Nicolas Ghesquière Goes West

Nicolas Ghesquière has been California-pilled.

Over the past few years, the women’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton has been going back and forth between Los Angeles and Paris. This past spring, he put down roots on the West Coast when he purchased the Wolff Residence, an early-1960s modernist triumph perched above the Sunset Strip that John Lautner designed in homage to Frank Lloyd Wright. Ghesquière calls the new house “so far away from Paris but so close in my heart at the same time.”

This new second home (spiritually and materially) has made him feel more positive—kinder, even. “It has definitely been a positive influence on me being more relaxed,” he tells me. Ghesquière is petite and almost wiry, and his all-black uniform is still intact, but now a pair of zaddyish aviator eyeglasses grace his chiseled face. He is wearing his thick brown hair a little longer and sculpted; his skin is dewy.

It is during this California phase that Ghesquière has turned out some of his most inspired work at Vuitton, with his stunning sci-fi resort show at the Salk Institute in San Diego in May and his Fall 2022 collection, a collage of the warm clichés of teenager­dom, serving as a sort of pronouncement on this new sense of what he calls “chill.”

Ghesquière was this century’s first bona fide star designer. In the late 1990s, as an unknown, he started making his mark at Balenciaga, defining the dressy-casual style of streetwise women with glitzy jackets and tops paired with casual trousers and creating the house’s first It bag, the Motorcycle. From there, in 2013, he landed at the crown jewel of LVMH, insistently making daring and densely inventive clothes at a moment in fashion when many creative directors are often more highly regarded as marketers than designers.

Though Ghesquière began his career as a boy king, his composure and his position as the leader of one of fashion’s most profitable luxury brands now make him a kind of éminence grise. Indeed, there is something wonderfully antique about the way he fawns over art forms beyond the bounds of fashion and exudes graciousness.

Ghesquière’s relentless positivity is refreshing in an industry that often veers toward the cynical, and it can even seem to border on delusion. Young people discovering his old Balenciaga designs and forking over absurd sums for them, sometimes at the expense of discovering contemporary fashion? It’s “Great! Really good!” Doing the kind of enormous spectacle shows that once scared him in his younger days? “Amazing!” At one point he says, of working at Vuitton, “Well, everything is exciting!” What’s come over this handsome Frenchman? you wonder. Until you realize, well, duh, the man moved to Los Angeles!

He dotes on the city like a new love: “There is a spirit,” he tells me. “There is a state of mind. It’s not just a legend; there is a chill, probably even more for me as a foreigner.” (Ghesquière pronounces the word “fo-RAIN-er”; he is still French, after all, if less so in the words he says now than how he says them.) In a city like Paris, “people maybe put less civility in their exchanges.” But in L.A., people “take time to ask you how you are,” he says.

“I really love that. For me, it’s so great to have a minimum of kindness and attention.” (He’s in love with a person too—his American-born partner, Drew Kuhse, who, according to friends, is almost always traveling with him.)

Ghesquière still loves Paris, of course, but in California, “I feel very protected,” he continues. “I feel connected to culture and disconnected, sometimes, to work, which is good for me.” And of course, there is the architecture: “Clearly, it’s very rich, very eclectic.” He loves the juxtapositions of styles, which is fitting, given that his work at Vuitton has been thoroughly postmodern, defined by an enthralling mash-up of periods and history.

He does rhapsodize about the state almost like a cult member: “There is no taboo, no conformity. How do you say? The rules exist, of course, but it’s anticonformist in a way. It’s very free.”

That is the spirit that suffuses Ghesquière’s fall collection, which includes skater-boy neckties and slouchy trousers and grandpa-cardigan coats and poetically soft mille-feuille chiffon and tulle gowns; it is about the freedom to mix ideas, the freedom to move, and, most of all, the absolute freedom you feel when you’re young and beautiful and the sun shines every day. Ghesquière has been perfecting “a vocabulary that has become not feminine, not masculine—it’s just about breaking boundaries,” he says between elegant puffs from a very skinny, very gold vape pen.

