Nicolas Ghesquière - Designer, Creative Director of Louis Vuitton

[Chanelcouture09]

What about the Asian market?

It’s not a market I know as well, but their approach was similar to the Americans. They began by requesting the lower priced items, but in the end they also wanted the robust pieces. It’s not El Dorado as everyone says. It’s amazing to think you can address such massive audiences, but at the same time I’d like to start by communicating to those who are able to understand the brand and spread the right message. I think people are moving too fast. We should take time with Asia, and avoid provoking rapid consumption that leads to cheapened, quickly obsolete brands. Many labels have gotten mired there and it’s dangerous. There has to be a sort of apprenticeship phase, where we talk about how things are made, about luxury in the Western sense. It’s a bit of a cultural shock. The “flowers” collection did well, but so did the “punk”. It’s still mysterious.

To understand where we are in fashion today, you have to understand the history of Western fashion and of course Asia has different references. For example, in China, for complex reasons, there is little historical sensibility. History is fabricated in the way the French have always reconstructed the Ancien Régime.

Yes, novelty there seems to trump any idea of conservation. It’s easier to destroy and start again, then to restore.

Seeing an archival Balenciaga dress next to one of your creations has to have a completely different effect in that context. The way you work with materials seems to be a way of counteracting wannabe luxury with non-luxury, which in the end revitalizes the industry’s end game.

Luxury is the art of transformation, handling, and adding value to even the most commonplace material. You are right, it’s a message that is harder to communicate in Asia. But the big question about the Asian market now is “does everyone want to look alike?” We’re told they want the safety of uniformity, so when something clicks, apparently they’ll all want it, like with the Japanese. But, at the same time, we are told that they’ve had enough of repressive codes and are seeking individuality. I couldn’t tell you what’s really happening.

Do you look at Japanese designers, like Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe; there are clear resonances in their work.

Of course – with almost every season they open doors to new possibilities. Without resorting to plagiarism, these designers are really models to which one can aspire. At the same time, they’ve dipped into a fashion’s shared heritage. We can identify ourselves in their work because of a totally idiosyncratic use of that heritage, from Chanel to 60s Balenciaga for example, and at the same time because the way they handle it takes us to new horizons. They give us a sharper and more discerning eye. Rei Kawakubo is not only exemplary for her uncompromising and radical design but because she really is the queen of merchandising – from leather accessories to the satellite collections. Miuccia Prada also has an amazing knack for merchandising; Prada managed to translate a robust idea into an accessible one. But, Rei Kawakubo is a tremendous businesswoman, in the noble sense. Like Azzedine, it’s inspiring to see that there are several paths to success. They tell us you need so much money to do fashion and luxury, but then again maybe not. Rei Kawakubo obviously has great means now, but it all starts with an individual’s determination and individual perspective. We’re not in the fuzzy realm of finances, corporations, or merchandising where it’s unclear who decides, corporate or creative. Of course Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli are a very effective duo. Rei Kawakubo works with her husband, but it’s fundamentally a creative vision. It’s all very encouraging for someone just getting started.

What would you advise young designers today?

Be self-reliant but also understand how to secure financing and organize logistics. It’s particularly true in France, where entrepreneurship is discouraged in comparison to the rest of the world, and yet our cultural values inspire enterprising by sheer contrast. That’s probably why we pay dearly for success here. Stay true to your identity; know how to figure things out yourself; don’t get stuck at roadblocks; and get a rounded education, which I no doubt lacked in matters of business. You have to be all-terrain.

As a young designer, you took an unmistakably unique approach to retail expansion at Balenciaga, not surprisingly. Your New York store for example shifted the traditional context of luxury retail to a gallery setting, in an emerging arts district. Your L.A. store picks up on the same idea. What was your strategy?

