Nicolas Ghesquière: The man who asked the handbag makers to have a go at dresses 
Louis Vuitton’s workers helped to create a new leather look, the designer tells Alexander Fury
  “Aw, come here copycat. You’re my puppet. You know I love it.” So  intoned the soundtrack to Nicolas Ghesquière’s autumn/winter 2014 Louis  Vuitton show, his all-important debut for  the French luxury-goods  behemoth in Paris.
  
     Was it a wry dig at the backstreet bootleggers whose rip-off Vuitton  bags are a multimillion-pound business in their own right? Or maybe at  the rest of the fashion industry, which during his 15-year tenure at the  house of Balenciaga consistently pecked over his work for plum ideas to  enliven their own collections? There’s been something of a down mood  this season, as if many designers were treading water. Or holding fire,  waiting for Ghesquière’s next move.
He left Balenciaga in 2012,  having established a contemporary template for the label (Alexander Wang  is still running with it) and for himself as a designer. Fabric  innovation, archival investigation and a touch of the sci-fi, the whole  resulting in a retro-futuristic mix that vibrated, each season, with  invention and energy... His first Vuitton show seemed to pick up where  he left off chez Balenciaga, albeit on a different scale.
Backstage,  Ghesquière talked the fashionable patter about Vuitton’s heritage and  codes, but it was the new that he brought to the house that remained in  the memory.
Inspirations? There weren’t really any. “What I tried  to express was quite effortless,” explained Ghesquière, a slight and  quintessentially French-looking man of 42 who seems perhaps a decade  younger. “To be honest, it was a lot of work, but I wanted to approach  it with an easiness. I didn’t want to do a theme or story, to be very  thematic. I have this vision of Vuitton as multiple propositions. It’s  definitely a wardrobe.”
There was, however, a vague 1970s  inflection running through the show, from the high, stiff hemlines of  zip-through A-line mini-dresses to the tightly sweatered torsos and  hyper-high waisted trousers. Those bordered on the 1980s – another of  Ghesquière’s favourite reference points – when worn with a wrapped,  metal-embellished leather belt, while a single glistening gilt Vuitton  gewgaw dangled from the models’ left earlobes.
Leather was, naturally, omnipresent, glistening on the opening  thigh-high coat, later inset into skirts and dresses, spanning the waist  or gleaming at the shoulder. “There is a lot of leather and a lot of  metal – which obviously comes from the bags,” said Ghesquière. “I asked  the leather goods atelier to develop some pieces of clothes, and that  was new for them. Usually they do bags. It’s creating this transition  between leather goods and ready-to-wear.”
Ready-to-wear is what  Louis Vuitton offers – alongside lots and lots of bags. However, it was  easy to forget that in the final few years of Marc Jacobs’ shows for the  house, the clothes became increasingly archaic and fantastical to  compete with the elaborate set pieces. Ghesquière seemed to be stating  his point with equal force – albeit with less smoke and fewer mirrors.  He’s ready to dress the world – and these eminently desirable designs  should do just that.
If this Vuitton show lacked the glamour and  drama of an elaborate set piece, or the jolt of some of Ghesquière’s  earlier collections, where he reset our ideas of decoration and  proportion, it certainly wasn’t short on experimentation.
“I ask  people to do things they’re not used to doing,” said Ghesquière of the  Vuitton craftspeople. “I play a little game – I ask the knitwear woman  to think about fabric, and I did the same with the person who developed  the fabric, to think about knit. There is a game in the collection… what  is real, what is not real. But it’s subtle.”
Pushing people  outside their comfort zones is a trademark of Ghesquière’s approach.  Here, there was something slightly discombobulating in seeing him  present ideas quietly, with such polish and commercial élan. A few,  perhaps, were deflated. Look harder.
Ghesquière is clever, and his  clothes are too. There’s more than immediately meets the eye, and  they’re far more than just foils for bags. 
“Craftsmanship” and  “functionality” were words he intoned again and again, as journalists  descended to pick over the newest Vuitton name for sound bites.
However,  one variation on that theme stood out: “It’s the human side of the  craft that’s important.” The human behind Vuitton is, of course, Nicolas  Ghesquière. And he is important.