“He’s most comfortable when he’s terrified,” she tells me about her exchange with Ghesquière backstage at what was to be his last trip down the runway for Balenciaga, “I was like, ‘Dude, are you okay?’ and he was like (in a French accent), ‘Yes. Yes. I will tell you soon, but there are things happening.’ Before I left, he was like, ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ I’m so ****ing proud of him because what he was about to do would rock people’s worlds. He was just like, ‘Believe for me.’ I thought it was the coolest ****ing thing.”
Ghesquière appears as blissful about this moment in his career as the 18th century salons overlooking the Seine, to which he decamped with a cadre of loyal followers, are light filled and ornamented. Over the years, Ghesquière has fostered a trusted think-tank around him, including Hardy, creative consultant Marie-Amélie Sauvé, and artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. He assembled one of the largest production teams in Paris with upwards of 30 people in the design studio and 50 in the fabrication ateliers, but when it all started the team was no more than a dozen, including the seamstresses, a simpler state he is delighted to have salvaged: “I had lost the sense of something humble but so pleasurable, more private. I’m very happy here. It won’t last, but I’m enjoying it, focusing on ideas in small groups.” We video-chatted while he was at this elegantly improvised headquarters; his voice polished, sprightly, and smart, a near French Paul McCartney with velvety overtones. He places words like a clearly intended stitch, asserting his focus with every thought. Ghesquière has been busy, on trips to Tokyo, London, and L.A., broaching conversations with the likes of textile magnate Alan Faena and archiving a mass of material accumulated over 15 years of practice but his focus, as always, is on reinventing the paradigm. “Many graduating students today are looking at smaller, quieter, local brands. They no longer want to go a corporate road. Working for a prestigious brand is no longer viewed in the same way,” Steven Faerm, Assistant Professor at Parsons The New School for Design has observed. Once again, Ghesquière may be ahead of the curve. If anyone can synthesize today’s opposing trends it will be the master of radical fusion. But, where do you start reshaping the system? Could we start by outlawing the use of dead designers?
I. System Reboot
NICOLAS GHESQUIÈRE: In a way it’s true. They take up space. Since business, banking, and groups have taken the upper hand today, decision-makers follow finance more so than creative direction, even if they are sensitive to it. Obviously to ensure the longevity of an investment, a brand has to carry a stable value. A designer has to materialize that brand name. I don’t know how long it will last, but people still need and want a creative voice and face, an embodied presence. The creative director has to be someone “promotable.” I’ve heard this a lot: “This one is promotable and this one is not.” It’s probably the same for actors. Brands reassure everyone, the consumers and the investors. But it’s a challenge for an individual perspective. I remember Jean Paul Gaultier saying, and he may have been referring to the grands noms – signature brands – like Dior and Jean Patou, “We should assign one designer for a year to develop their interpretation of one of these signature brands. We would get a different interpretation of the legacy and repertoire every time.” I thought it was such a smart and powerful idea. Anti-business but also not entirely crazy.
PIERRE ALEXANDRE DE LOOZ: You interned with Jean Paul Gaultier in the early 90s, and then assisted him in his studio. What did you learn and how did it affect you?
It was droll in every sense of the word, being in Jean Paul’s studio at that time. You felt like you were at the heart of a nuclear reactor: it’s where things were happening, where you wanted to be. I was 18. I played a minor role, but it enabled me to see so much. It showed me that everything was possible.
I’m really happy to have had a small taste, things were already changing, of the era of les créateurs before the advent of the megabrands. It was very important for me to have witnessed these designers build their own maison, express their own ideas, their individuality. I never worked with Azzedine Alaïa, but now I am close with him and for me, people like this are models. At the time I didn’t really understand the consequences of working independently, but I find it absolutely commendable today.
What is Gaultier’s historic place in French fashion and fashion in general?