Comme des Garçons was already on West 22nd Street in Chelsea. But, it all started with Paris, where we wanted to take a stance against globalization, the game of having the same dress at a moment’s notice all over the world. While Prada, Gucci, and everyone else were deploying carbon-copy stores everywhere – Prada shifted of course – Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and I wanted our boutiques to be varied, to integrate the local urban context. Starting with Avenue George V in Paris we rejected the idea of a standard reproducible display so you might have different experiences, like going to a local museum or a restaurant when you travel. At that time, Balenciaga was with Gucci Group. They found a very lovely space on Madison Avenue. “You’ll be very happy”, they said, since it’s surely a fantasy for a designer to have a store on Madison. I remember when I walked into the location, I immediately spouted, “I’ll never show my clothes here!” It just wasn’t for me, especially not for our first U.S. location. With some assistance, I found a couple of old warehouse spaces in Chelsea that I showed the executives. Domenico De Sole was the CEO of the group at the time and he rather brilliantly agreed to give me the same budget for the space and carte blanche on the design, except that in Chelsea we had 1600 square feet versus 230 square feet on Madison Avenue! Dominique suggested we keep a lot of the rough existing details, and we worked with what he had, which wasn’t so bad. In a year the store was pulling in several million dollars, which far surpassed the projections we had for the Madison Avenue location. It gave me great credibility vis-à-vis the group to continue developing spaces in that vein. The L.A. store is one of the best; it’s incredibly beautiful. It was a 40s timber frame building slated for demolition by the city. We completely re-built it from the inside out, with a plant and mineral garden. London and Milan are great. I have to admit that this saddens me a bit. Dominique has decided not to work for them in the future and I am not sure how the company will handle the stores.

The stores may have been varied, but your identity is crystal clear. They all have an incredible effect of transforming the clothes into alien works of art.

At the time, Dominique refused to play the speculative game of the art market, so she had no gallery representative in New York. We were tickled by the fact that with the store, she gained tremendous presence in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district. Hurricane Sandy unfortunately destroyed the store and I don’t think it will reopen. I am not at all superstitious, but I took it as a sign that I should leave. It was strange. In French we say, ‘Après moi le deluge’.

Going back to Mario Sorrenti and Joe McKenna’s 2001 W photos, plastic surgery lends the models some of their commanding appeal. Do you foresee a future when plastic surgery is part of a designer’s repertoire?

Of course, I am sure of it. Even for big spenders what’s available today is bottom-of-the-line, the standardization of faces. Whenever plastic surgery becomes bespoke, and design enters the equation, it’s a license I’d sign immediately. I’m much more interested by that than a global distributor of down-market clothes. One would have to review the classics and go through a couture phase, for sure. It will be amazing, morphing and transforming the body and inventing new criteria for the body. We’ll have to create a chamber of commerce to oversee everything!

Would you say your interest in smuggling material and cultural trash into the world of high fashion is a form of futurism?

Yes. Historically in fashion, being trashy was being provocative. These elements took on value by the simple fact that it wasn’t clear what value anything had anymore. My work integrates these elements, to ennoble them through the quality of fabrication. Trash is future luxury. For example, the German shepherd graphic was lifted from a fireman’s calendar. We made it in cashmere and created a new icon. I’ve always remixed elements from different aspects of our culture like this. When I did Spring/Summer 2002 with stonewashed patchwork cargo pants, the colors were based on Hollywood Chewing Gum. The pants were stonewashed in a friend’s bathtub and in the washing machine at the office. In France, cargo pants were totally exotic. I wasn’t aware of the connotation they had in the United States, but we transformed them. They became an item people purchased at $1000 each, and we must have sold 2,500 pieces, which was enormous and an immediate success for us. You’d never seen cargo pants like this, a real mixture of high and low.

It reconciles what is possible for some and impossible for others. It’s a utopia. It demonstrates to someone with money that what is popular and amusing can have promise, and for those of limited means, that what they enjoy will one day become luxury, and that’s the direction in which things have always evolved.

Fashion today, because of its unprecedented scale, raises tremendous ecological, social, and economic questions, not to mention creative ones. What goals should the industry set in the coming years to be sustainable on any of these levels?

