Last October, Nicolas Ghesquiere lit up the loure literally
For his late-night SS19 Louis Vuitton show, he commissioned set designer Es Devlin to construct a luminous, space-age tubular structure that made the cobblestone Cour Carée feel like the inside of a spaceship. The effect was futuristic, but also strangely unmoored from time. It was like watching a show through a dream, or a void.
The clothes shared the same fluidity: of the present and the past at once, with Eighties throwbacks alongside high-tech fabrics, space-suit sleeves and Memphis prints. Take the first look that Ghesquière sent out: Dominican model Ambar Cristal Zarzuela wearing a billowing blouson jacket in turquoise and tan with a pair of prim patent leather lace-up booties. It was part Mad Max heroine, part Victorian schoolgirl crossed with a Star Wars fighter pilot. It was 19OO, 198O and 2O8O all at the same time, seamlessly blended into the upside-down triangle silhouette that has become Ghesquière’s signature.
‘It’s about a world where imagination is endless,’ he explains, sporting a navy plaid shirt, short beard and playful grin when I meet with him a few months later at New York’s Milk Studios, where he’s being photographed with his friend and muse Michelle Williams for ELLE. According to Ghesquière, he references science fiction in his designs not because he sees it as an escapist fantasy, but as a ‘sooner present’: the aesthetics of a world that is almost already here. ‘I was always interested in anticipation,’ he explains. ‘In every way – in movies and comics and different expressions that exist to look forward.’
It’s a fitting expression of what has become Ghesquière’s USP. For the past 2O years – first at Balenciaga and now at Vuitton – he has established himself as a visionary of understated, almost translucent glamour. He’s been at Vuitton for five years now, and he’s relaxing into the role, embracing playful imagery and the pop-cultural references from his youth (his Instagram is currently a vivacious mixture of Star
Wars memorabilia, heavy-metal T-shirts and his two black Labradors). Scratch the surface deeper and you realise one of the keys to Ghesquière’s success is that he obsesses. He grabs on to images, ideas or shapes and can’t let them go. When he was growing up in the village of Loudon, western France, he plastered his bedroom walls with posters of his heroes, including Wonder Woman – his favourite Marvel heroine. ‘You know that adolescent room, when you put your obsession on the walls,’ he says. ‘It’s like that bedroom never disappeared in my head.’
Just as a teenager’s bedroom walls are a mélange of their voracious passions, so Ghesquière’s collections are a seamlessly stitched-together mood board. It’s a process he calls ‘a proper life collage’, which he compares to inventing new dishes in a kitchen where the pantry is always stocked with his idiosyncratic interests: ‘Always a different meal, but with exactly the same ingredients,’ he says. In less-skilled hands, his science-fiction references could skew kitsch, but Ghesquière avoids this, making his work seem less like costumes and more like ‘a suit of armour’. He considers his last show to have been an homage to women’s bravery. He tells me he wants women to feel bold while wearing his designs: ‘I look up to women as heroines – in my childhood, and later, and still now. So there is that intention to bring powers. Superpowers.’
His Louis Vuitton front rows are testament to this, lined as they are by smart, accomplished women from across the generational spectrum: Jennifer Connelly, Catherine Deneuve, Alicia Vikander and, of course, Michelle Williams. He considers Williams, who has been a Vuitton ambassador for more than five years, to be the modern-day equivalent of the superheroines he pinned on his bedroom wall as a boy. ‘When I joined Vuitton, I was so pleased by the fact that I was going to meet her and work with her. The way she welcomed me was so warm.’
For Ghesquière, the wearer is key. His clothes enhance and embolden, never eclipse: ‘I first design from instinct, an intuition I want to express something. So I draw, then at some point [I start] questioning if Michelle, for example, would love this look. I’m thinking, “OK, I guess this is something that can speak to her.”’ It’s a sentiment that was fostered early; growing up the son of a golf-course manager father and fashionloving mother, he was ‘attracted to be curious about fabrics and how to build a silhouette, and how this silhouette would belong to someone’.
Ghesquière credits Jean Paul Gaultier (who he assisted in the early Nineties) with teaching him to ‘not be afraid to destroy something in order to build something new’. This thirst for innovation made him an ideal fit for Balenciaga, where he was creative director from 1997 until 2O12 and introduced the top-heavy silhouette that went on to dominate the Noughties (slender trousers, voluminous blouses, cocoon-sleeve sweatshirts). His appointment, aged just 25, came as a surprise to the industry. But it proved the perfect fit: the French house was starting to feel dusty, and Ghesquière’s precision and playfulness mirrored that of Cristóbal Balenciaga. In one season, the young designer revived interest in a brand that the industry had long considered on life support.
When Ghesquière landed at Vuitton in 2O13, many wondered what he would do with a luxury brand whose history as a luggage company has made travelling and adventure part of its DNA. But Ghesquière, who is only the second women’s apparel designer to helm the LV brand (the first was Marc Jacobs), took this design prompt and made it his own. He has infused Vuitton with his trademark formalism, but has also allowed his mind to roam like a globetrotter – and beyond, exploring other universes, as for SS19. ‘It’s not casual,’ he says of Vuitton’s aesthetic. ‘But there is this idea that it shouldn’t be too stiff. You have to think about how people can really move in it and live in it.’
He is starting to look towards his own future now – his own ‘sooner present’. One day he may start his own namesake label. But for now, Ghesquière is very happy where he is. He is a monogamist when it comes to fashion: staying at houses long-term, allowing himself to grow. He likes time to evolve, to ruminate, to let his obsessions simmer. ‘I am a slow thinker,’ he says. ‘I usually need time to process. I want to create a desire, something that people love.’