Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière on his relationship with New York and its fashion

Although he will always have a special place in his heart for New York City, these days the designer is also completely enamoured with the West Coast: he waxes poetic about seeing Licorice Pizza; he describes rapturously the joy of walking on the beach. He is currently building a house in the Hollywood Hills and a few weeks after the day we talk he will present his cruise show at San Diego’s Salk Institute, a famous example of brutalist architecture designed by Louis Kahn in partnership with Jonas Salk, the scientist responsible for developing a polio
vaccine in the 1950s. The runway offered wildly voluminous frocks worn with trainers and belts encircling bare flesh and, as luck would have it, the universe cooperated with a spectacular sunset.

“The guest of honour for the show is the sun,” Ghesquière offers. “The elements are invited.”

GEMMA CHAN
Chan has had a busier year than most. Following her starring role in the Chloé Zhao-directed Marvel blockbuster Eternals, she’ll next be seen as a 1950s housewife in the feverishly anticipated Don’t Worry Darling, alongside Harry Styles and Florence Pugh, as well as in Extrapolations: a series exploring how the climate crisis will impact our lives. Then there’s a biopic of the first Chinese-American Hollywood star Anna May Wong to come. Safe to say Chan is not slowing down anytime soon.
Twill coat with leather detail, cotton-silk shirt with scarf detail, silk tie, wool miniskirt; leather trainers; all Louis Vuitton

Can the magic of Manhattan compete with this hothouse paradise on Earth? What about seeing kids on the street? In California, everyone is in a car. Ghesquière replies that wherever in the world he finds himself—and Vuitton is a huge enterprise, with shops from Vegas to Venice, Singapore to St Barts—his eye remains fixed on the pavement. “This last decade has changed our point of view about fashion—some ideas that needed to be changed, some changes that needed to happen, some things that needed to explode,” he muses. Then he sighs, thinking, perhaps, about some unnamed person, glimpsed wholly in his imagination, who has dared to maybe pair a Vuitton Sims shirt with a vintage fringed cowboy jacket and added a Speedy satchel and down-at-heels Dr Martens. “The real thing is the freedom to transform things, to wear them differently—the personal addition! It can seem a little chaotic, but we have never celebrated individuality as much as today.”

Credits: 

Photographed by Gregory Harris. 

Styled by Dena Giannini. 

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