He was not merely concerned with making handsome garments, because Jean Paul’s clothes are extremely handsome, well-crafted, and of extremely high quality. He was also not just an eccentric dreamer. One thing I learned was that it’s okay to have fun with clothes if you make them beautiful. Actually, Jean Paul was able to make an extraordinary, classic wardrobe on the one hand and season defining, purely fashion oriented pieces on the other. It may be a cliché, but one of his major contributions was métissage – crossbreeding. That is, the ability to mix things freely, with an open mind, high and low, where the commonplace and cheap merge into a luxury wardrobe with a sense of humor. He managed to make them luxurious by their realization and intriguing, by inventing and mixing silhouettes in a new way.
Would you say, Gaultier redefined what we accept as the beauty of fashion? Did he help change the basic terms of what can be beautiful?
Absolutely. We are so much more conformist today. There is a sort of nouvelle bourgeoisie that has taken hold.
What was Balenciaga when you started?
It had more or less been forgotten. Yet, the most contemporary designers like Helmut Lang and Jil Sander still found something relevant in Cristóbal Balenciaga’s universe, referencing his abstraction in their work. In couture, Dior had defined incredible volume and constructions over a short career. Chanel embodied a path to freedom, democratizing the wardrobe, bringing sportswear to the fore but mixing it with luxury, and addressing the female condition beyond fashion. Balenciaga really corresponded to abstract art, to architecture, and a form of intellectual fashion, austerity mixed with a graphic quality. Today there are many examples of salvaged names, but in this case the power of the house outstripped its founder’s wishes. The maison survived thanks to the perfumes licenses, but also because Balenciaga’s legacy remains vital. Thierry Mugler, for example, who was all about body conscious shapes, might appropriate Balenciaga for a suit with an interior of contrasting panels, like Cristóbal’s petals, but fitted his way. Where Yves Saint Laurent might pay literal homage, the Japanese leaned ultra-conceptual, oversize, and radical. You can see it in their constructions and the way they work materials. Their work helped reveal something more contemporary in Balenciaga then a direct couture interpretation. It was so interesting and timeless that it would have resurfaced in any event, with me or anybody else at the helm. He can be endlessly reinterpreted by other talents who have bold styles and that’s how he is a common denominator, everyone has a version of his oeuvre, because he has entered the collective unconscious.
How did the reaction to your Fall/Winter 2006 collection, widely considered a masterful homage to Balenciaga, affect your thinking? You had had no access to the archive until then.
It was the collection for which my peers decided to recognize me: “That’s it, he’s ready; we’ve been waiting for this.” I received so many letters, which basically said “Welcome to this world!” Karl Lagerfeld wrote, “In the 60s, Paris was Chanel and Balenciaga. This confederacy suits me quite well today. Welcome.” I didn’t really know Steven Meisel at the time and I received a massive bouquet from him. It was like my first communion in the Church of Cristóbal. It was defining collection.
With a little hindsight, how is Balenciaga viewed today?
I regret that it is seen as a house of bags, though I am implicated, because I’d like it to remain a maison de mode. In any event it’s part of our shared fashion heritage. Miuccia Prada reinterprets it every few seasons. Marc Jacobs does too, and Jil Sander. I cherished the idea of a laboratory. I’ve been told – and was also criticized for it – that Balenciaga can appear overly avant-garde, perhaps even elitist. My answer was firstly that the label deserved no less. If you ask me, there is only one place where there’s real research and that’s Balenciaga. I’ve also been criticized for not being commercial enough, which is rather amusing. When I arrived the garments weren’t even being produced. I had to invent how to market them and we never stopped pursuing merchandising, and becoming more and more commercial. I hope people will recognize that over the last 15 years I was able achieve the balance between a house that preserves and evolves its values in real-time and a healthy, successful, genuine business.
Why are fashion’s perspectives narrowing when over the last 15 years we’ve witnessed an incomprehensible explosion in its markets?
