A Cruise Collection for Anyone Who’s Sick of the Trend Cycle
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One of the most remarkable things about Nicolas Ghesquière is his ability to communicate through shapes and forms. The designer’s storytelling has always been less about a definitive through line or a main character—especially during his 10 years helming women’s ready-to-wear at Louis Vuitton. He’s more interested in what clothes can say when the craft becomes the focal point. For him, tailoring, construction, and sculptural nuances speak louder than fiction or fluttery words on a page of show notes.
Last night in Barcelona, Ghesquière did it again. He spun up a fantasy that was not cemented in any specific plot arc, but instead grounded in a more organic beauty. Louis Vuitton’s Cruise 2025 collection was shown at the Park Güell, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a modernist wonder that, with its whimsical, curved, stone-flanked pathways and kaleidoscopic mosaics, is ripe for surrealist dreams. Instead of a thematic collection, Ghesquière gave us an intelligent and delicately coded celebration of modernist art and architecture, one specific to the aesthetic of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who designed Park Güell.
Ghesquière has, over the course of his decade at Louis Vuitton, shown various collections at other architectural landmarks around the world, including the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio, the TWA Flight Center in New York, and the Bob Hope Estate in Palm Springs, but this jaunt somehow felt more personal. Maybe it’s because Ghesquière and Gaudí share a synergistic respect for unexpected organic forms. Or maybe it’s because this collection felt like a continuation of Spring 2024, which was introspective and tender, celebrating his tenure at Vuitton with a cleverly executed array of Ghesquière-ian house codes.
For Cruise 2025, Ghesquière clearly had fun playing around with texture and fit, namely in the sharp flamenco hats and strong-shoulder suit pairings, as well as the bouncy balloon-hem dresses and the skirts that swished along with sequins, raw-edged yarn, or scrunched and draped taffeta. There were winking nods to flamenco beyond the hats, too, like the transparent black and white polka-dot dress with barlike straps and cutouts at the hips, or the apron jumpsuit styled with what looked like the bottom half of a flamenco skirt tied around the neck and fringe-covered shoes. In short, the collection is a luxury wardrobe made for tango dancers and bullfighters on some kind of ever-unfurling space odyssey. It’s an imagined journey made real through clothes that only Ghesquière can give us.
The thing about cruise collections is that they’re typically about a brand’s ability to go big. The further the destination and the more extravagant the setting, the better. It’s a moment made for viral attention, for the dream of a luxury product to come to life via a hugely expensive, wildly opulent runway show. Louis Vuitton plays this game better than most, but Ghesquière has never been about gimmicks or the desire to make something go viral. His way of operating is about a genuine love of art and craft, of using design as a mechanism to inspire.
It’s a good time to promote this idea of luxury, too, when we’re in an anti-trend moment in which fashion lovers want to lean into personal style and authentic forms of dress. Mashing up your own thing is much more satisfying than copying someone else’s uniform. Ghesquière has never made products for products’ sake. As he showed once again last night in Barcelona, for him, it will always be about the power in the purity of form.
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