming together, will inspire all of you to come together and champion them, through, as what everyone has emailed for 371 days now, ‘uncertain times’.
Come VOV with us and show you care.
with love, Lottie @ theVOV