An eight-metre wave in the middle of a drought: Paris picks over the Louis Vuitton show

LVMH has said that not a drop of water was wasted in building the giant artificial waterfall with which Louis Vuitton opened Paris Fashion Week. The statement was needed because the French capital was suffering record heat at the time, and water use had become a sore subject.

The eight-metre wave and the sand-covered runway served as the backdrop to Pharrell Williams’s show. The structure was erected at the Cité Universitaire, the sprawling twentieth-century residential complex in southern Paris where, by the campus’s own count, 12,000 students live each year.

As temperatures across the country rose above 40°C, images of the installation quickly caught the attention of local residents and politicians. It reopened the argument about how fashion brands use the city and its landmarks for commercial ends.

“The water used to create the wave was taken entirely from the Paris mains, delivered to the site and then returned in full to the Paris sewer system through a closed loop,” an LVMH spokeswoman said. The sand, she said, will go to the Cité Universitaire’s beach volleyball courts and to a recycling partner, and the event itself was adapted to the rules that apply in a heatwave. The campus’s communications director, Jérôme Duplan, confirmed that the water ran on a closed loop.

Fashion week’s defenders argue that shows in public buildings reinforce Paris’s standing as the world’s fashion capital. But the industry’s more ambitious projects have repeatedly met resistance from residents: Williams’s 2023 debut, for which the oldest bridge in Paris, beside the Louvre and Notre-Dame, was closed off, was denounced by French politicians as an appropriation of public space.

“I understand people’s reaction to poorly explained privatisations — with access restricted and, in the middle of a heatwave, a spectacle that sends a very unfortunate signal,” said Mélody Tonolli, deputy mayor of Paris responsible for student living conditions, of the latest show.

LVMH notes that the six-week installation was agreed with the host. Duplan added that Louis Vuitton’s sponsorship helped fund the structure, at a campus under financial pressure from shrinking state funding and rising costs.

Some residents, however, feel they have been treated unfairly: paying for their accommodation, they were unable to use part of the site and had to rearrange their days. The show, they say, laid bare the gap between extreme wealth and their own living conditions. “When you see where we live and how we live, and what Louis Vuitton has just built — it is a complete paradox,” says student Emma Keller.