Louis Vuitton Stages Its Voyager Show at Shanghai’s Long Museum

Louis Vuitton presented its women’s pre-fall 2024 collection on 18 April 2024 at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai. It was the first show in China by Nicolas Ghesquière, the artistic director of the women’s collections since 2013, and the second in a series the house calls the Voyager show.

The Voyager idea

Louis Vuitton has long staged its cruise collections in notable buildings around the world. In 2023 it gave a name to a second travelling show, for its pre-fall collection, describing it as an expression of the house’s spirit of travel in exceptional locations. The first took place in April 2023 on the Jamsugyo Bridge in Seoul, a low bridge across the Han River that is submerged when the water rises. Shanghai was the second. In between, Pharrell Williams showed his men’s pre-fall collection on the Avenue of Stars in Hong Kong in November 2023.

Three shows in East Asia in twelve months said a good deal about where the house saw its customers.

The building

The Long Museum West Bund was designed by Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus and opened in 2014 on the site of a former coal wharf on the Huangpu River. Its structure is a series of tall concrete walls that open at the top into half-vaults, like umbrellas, meeting to form naves of bare concrete. A coal-hopper bridge from the 1950s was kept and runs through the site. It is among the most admired works of contemporary Chinese architecture and the building that established the West Bund as a museum district, later joined by the West Bund Museum.

The runway ran through the vaulted galleries, lit in warm tones against the grey concrete.

The collection

Ghesquière worked with the young Chinese painter Sun Yitian, known for hyper-realistic pictures of inflatable toys, whose cartoon-like animals appeared on bags, coats and dresses. The collection otherwise continued the designer’s mix of sportswear, tailoring and historical reference.

Louis Vuitton and Shanghai

The house opened its first shop in China in 1992, at the Peninsula hotel in Beijing. Shanghai has since become the centre of its Chinese business and the site of its most ambitious projects, from exhibitions at the Shanghai Exhibition Centre to The Louis, the ship-shaped building on Nanjing West Road that opened in 2025. Fashion houses have chosen Chinese settings with growing care, as Chanel did at West Lake later the same year and Prada at Rong Zhai before it.