Get ready to meet Louis Vuitton’s newest superstar. Over the weekend Nicolas Ghesquière released a few snaps of the brand’s upcoming campaign, which may just go viral thanks to their new model, Lightning, a pink-haired beauty, well-known around the world. If you’ve never heard of her, don’t feel out of the loop—it’s because she’s a fictional video game heroine from the Square Enix Final Fantasy franchise. The French brand partnered with the original series’ video game artist, designer and director Tetsuya Nomura to create a sequence of images featuring Lightning in the new Spring 2016 collection.
While the casting of a video game character for a luxury designer campaign is likely to garner a fair amount of attention, it’s more than just a bid for Instagram likes. The new campaign actually plays off of Ghesquière’s Spring 2016 collection, which was inspired by everything from science fiction to anime, and referenced series like Sailor Moon and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Even Fernanda Ly, the show’s opening model, was sporting Lightning-inspired pastel locks and pink motorcycle jacket.
And if this all seems a bit weird, (surprisingly) it isn’t. Ghesquière was not the first to cast Lightning and her Final Fantasy companions in a fashion campaign. (Who knew the gaming and fashion industry had such similar interests?) In 2012, Prada released a Japanese campaign starring the Final Fantasy XIII-2 characters in the Summer Homme collection for men's fashion magazine Arena Homme Plus. It’s unclear if Ghesquière will add additional characters to the Spring 2016 ads, but it’s an original concept and we can’t deny that we’re curious to see how this will affect the upcoming campaign season.