Marie-Amélie Sauvé, his longtime stylist and collaborator, describes the woman he designs for as “a hero or goddess” who is a strong warrior but also vulnerable, particularly to the larger forces beyond her control: “As a human being, you have both, and you express both sides,” she says, adding that “we are all, in the end, of course, vulnerable to nature.”

There was a mix of things at the conclusion of the collection as it was shown on the runway: stiff rugby shirts and the kind of huge sweater you long for on the beach after sunset, printed with David Sims photographs and slung over or looped around the waist of sweet, billowing dresses that were “almost like an impressionist romanticism,” Ghesquière says. They were meshed with “this fantasy we have” of guys playing rugby, of the way the body charges around in casual competition. “There was a very free mix in this way,” he continues. Here, his sweet and sunny new idealism was embodied.

“There was a real sense of California in that collection,” the actress Chloë Grace Moretz, who has been working with Ghesquière since 2018, tells me. “There were moments that were carefree, and moments that were really masculine, and others that were really soft. And we all sat there in the front row and just felt blown away.”

Ghesquière is at a high point in his career. Sauvé says the pandemic and the alarming effects of climate change have meant that he is pushing himself even more than he ever has. “He is already someone with a very strong and precise vision, but with everything that has happened, his vision was even more urgent,” she explains. He has also made the time to pursue other projects, like creating Alicia Vikander’s costumes for Olivier Assayas’s television meta adaptation of Irma Vep, which Assayas based on his 1996 film and premiered this summer on HBO. Ghesquière found working with Assayas so stimulating that it helped inspire the entirety of his Spring 2022 collection, a dark time-traveling ball he had wanted to bring to life for five years.

What makes Ghesquière’s work enduringly fascinating is that while he is obsessed with the future—especially science and sci-fi—he thinks newness in fashion is impossible, even pointless. Unlike other designers who constantly seek novelty in vain, he is after a feeling rather than a fresh idea. “The clothing itself can be new as much as I can try to do that,” he says, “but also, it’s the collage.” When he’s designing, or “building,” as he refers to the process of creating a piece, what he’s really thinking about is how all the elements of the outfit might combine on the runway “that hopefully can give a new feeling.”

One of the wackiest gar­ments in the Fall 2022 show was a button-up vest with long panels of fabric that fell into a swinging collapse at the hips, creating something between a paneled gilet, a tank top, and a Valley girl’s concept of 18th-century panniers. “It’s not about trying to create new for [the sake of being] new,” he says. “It’s about trying to find a new feeling with an already [existing] shape.” He was looking for something that “could envelop you—that makes you feel nice and warm, comfortable.” What Ghesquière does, he says, is “create a feeling that becomes a shape.”

As simple as the feeling may be, the shapes, fabrics, and structure are often dazzlingly complex. “It’s very hard to do something new today,” he muses. “But for sure, I believe [in creating] new feelings. Even if some things existed before, it’s not [about] how to make them fresh and newer, it’s [how] to create new emotion with those things.”

Does he think newness is still important in fashion? “No, no,” he says quickly. “And was it really ever?” It’s “a great declaration,” he continues, to say something is new, but it rarely is, and “it’s always the point of view of the person who makes it that makes it new or makes it different.” Maybe it’s “an evolution,” he allows. “We all have references. Everything comes from something. It’s very hard in this world, even if this world is in a very interesting transformation, to really declare that this is something completely new. And I think it’s scary, in a way, to declare it’s new. I think it’s better to say it’s an evolution. We’re growing from it. We don’t own it, but we transmit and we transform something.”

Mostly, instead of trying to think up something “new,” Ghesquière thinks about the process that makes something luxury. Louis Vuitton is a leather-goods company by heritage, but also, in the time since he joined almost a decade ago, “there is a lot more education” about luxury, he thinks. “People are very curious about the way things are done,” he says, and about “the quality and also the transparency of the resources and how things are done ethically, but also in the quality you put into making those things.”