I think it does start with sustainability and no one has found a solution. No concrete actions have really been taken, whether it’s the sourcing of materials, working conditions, or dying which is incredibly toxic. Some labels have an organic label now, but the chains of supply and production are unmonitored. There’s so much work to be done. It starts with a certain discipline, and we are very far from achieving it. The whole industry is based on timing. The faster the production, the more money comes in. To be sustainable you have to take the time to make it happen. There’s also a huge hypocrisy around out-sourcing and working ethically in other countries, while entire areas have been disenfranchised locally as a result, whether it’s in France, Italy, Spain, or Eastern Europe. It’s not enough to simply have an iconic address. There are fundamental questions to ask and I myself have to be very vigilant. We can all do a little something, but I think we’re all waiting to see which group will pull ahead and lead on this issue. Sustainability is a very taboo topic. I remember being very concerned about a certain product I was developing, because it required substantial manufacturing and packaging. I was extremely concerned. I was told the consumer doesn’t care and neither did the group. It should be moving faster. “What does it mean to be sustainable in fashion?” was the theme of Suzy Menkes’ 2009 luxury business conference in New Delhi, which I attended. My lecture topic was how to reawaken an old house while coming to terms with sustainability. I asked her recently if we shouldn’t reprise the discussion. Fashion weeks are more concerned with visibility then sustainability, that’s for sure.

What does the immediate future look like? Are you considering anything outside of fashion?

It’s been a while since I’ve been in a position to build and visualize an idea – thinking and conceptualizing, doing workshops – without having to materialize it right away. It’s a real pleasure. I am preparing something, but I have choices to make. I will announce something when I am ready. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. Now is my time to question inter-seasonality – it’s always the opposite season somewhere else in the world – and fashion’s need to be global while respecting the environment and local cultures and of course the usual six-month cycle for collections. I may decide to fulfill that mission again and I’ll enjoy it as I always have. Another part of me, absolutely wants to break these rules. I may be putting myself in danger, but that’s what I want today. I enjoyed years of extreme comfort with Balenciaga. It’s fantastic to harvest that status to explore in new ways, rather then sticking to a routine, even if it was the most comfortable and incredible, I couldn’t be in a better position.

*032c.com

 

[Chanelcouture09]

Editorial -

*032c.com

 

[Chanelcouture09]

This was also an illustration in the magazine by M/M Paris, which I adored -


*032c.com

 

[HeatherAnne]

More proof @LouisVuitton is getting serious abt rtw: @TWNGhesquiere's 1st Cruise collection will have a show in Monaco next month. #FTLuxury

twitter/vvfriedman (Vanessa Friedman's twitter)

 

[GERGIN]

Prayze tha lawd!

 

[Thefrenchy]

M Le Monde - March 22, 2014

FACEBOOK.COM/MLEMONDE

 

[Chanelcouture09]

*Vanityfair.com

 

[maxlinden]

^ The Article

The Thriller at Vuitton

A year after Nicolas Ghesquière’s reign ended at Balenciaga, the news that he would succeed Marc Jacobs as Louis Vuitton’s creative director touched off a rare hullabaloo in the fashion world: What daring! What a triumph! In his first interview since the announcement, the 42-year-old designer tells Ingrid Sischy about the challenge ahead, while devotees from Cindy Sherman to Catherine Deneuve explain their excitement.

Fashion is its own galaxy with its own planets and weather systems, its clusters of stars with gravitational pull. And even some Big Bangs, such as Nicolas Ghesquière, a designer who has the capacity to genuinely move people with his work. That’s when fashion becomes about more than just fads, getting dressed, or emptying wallets. There’s an anticipation, the sense of something bigger—such as the hullabaloo that greeted last fall’s announcement that following Marc Jacobs’s exit as creative director of Louis Vuitton to focus on his own brand, Ghesquière was to step in, launching his first collection for the house on March 5, in Paris. The appointment had become official a full year after Ghesquière’s tenure ended at Balenciaga, which had put the 96-year-old house back on the map. The timing turned out to be spot-on. With so many of today’s most original fashion talents out of the picture—Helmut Lang’s checking out to focus on his art; Alexander McQueen’s suicide; John Galliano’s self-immolation; Martin Margiela’s Houdini act; Ann Demeulemeester’s saying adieu; Jil Sander’s quitting for the third time—the relief with which the fashion community responded to the news that Ghesquière would be back was palpable.

Ghesquière himself has been mum ever since the Vuitton announcement was made. When we talked in January it was the first time he had publicly spoken about his new position and had encouraged his friends to also do so. His pal the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg remembers what it was like this past year, when the designer was between jobs. “It felt like he was in the shadows for an eternity,” she says. “There was a lot of secrecy. I was surprised by his patience. And touched by it.”

