There are designers, and then there’s Nicolas Ghesquière. With a career marked by audacious creativity, future-now designs and unforgettable shows, the superstar Louis Vuitton designer is in a tastemaking league of his own.
In March, Ghesquière celebrated his groundbreaking decade as artistic director of womenswear at the house with the kind of mega spectacle that only a global superbrand can pull off. He closed Paris Fashion Week in front of 4,000 guests, who were packed into a vast clear tent in an inner courtyard of the Louvre. The space was dominated by a giant disco ball/spaceship sphere, strobe lighting and a sound installation by the artist Philippe Parreno. Around it, 90 (yes, 90!) head-turning celebrities sat in the front row (spotted: Brigitte Macron, Emma Stone, Lisa from Blackpink, Cate Blanchett, Ana de Armas, Jennifer Connelly, Léa Seydoux, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Chan, Sophie Turner, Chloë Grace Moretz, Millie Bobby Brown, Jaden Smith and Catherine Deneuve).
On every seat, Ghesquière had left a typed personal message. Describing his Vuitton years as “a beautiful journey,” he said, “this joy is still here. Ten years later, this evening is a new dawn.” The designer, who signed a new five- year contract with the house last autumn, had talked before the show of his approach to keeping it fresh and forward-looking. At the start of every season, he described himself opening a Louis Vuitton trunk in his mind to see what’s inside. “I imagine I open this box. What’s the story inside? What do you find?” he told Emma Stone in a YouTube series made to celebrate his decade at Louis Vuitton.
The designer always has his eyes on the future, so his 10th anniversary show was never going to be a greatest hits compilation. That said, Ghesquière’s design vocabulary spoke loud and clear. The futuristic sports-inspired zip-up coats and flight suits that opened the show demonstrated the purposeful sense of practicality that has always run through his work at LV. For advanced-level fashion watchers, he laid plenty of design Easter eggs referencing (although never copying) previous collections. The swirling, wired hems of asymmetric and layered-up dresses recalled silhouettes of his 2016 Rio cruise show. Ghesquière’s time-travelling interest in historic dress codes was expressed in the collection, where frock coats lavished with feather-like embroidery nodded to the exquisitely 18th-century brocade frock coats he showed in SS18 (famously worn with his cult Archlight trainers). Trompe-l’oeil trunks were printed onto boxy little dresses, throwing things back to spring 2023, when the designer supersized strap and bag details as prints and adornments. And remember the bubbling hems of AW20’s tutu skirts? They were reprised in sparkling versions, worn with cap-sleeved, oversized T-shirts and biker jackets (check out AW21 for more of those dizzying oversized proportions). As for the masculine suits in shiny silk with laser-cut cross-hatching – the embryo of that silhouette can be seen in the spring 2019 show.