In a world where speed is easy and expected, time and luxury have become synonymous. “It’s really the combination of a beautiful way of doing things—design with quality—and most of the time to take time to achieve the things [I want to do], which is usually the biggest problem for fashion,” Ghesquière says. Between bags and shoes and clothes, “the clothes are always the ones that are the most difficult to achieve in the short time. You can always postpone a bag if you feel it’s not ready. You can say, ‘I’m not going to do it this season. I’m going to give him six more months, three, maybe another year until we decide it’s cooked.’ ” Shoes too. But with clothes, you have to say something about that specific moment, right at that time. “It’s an intuition. Sometimes it’s instinct. It’s a desire that is very immediate. You want to express that right away, right? So you have to achieve this with great quality in a very short amount of time.”

At Vuitton, Ghesquière spends much of his time thinking of technically sophisticated ways to make beautiful things. For fall, his great achievement was printing those Sims photographs of blissed-out teenagers, pulled from old issues of alt magazines like The Face, on fabrics like satin. Up close, the quality of the images on these materials is unimaginably exquisite. “For me, what was one of the most incredible innovations in the development of that collection was to achieve that precision.” Ghesquière sees this kind of invention, melding technology and tradition, as his remit: “It’s bringing new elements to the vocabulary of luxury.”

From the start of his career, Ghesquière has formed deep bonds with those who take on the otherwise perfunctory role of brand ambassador. Jennifer Connelly has been working with him since his Balenciaga days and still attends every Vuitton show; Charlotte Gainsbourg remains a close friend. In part, he works so well with Hollywood because he seems to see the commercial realities of his job as creative opportunities.

Just as intriguing as his longtime friendships are his newer ones. While much of the fashion industry has circled social-media stars like apprehensive predators unsure whether to eat or be eaten, Ghesquière has seized opportunities to dress YouTuber Emma Chamberlain and TikTok influencer Charli D’Amelio. What Ghesquière looks for is someone who makes him think, “You bring my fashion somewhere else,” he says. “That means you have an interest, a curiosity to wear those clothes. … You bring something to the clothes, or the clothes bring something to you, more exactly.”

Chamberlain tells me of Ghesquière’s “ability to combine opposites in a way that creates something completely new” and also highlights his ability to fuse “traditionally masculine silhouettes” with a feeling of femininity. Moretz, who followed a more traditional path to celebrity but is, like Chamberlain, a Zoomer, also speaks of this free sensibility: “It’s allowed me to be very fluid,” she says, as she builds her career and pursues different kinds of roles. “There are looks that are hyperfeminine, looks that are very masculine, and it allows me to change and evolve between those.”

What stars seem to like about Ghesquière’s clothes is their ability to fully envelop them in high fashion but still allow them to exert control. The shoulders may be strong, the shapes may be voluminous, but the individual is never second to Ghesquière’s artistic whims; instead, the weight and power of his work transfer effortlessly to the person wearing it. “The first time I wore his clothes, I just really felt welcome,” explains actor Cynthia Erivo, who has worn Vuitton on the red carpet almost exclusively this year. “He has a passion not just for the art of fashion and the art of storytelling but for the art of caring for people.”

I ask Ghesquière whether he thinks the runway has become too important—this temple of content, relentlessly milked until the next season, as opposed to a kind of playground where ideas for how women can dress might begin. If the early 2000s were all about a mix of brands, designers now often expect celebrities and customers to replicate their runway vision precisely. “What’s really exciting [is what] is not in your control,” Ghesquière insists. “Probably a few years ago, I would not have thought the same. I would have been obsessed with control.” The “great surprise, great unexpected way of wearing things or who’s wearing it,” he says, “is even more inspiring than even a decade ago.” What he sees now, especially with younger consumers, is “much more individual expression in the way of dressing, simply, and it’s free.”

He no longer wants to provide diktats as a designer: “I think it’s more important to create a spirit of freedom more than anything.”

This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR, available on newsstands August 30.

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