Fresh Academy

Louis Vuitton Spring 2010 Men's: Menswear Fashion Collections on men.style.com: "Ah, the romance of fashion. Your local bike messenger is probably a scrawny, over-inked meth head with bad hair, but in the eyes of Paul Helbers and his team at Louis Vuitton, bike messengers are 'the gentlemen butterflies' of the city, in honor of whom they created a collection that celebrated sleek, aerodynamic athleticism. Helbers has latched on to some pretty nebulous inspirations in the past, and Vuitton's men's collections have suffered accordingly, but this time around, the concept was sufficiently tight and contemporary to give the clothes the edge of a big, mean metropolis. The catwalk was asphalt, the soundtrack was Lou Reed walking on the wild side and Cat Power offering her own enervated salute to New York, and the accent color was taxi-cab yellow. There were prints that suggested worn urban surfaces, and striking footwear that looked like graffitied sequins.The bike messenger's extremely functional clothing shaped a jacket in a high-performance combination of nylon and neoprene, but equally, the messenger's leggings were reconfigured in cotton silk. (There was something almost Marie Antoinette about that, which would surely appeal to Helbers' artistic director, Marc Jacobs, who once offered plaid flannel shirts cut from the finest silk.) The butterfly theme was obliquely reproduced as the exoskeleton pattern of insect wings on a silk jacquard trench, or as gilded Papillon pins, or in the pattern extracted from Liberty's archives that was printed on a nylon safari jacket. It was an odd pitch on Vuitton's part—but Jacobs has already proved at least once in his career the potency of transmogrified grunge. It was also telling that the dressed-up bike boys were carrying a particularly gorgeous reintroduction of Vuitton's Taiga leather range. I could barely tear my eyes away from the bags.

— Tim Blanks