In this moment, when so much of what we see in fashion, art, the movies, and music is pandering, the appointment is striking for its outright daring. Vuitton is a giant, $9.4-billion-a-year business, and Ghesquière so far has worked on a much smaller scale. He is known to be a perfectionist, a fanatic even over details, and uncompromising—characteristics that tend to scare those who have to cough up the check. Yet to the folks at LVMH, who made it happen, it was a no-brainer. “We like adventures,” says Delphine Arnault, the 38-year-old daughter of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault and an executive vice president at Vuitton. That sentiment is echoed by Michael Burke, C.E.O. of Vuitton. “There was only Nicolas,” he says. “We are under an obligation of maintaining a standard of boldness after the brilliant job that Marc Jacobs did. We had to have somebody as great as Nicolas. We couldn’t go into it saying, We’re going to play it safe.”

Both Delphine Arnault and Burke talk about the spirit of adventure that has been crucial to the 160-year-old company since its inception, when 13-year-old Louis Vuitton left home to build his dream in Paris. But it’s one thing to tout a legacy and quite another to put your money where your mouth is.

Ghesquière’s odyssey in fashion started when he was 14. Born in 1971, he grew up in the Loire Valley wine country, in Loudun—a town immortalized by Aldous Huxley’s 1952 novel, The Devils of Loudun, and Ken Russell’s deliriously overwrought 1971 film of it, The Devils. To hear him tell it, it seems that the only surfaces of his surroundings that Ghesquière didn’t cover with fashion drawings were the grapes hanging from the vines. Schoolbooks, windows, walls were his canvas. Fashion, as he says, had “chosen” him. The family’s Apple computer—an ancient artifact by today’s standards—was the young designer’s link to a bigger world. With the help of his father, who ran the local golf club, Ghesquière put together a portfolio of drawings and sent it, along with a letter introducing himself, into the ether. Agnès B.’s company, always with an eye out for the Zeitgeist, picked up on the energy of his drawings and set up a summer internship. These many years later, Agnès B. says they have had so many kids in her internship program that she doesn’t remember what he did. But she says: “I remember his face. His eyes are strong and clear. There are the eyes and there is the look—le regard. His has something in common with Montgomery Clift.”

Ghesquière’s next patron was Corinne Cobson, who hired the aspiring designer to work on weekends and holidays at her small, but already cultish, fashion business. He’d take the train into Paris, stay at an apartment she’d arranged for him, and hang out at all the 80s hot spots, such as Le Palace and Les Bains Douches, where he had his first Grace Jones sighting. (Forget about ID checks to weed out the under-aged—it’s Paris.) In exchange, by day, he’d sprinkle his youthful fashion dust.

He was not lacking in youthful ambition either. “I promised myself: Before your 18th birthday you’re going to be at Jean Paul Gaultier. And it worked. I was hired,” Ghesquière remembers. At the time, of course, Gaultier was fashion central for iconoclastic experiments and high jinks.

After a couple of years with Gaultier, the young designer struck out on his own as a freelancer, to hone his skills as an interpreter of various brands, including Thierry Mugler. “My parents were not happy,” he admits now. They had wanted him to go the more conventional route of a degree from a fashion school, but it was all about the trenches for Ghesquière. He didn’t know it at the time, but luck would also play a part—and luck doesn’t wait for you. His big break came at age 22, when a friend, Pierre Hardy, the innovative shoe designer, told him about a freelance position at Balenciaga. Even though his pals warned him, What do you want with such a dusty old fashion house?, Ghesquière was intrigued. At 25 he was crowned creative director at Balenciaga, and the rest is history.

Ghesquière describes his early drawings as “heroines—girls with attitude” and that captures what he did at Balenciaga. One of his favorite words for his approach is “hybrids”—and it helps to nail down the designer’s complex inspiration system, which draws from many references. These include architecture, technology, and sports, the last of which was a big part of growing up in the Ghesquière household, which might explain his healthy sense of competition. One of his “must have” jackets with a molded silhouette recalled his training in fencing.

