A giant mosaic lizard guards the entrance to the space, conceived by Catalan architect and designer Antoni Gaudí as the marketplace for a planned estate of luxury homes. Construction stopped with the First World War and the site became a park.

Chameleon-like as ever, in May it transformed into a stage. The fashions on parade morphed similarly between styles and decades. Before an audience including Saoirse Ronan, Sophie Turner and Phoebe Dynevor, inverted triangle shapes evoked formal silhouettes from the 1980s while straw gaucho hats and jodhpurs gave off equine vibes. Artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière cited Spanish Painters Sutherland Shire Velázquez and Goya as influences on the collection.

The chameleon approach is clearly working for Ghesquière — Louis Vuitton’s revenues grew by three per cent to £17.6 billion in the first quarter of the year. One of the LVMH group’s most profitable brands, it was founded in 1854, three decades before Gaudí began work on the city’s Sagrada Familia. 

This basilica, with its mashup of architectural styles, is unfinished yet ever evolving; Ghesquière, too, is all for change and rebirth: Spain, he said, is ‘about freedom, it’s about youngness, it’s about an extravagance somehow’.

Gaudí would surely have agreed. 

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