Fashion has never been so in fashion. All of a sudden we’ve arrived at a place television, music, media, and advertising have enjoyed for a time; fashion has been vastly democratized, which is excellent, but it’s also become pop culture. Everyone wants to be part of it, to own a piece of it, to appear interested and aware. The fashion world used to be relatively marginal. It could be prestigious, but it was also considered to be a toxic world of crazies – was it not dangerous and unwholesome in a way? People only slightly older than me saw a lot of their friends disappear with the emergence of AIDS. Consciousness of the syndrome was growing in that small community, when I arrived. It was nevertheless a golden age of serious experimental work and independent designers. I’m not saying it was better before: today there are so many more possibilities, the profession is structured, there are established training programs and it’s appreciated. The shift has generated many new possibilities, at the same time everything’s been somewhat devalued and many brands and creators have had to worry about being politically correct and addressing the widest market. Naturally, there will continue to be opinion leaders and forward-looking research, and things will have to level out, but for me it’s not a defining moment in fashion. Globalization has brought many things, including the internationalization of a feminine aesthetic that I boil down to the character of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City. Whether in Japan or China, in the U.S. of course, and in Europe, there is a cliché of the fashionista whose primary concern is achieving that girlie, stiletto look, never mind if it’s fashionable. It did nudge a number of women, and girls, to risk wearing clothes they ordinarily would not have but it has standardized things and I’m not sure it’s all for the better.
Ironically, aren’t the accessories that enable this international cliché the lifeblood of fashion brands?
Indeed, today it can seem most important to have a good expensive pair of shoes or bag. Garments, on the other hand, can simply be a bargain item. The large retail brands have positioned themselves in unbelievable ways to do this, which has thrown the status of ready-to-wear into question.
Do the H&M’s and the Zara’s of the world scare you?
Their process and production speeds are incredible, and I think they have the big bosses of luxury drooling because everyone fantasizes about achieving that level of efficiency. Yet, for some of these brands the creative aspect gets completely short-circuited; they are clearly waiting for the runway shows to snatch and sell silhouettes as quickly as possible. It can’t be great for the designers there who probably spend their time adapting what someone else has invented. There have been some very successful collaborations between designers and multinational retailers, especially by H&M, but it questions everyone’s future. These companies will all need strong talent at some point. They are all hedging against this investment and the fact that without an original idea you might make tons of money but you still need a creative source to survive, either to sustain your visibility or, in a more basic sense, to create clothes. Will these brands be the next multinational luxury goods groups? Perhaps. We might be in a transformative moment. They are, in any event, increasingly competitive with luxury retailers.
As far as the bag and bobble blitzkrieg, when you started at Balenciaga, resort, men’s, and pre-collections didn’t exist and now there’s everything from dog collars to what you’ve tailored for the runway – how did you experience the pressure of having to be creative on so many different levels?
It’s one of the reasons I wanted to stop. As long as the production schedule kept sight of the creative side, it felt human. Then it accelerated to such a degree that at a certain point I was totally miserable. I simply didn’t have enough time to search for new, sufficiently interesting ideas and I had to keep churning out proposals, meeting deadlines, taking up gigantic studios that required interacting with greater numbers of people and in the process I realized I would loose what defined me. The pressure was really gratifying when it was about a new project or collection that could grow the house. But when they became absolute necessities, when the runway shows became less important, because they were too late in the calendar, when some of the more exclusive and luxurious elements that propelled the house became less of a priority, the pressure was no longer acceptable. I didn’t want to play the game anymore, at least in that way. It’s true that for everyone it’s accelerated to a frantic speed over the last few years. When I started, there were only two seasons, we had the runway show and a few extra commercial pieces, but by the end there were 15 collections per season, which is more than 30 collections per year. There are days when frankly you don’t know what planet you are on after work. When I do something I want to get involved at every level. It’s always strange delegating to other designers and later to sign the product – my name is on there. Even if it was all under the same Balenciaga label, I had a hard time pretending I had done something if it hadn’t – let’s say I had to be involved to the greatest extent possible. At the same time, it can be a great pleasure once the machine is assembled, and the ideas are flowing, and you are feeling generous. I created many things, but it can’t last. It’s unhealthy. You lose your identity...