As Ghesquière steps back into the limelight at Vuitton, there’s a sense anything can happen. Because of the powerful legacy left by Marc Jacobs of collaborations with artists as varied as Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Yayoi Kusama, there’s already an aura of experimentation surrounding the brand. Ghesquière does not presume to call himself an artist, but he tends to work the way an artist does, rather than pursue the typical fashion goal to immediately please. His clothes can elicit the “shock of the new,” and they often take some getting used to. He has a radical approach to pattern, and his combos can jolt. When he nails it: Hello, fashion’s Matisse. And once your eyes have adjusted to the newness of Ghesquière’s clothes, you find they become more beautiful over time, making a lot of the rest of what’s out there seem tired. This is why Ghesquière’s designs have a history of being knocked off by other companies that make fortunes out of producing cheap versions of the latest fashions. His work has always had street cred because of how it combines the familiar with the super-new. “What I find most interesting in fashion is that it has to reflect our time,” he says. “You have to witness your own moment. People used to define me as a futurist designer, but, you know, the future is now for me.”

In fact, his clothes don’t conform to the old dictate of striving to make a woman attractive. Which is probably why women who have spent their lives challenging that limited notion recognize Ghesquière as a soulmate. The artist Cindy Sherman, who puts female stereotypes at the core of her work, follows his designs with interest and has collaborated with him. “He takes chances and pushes boundaries,” she says. “He seems to be very independent and kind of fearless. He is not scared to play with freakish elements that could easily become ugly, which, of course, I like, because it’s much more interesting.” This sentiment is shared by Stella Tennant, one of the coolest, pickiest models out there: “I didn’t feel like a filler when I modeled in his shows. I felt like a person.” Even a fugitive. “We all wear trousers and dresses and skirts, so when someone comes up with something that you haven’t seen before, there’s magic. Like those black boots that he did, with buckles on one side and mad metal studs on the sole. I still get a lot of hassle wearing those boots through airport security, but it’s worth it,” she says, laughing.

Ghesquière is the only designer with whom the actress Jennifer Connelly has developed a personal relationship over the years. He created the fragile, almost tattered-looking dress she wore to the Oscars in 2002, when she won the best-supporting-actress award for her performance in A Beautiful Mind. Connelly says, “His silhouettes are architectural, but they’re not trying to wear the individual who is inhabiting them. He has such a sense of proportion, in every way.” Ghesquière has also won over the fashion-savvy French legend Catherine Deneuve. “He is not someone who is trying to make you look pretty,” she says. “It’s something much deeper than that. He doesn’t want to be loved—he wants people to see something that they remember.”

I asked Deneuve if she thought Ghesquière, a gardening pal, had the thick skin required to survive the high-pressure system that fashion is today. “I am not too worried,” she says. “Nicolas is tough and very intelligent. I don’t think he’ll give up things that he really cares about. He’s like a tree, you know: strong. Not a flower.”

Ghesquière sums up for me what he has learned over the years in fashion. “I learned to not be scared,” he says. “To be brave. In this work you have to convince everyone all the time, at different levels, to support your dream. I learned you have to be confident in order to do that.”

This reminded me of an unforgettable Ghesquière moment. He was working for Balenciaga at the time. The crowd was seated. Anticipation was in the air. But right before the show was to begin a loud craaaaaackkkk splintered the air: a bench had collapsed, and an editor landed on her butt, legs splayed in the air. Then another craaaaaackkkk thundered, and another bench went kaput. More crashing bodies and horrified bystanders. Then it happened once more. People were starting to really freak. An apology came over the loudspeaker, followed by a request that the entire audience rise up off the benches and stand for the show.

Trust me—this was not the kind of crowd that was game to stand. But stand they all did. What’s more, cheers resounded when the show was over.

Even though he was mortified, the humor of the situation was not lost on Ghesquière. “Some people thought it was sabotage, and we even launched an investigation to find out what happened,” he recalls. “It turned out that the benches were simply baked too long in the oven, which made them weak. Who else would that happen to? Only me!” That was fashion drama.

This is fashion history. Let’s see what he does at Vuitton. The curiosity is high. “Of course, he will have to re-invent himself,” says Karl Lagerfeld, “but he is gifted and the energy is good for Paris.” As his first show drew nearer, I asked Ghesquière for a clue. He e-mailed: “Never forget that what becomes timeless was once truly new.”

VanityFair.com

 

[TheoG]

Loved reading that, thanks for posting.

This reminded me of an unforgettable Ghesquière moment. He was working for Balenciaga at the time. The crowd was seated. Anticipation was in the air. But right before the show was to begin a loud craaaaaackkkk splintered the air: a bench had collapsed, and an editor landed on her butt, legs splayed in the air. Then another craaaaaackkkk thundered, and another bench went kaput. More crashing bodies and horrified bystanders. Then it happened once more. People were starting to really freak. An apology came over the loudspeaker, followed by a request that the entire audience rise up off the benches and stand for the show.

