The Tamesis
When Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière first visited New York, he stayed in a friend’s loft on Lafayette Street downtown, in the then-transforming SoHo neighborhood. “I was really shocked to see all those cool buildings and apartments that you could live in,” he told Nicole Phelps on this week’s show penetrate. “Somehow it was actually the opposite of Paris.” Later on the same trip, he recalled, he explored Uptown and took in the beauty of Central Park, which immediately reminded him of the iconic film. “Honestly, I don’t think this is going away,” he said. “When you visit New York for the first time, you discover the richness of the city.”
Ghesquière returned to New York to present his Resort 2027 collection for Louis Vuitton in the gardens of The Frick Collection, a Gilded Age mansion-turned-museum where the brand has just served as the museum’s main cultural sponsor for three years. The collection appropriately explores the designer’s first memories of the city. “I was very interested in exploring again the duality, the confrontation and the harmony of downtown and uptown,” he said. “You know, where’s the cultural line between these people?” People love the late Keith Haring—the brand has been drawing inspiration from the famous graffiti artist on its social media channels.
After a dozen years at Vuitton and an influential run at Balenciaga, Ghesquière doesn’t shy away from the unfamiliarity and challenges of the runway. His work is rich and provocative, a mix of the everyday and the avant-garde. As he told Phelps previously on the show: “Fashion requires aesthetic danger.” He remains committed to pushing the boundaries of fashion, especially when it comes to one of the world’s largest luxury brands.
Here, the designer talks about how he created his contemporary resort collection, his relationships with muses like Emma Stone, Jennifer Connelly and new gold medalist Alysa Liu, his life in Los Angeles, why Los Angeles is “such a weird place,” and the advice Jean Paul Gaultier once gave him. Listen.
