November 2012: the fashion world is reeling from the news that Nicolas Ghesquière, the design leader of his generation, beloved for his high-concept and haute technique, is out at Balenciaga. If someone had said then that he would send a practical navy blazer and cropped blue jeans down the runway at Louis Vuitton less than two years later, who would’ve believed it?
During his 15 years at Balenciaga, Ghesquière made clothes, as he puts it now, “for museums.” He designed plastic “Lego” heels and metal C-3PO leggings; he synthesized and modernized the couture lines of Cristóbal Balenciaga for the 21st century. With his reputation for experimentation and embrace of the avant-garde, he’s among the unlikeliest of talents to trumpet clothes “for real life.” And yet, as the new creative director of Louis Vuitton, building a wardrobe is exactly what he is doing.
Ghesquière’s debut Louis Vuitton collection, shown this past March in the Louvre’s Cour Carrée, the same venue where his predecessor, Marc Jacobs, put on his runway extravaganzas, set a new tone not just for the LVMH-owned brand, but for the designer, as well. Models walked at a brisk clip around the space in A-line skirts and spread-collar shirts, or in zip-front color-blocked suede dresses with belts neatly cinching their waists—they appeared not like visitors from a sci-fi flick or some rarefied couture salon with echoes of mid-century Paris, but from a neighborhood that looked familiar. The models seemed like hipper versions of you and me.
The news was in how street-ready the collection was. It was a point driven home on October 1 at the Frank Gehry-designed masterpiece that is the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne, the site of Ghesquière’s Spring ’15 show. Jennifer Connelly, Michelle Williams, Sofia Coppola, and Charlotte Gainsbourg were there dressed head-to-toe in LV, but so were women young and not-so-young who had sought out the collection at stores. At the show, it was impossible to miss the editors, stylists, and buyers proudly toting their new Petite Malle and Dora bags.
This is not to say that women didn’t wear Balenciaga; they did. But where Ghesquière’s work at that house was about ceaselessly moving forward, about “jumping from the cliff,” as his longtime collaborator, the stylist Marie-Amélie Sauvé, said recently in Self Service magazine, his Spring collection for Vuitton was a considered progression from Fall. The video clip that opened the show, featuring young faces speaking words from Dune, one of Ghesquière’s favorite films, spelled it out: “A beginning is a delicate time,” they said, their voices merging. “The journey begins here.”
“I am not afraid of simplifying,” Ghesquière says over the phone from his Paris atelier, two weeks after the Spring show. “Keeping my consistency, keeping my story, but going in a more simple way. I want to build a wardrobe with the girls at Louis Vuitton,” he adds. “And if they invest in a skirt or a jacket or a dress, I make the promise not that it is never going to be completely démodé , or never out of fashion, but I make the commitment that I am never going to say, ‘Ha-ha, everything you thought was good three months ago is now for the garbage.’” That sounds commonsensical enough, especially considering the prices designer fashion commands these days, but in fact it’s downright daring. On the runway, where newness is the hottest commodity, thinking evolutionarily is practically revolutionary. What Hedi Slimane is doing at Saint Laurent is not entirely dissimilar. But given Ghesquière’s reputation as an innovator, his shift toward incrementalism has made it plain that industry-wide change in that direction is not only good, but necessary.
Ghesquière credits his new style—should we call it slow fashion à la slow food?—to maturity. “I can be a great scientist and look for ideas, but I want to tell you I can also be a great classic designer. I get older like everyone, and at 43, I want to think, OK, I have a signature, but I’m totally able to build something that is more timeless,” he says. Ambition, too, plays a role. When Ghesquière left Balenciaga, influential voices in the industry hoped he would launch his own label and advocated for LVMH, Richemont, or another fashion conglomerate to back the venture. Ghesquière enjoyed what he calls a “yearlong holiday” in between Balenciaga and LV, and it’s understood that he had discussions with several different entities. The fact that he didn’t do something under his own name was a letdown for some, but not for the designer himself. “To be at a brand like Balenciaga that some people were considering niche, and suddenly to be able to move on and speak to more people, it’s beautiful, I think, and something I was expecting for many years.”
