THE MAN OF HOUR
NICOLAS GHESQUIÈRE IS FOCUSED ON THE FUTURE.
LAST OCTOBER, Nicolas Ghesquière lit up the Louvre—literally. For his late-night spring/summer 2019 Louis Vuitton show in Paris, he commissioned set designer Es Devlin to construct a tubular structure that made the cobblestoned Cour Carrée 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, with ’80s throwbacks alongside high-tech fabrics, spacesuit 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 Star Wars fighter pilot. It was 1900, 1980 and 2080 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 we meet a few months later at New York’s Milk Studios, where he’s being photographed with his friend and muse Michelle Williams. According to Ghesquière, he references science fiction in his designs because he sees it not as an escapist fantasy but as a “sooner present”: the aesthetics of a world that is almost here. “I was always interested in anticipation,” he says. “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 20 years, he has established himself as a visionary of understated glamour. He has been at Louis Vuitton for five years now and is relaxing into the role, embracing playful imagery and the pop-cultural references of his youth.
Scratch deeper below the surface and you realize that one of the keys to Ghesquière’s success is that he grabs on to images, ideas or shapes and can’t let them go. When he was growing up in the village of Loudon, France, he plastered his bedroom walls with posters of his heroes, including Wonder Woman. “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 teens’ bedroom walls are a mélange of their passions, 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. In less-skilled hands, his sci-fi references could skew kitschy, but he avoids this, making his work seem less like costumes and more like “suits of armour.”
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 a testament to this, lined as they are with accomplished women from across the generational spectrum, like Jennifer Connelly, Catherine Deneuve, Alicia Vikander and, of course, Williams. He considers Williams, who has been a Louis Vuitton ambassador for more than five years, to be the modern-day equivalent of those superheroes he used to pin on his bedroom wall. “When I joined Louis Vuitton, I was so pleased by the fact that I was going to meet her and work with her,” he says. “The way she welcomed me was so warm.”
For Ghesquière, the wearer is key. His clothes enhance, never eclipse: “I first design from instinct—an intuition that I want to express something. So I draw, and then at some point [I start] questioning if Michelle, for example, would love this look.” 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 fabric and how to build a silhouette and how this silhouette would belong to someone.” Ghesquière credits Jean Paul Gaultier (whom he assisted in the early ’90s) 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 2012. His appointment, when he was 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 while being all its own.
When Ghesquière landed at Louis Vuitton, 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 womenswear designer to helm the brand (the first was Marc Jacobs), has infused Louis Vuitton with his trademark formalism; he has also allowed his mind to roam like a globetrotter and beyond. “It’s not casual,” he says of the Louis Vuitton 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.”
Ghesquière is starting to look toward his own future now. One day he may start his own label, but for now he is very happy where he is. 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.”