Is this why they stood at Balenciaga S/S 12? I thought it was intentional Or a whole different show.

 

[mackos]

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[Flashbang]

April 14, 2014

The Nicolas Ghesquière Effect

By Miles Socha with contributions from Jessica Iredale



There was intensive research and dazzling experimentation behind the ready-to-wear Nicolas Ghesquière turned out during his 15-year career at Balenciaga—and his shows always delivered a strong dose of fashion with a capital F.

Yet backstage after his debut at Louis Vuitton, it was another F word—function—that came up time and again as the Frenchman discussed his approach to the storied house, marking its 160th anniversary this year.

“Our first season was an opportunity to set up and to capture what would be the key elements for the future,” he says, perched on a retro sofa in Vuitton’s loungelike “green room,” where celebrities cool their jets before facing the crush of photographers in the show space. “I didn’t try to tell a story.”

Instead, Ghesquière considered the women in his personal and professional milieu—Camille Miceli, Marie-Amélie Sauvé and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is tipped to be among the stars in his first ad campaign—and a “wardrobe” that would suit them.

“So I listened to them, I collected little things from all of them and mixed it up,” he explains. “The clothes had to be functional.”

Ditto for his first handbags, headlined by miniature trunks like the one Delphine Arnault, Vuitton’s second-in-command, cradled in her slender arms as she greeted such guests at the show as Charlene, Princess of Monaco.

“Again, function,” he stresses. “I was like, ‘How this can travel from the trunk, and what it can say today?’”

Ghesquière put a thin leather strap on his Mini Malle clutches, adding the versatility of toting it on the shoulder like a camera bag of yore, heightening the Seventies vibe of his fall collection, hinged on wearable clothes of the sort cool girls crave. “So a small bag for the day and how you can carry this in a very cool way, and very functional way, too,” he explains.

Craftsmanship was another fixation for Ghesquière. In tandem with his arrival at the luxury powerhouse last November, Vuitton engaged French photographer Gérard Uféras to shadow Ghesquière as he became acquainted with the vast company, the flagship brand of luxury goods giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The sleeves of his sweater always rolled up, the designer can be seen poring over fabric swatches, leather samples and shoe sketches—the picture of intensity.

Part of his immersion in the company’s culture was a trip, his first week on the job, to its museum and workshops in Asnières, where special-order leather goods and bespoke trunks are realized.

Vuitton’s savoir faire in handbags, which account for the lion’s share of its business, certainly captivated Ghesquière, who brought in a number of those artisans to work on some of the clothes.

“I thought it was interesting to ask them to do some things that they are not used to doing,” he explains. “This was a great process for me.”

While leather was a predominant feature of the collection, from the flaring coat on Freja Beha Erichsen that opened the show to the sexy, lingerie-style dresses grafted to tweed, there were three polo dresses with flaring collars and zippered closures that bear the imprint of the leather-goods artisans who painstakingly pieced glossy leather strips on the denim-blue suede bib fronts.

According to Michael Burke, chairman and chief executive officer at Vuitton, Ghesquière is taking an approach completely different from that of his predecessor Marc Jacobs. During his 16 years as Vuitton’s first artistic director, Jacobs would lead the 19th-century trunk maker into the modern fashion age by introducing rtw, footwear, jewelry, scarves and all the other categories that are par for the course for a global brand today.

Jacobs did so in a freewheeling way, sending out fashions that were streetwise one season, coquettish the next, and perhaps demure and womanly the season after.

Now, however, “It has to balance between newness and heritage at the house,” according to Burke.

Under Jacobs, the dial was cranked way up on newness. As there was no fashion vocabulary à la Chanel to follow, the elusive Vuitton woman “could be anybody at this point, and he had fun with it,” Burke says of Jacobs’ approach. “He made us credible, because 16 years ago, we didn’t exist in fashion.”

That means it’s up to Ghesquière to “write a language” for Vuitton, including defining what a “suit” from the brand looks like and who the customer is—all the while taking into consideration the “long shadow” thrown by its legacy in trunk making and leather goods.