Of course, Louis Vuitton’s massive size influences what Ghesquière designs. With 462 stores in 63 countries, LV is decidedly not niche. But Ghesquière isn’t nostalgic for his past. “I was pushing my ideas to the edge to make sure it was something experimental and unique and also difficult to reproduce, to be very extreme in my proposition,” he says. “To me, that was the basic rule at Balenciaga: something unique and elaborate. Louis Vuitton is absolutely global, so my proposition has to be much more straightforward—more direct, less complicated maybe. Of course, it’s at the price of sometimes losing something spectacular. But I did that with a lot of pleasure and a lot of achievement at Balenciaga, so I was ready to move on to another conceptual approach.”
Ghesquière’s approach, essentially, has been to cast a backward glance at the 1970s. It was an auspicious time for the Vuitton brand, he believes, when its monogrammed travel bags were starting to be carried by the likes of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (the parents of his pal Charlotte; coolness runs in the family). Since the company’s founding in 1854 and up until the ’70s, the monogram had been closely associated with France’s haute bourgeoisie. “They [icons like Birkin and Gainsbourg] transported the idea of Louis Vuitton to a new generation,” Ghesquière says, summing up in so many words his own mission. His experience thus far has been liberating. By his own account, Ghesquière was a bit of a fighter at his old job, ready and willing to argue a point to get what he wanted. Much to his delight, with the support of chairman and CEO Michael Burke and executive vice president Delphine Arnault, it’s a personality trait no longer necessary at Vuitton. “I am very free, and I think you can see it in what I do,” he says. At Balenciaga, what’s more, there was the ghost of Cristóbal to contend with. “The revival of a couture house is so important, especially in Paris,” Ghesquière says. At Vuitton, in contrast, there is only a short, although not insignificant, history of ready-to-wear: Marc Jacobs’ tenure began in 1997 and ended in 2013 (an arc that mirrors Ghesquière’s own at Balenciaga). It means that Ghesquière is able to follow his own lead.
In his first collection for Louis Vuitton in March, Ghesquière tipped his hat to Jacobs with a note placed on every seat. “I salute the work of Marc Jacobs, whose legacy I wholeheartedly hope to honor.” Since then, the two have had several exchanges. “To have his validation is something that is very important to me, and I am very thankful,” says Ghesquière. He is not on quite the same terms with Alexander Wang, who followed him at Balenciaga. “With me and Marc, there is a high respect. I expressed it to Marc very early on. One day I will look at Balenciaga again, but to be honest, I have no curiosity for it at the moment. When we sort out a few problems, I will look at it with serenity and peacefully.” (Balenciaga’s parent company, Kering, and Ghesquière are settling a suit arguing that Ghesquière violated the terms of their separation agreement.) “I still think Balenciaga is a beautiful name, with a beautiful story, and I wish the best. My life is somewhere else, but I really cherish the moment I had with them.”
To build the wardrobe Ghesquière speaks of, he has homed in on the idea of travel, which he sees as integral to Louis Vuitton’s DNA. In the new Spring collection, notions of movement and fluidity manifested in the plastic heels of ankle boots cut into the house monogram’s four-petal flower; in an A-line skirt printed with hot rods and takeout containers; in skinny black ski pants with articulated, padded knees. With their faint echo of Balenciaga’s Spring ’07 C-3PO leggings, those pants were a reminder of Ghesquière’s haute concept days. They also underline the fact that, although these clothes are more straightforward, Ghesquière hasn’t abandoned his sci-fi side entirely. He says the shows will become more spectacular, as Spring’s presentation in “the belly” of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Close Encounters of the Third Kind runway lighting and sound effects made clear. But he isn’t going back to clothing that requires an instruction manual anytime soon; when it comes to the collection, Ghesquière is insistent: “I want to have my feet on the ground.”
Brisk sales of the Petite Malle and Dora bags aren’t the only indication that consumers are ready for a simpler, easier Ghesquière. A quick perusal of the Resort collections, shown a few months after his LV debut, indicates just how loudly he speaks and how eager other designers were to hear his voice again. But if Ghesquière is pleased to know that he’s as influential now as he was the day he left Balenciaga, what really gets him going are all those girls who turned up in their new LV at the Fondation. “You know,” he says, “I love the way there is this feeling it belongs to them now, and they style it, and they are free with it.”