“It’s 160 years old, so it can’t be ex nihilo,” Burke stresses. “You have to dance with that shadow.”

How far Ghesquière plunged into Vuitton’s heritage was not obvious as models whisked through the tent constructed in the Cour Carrée at the Louvre, rapid-fire shows being a habit he kept from Balenciaga.

But he went deep into the archive, culling visual signatures that are firmly rooted in Vuitton’s history, though not as widely known to the broader public as its famous monogram canvas. These new codes could help the brand as it seeks to cultivate a more upscale, exclusive reputation after years of rapid expansion and a heavy reliance on logo canvas.

Vintage trunks by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, a Vuitton client starting in 1896, were a font of inspiration. Kahn preferred bright red Vuittonite canvas and three hand-painted Xs to identify his trunks, features Ghesquière reprised on his Mini Malles. Some of these came sheathed in canvas, a wink to the protective covers used on leather Vuitton luggage in the 19th century.

wwd.com

 

[Flashbang]

....

Other archival elements Ghesquière brought to the fore include:

• The quilting inside old steamer trunks was used as a surface texture on leather handbags and suede skirts, plus as a pattern on the insoles of some shoes.

• The unique color of the natural cowhide leather that features as handles and trim on monogram bags—known as VVN for “vache végétale naturelle”—reappeared in various materials, including alligator and wood-grained Epi leather, and used on handbags and clothes, often as collars or trim.

• Straps inside trunks to secure the contents during transport inspired the harnesslike lacing on shoes and booties; twisted belts echoed the appearance of straps that anchored books in “library” trunks Vuitton made for famous clients, including Ernest Hemingway.

• The encircled LV logo that figured on show invitations, and will appear on sweaters, was previously only used on the locks for trunks, when Gaston-Louis Vuitton secured patents for unbreakable locks, and locks in series that could open with a single key.

• The Neo Marceau bag, a trapezoid satchel with angular handles reminiscent of Ghesquière’s Star Wars style at Balenciaga was actually inspired by an archival style from the Fifties.

And so Ghesquière scoured the past to bring Vuitton into the future. In the broadest terms, Burke says the designer’s remit was to invent “audacity that leads to eternity.”

It was a subject Ghesquière addressed in the small, typewritten letter he left on every seat at the show, asserting that his “stylistic expression is at one with the Louis Vuitton philosophy.…The quest for authenticity and innovation. The desire for timelessness. Does not every designer ultimately seek to create something timeless?”

Perhaps the most surprising things about Ghesquière’s debut were the low-key show set—a landscape of beige bleachers and a glass-walled tent whose vents opened to reveal daylight—and that the futuristic gloss that defined his work at Balenciaga was teleported away.

Asked if he was conscious about “not doing Balenciaga” and distancing himself from that level of fashion innovation, he muses: “Well, I am what I do myself, so I don’t know if you do it consciously or not. But I try to express my point of view on fashion. And what is extraordinary with Vuitton, because it’s a big, big, big scale, is that you can imagine so many stories. It’s about multiple types of women; it’s a different profile of women. So this is very new for me. In a way, I didn’t have to think about distancing.”

As for how he defines the Vuitton woman, he replies: “I define her in a mix. She is really cool with mixing causal clothes with embellishments. The only thing is the expectation of the luxury and the way it’s done. So it’s really someone that has a real taste for mixing.”

Yet given Ghesquière’s meticulous approach to fashion, it’s hardly an anything-goes situation.

As the lineup of fashion designers who attended his Vuitton debut attested, Ghesquière ranks among the rare few you might call a designer’s designer.

“I love his work,” enthuses Jean Paul Gaultier, under whom Ghesquière worked early in his fashion career. “It’s very interesting and very clever.”

“He’s very talented,” adds Christian Louboutin. “He’s working on invention, he’s working on shapes. It’s all about research.”

Young London designer Jonathan Anderson of the J.W. Anderson label is even more to the point.

“I really respect what he’s done, and I think he is extremely important in this industry. I think designers need other designers,” he says. “I think he pushes, and I think fundamentally I can say he’s just got a very sharp approach to things. There’s no dicking around.”

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October 29, 2014
Nicolas Ghesquière Talks Design and the Louis Vuitton Brand
By Marc Karimzadeh
Nicolas Ghesquière, now a year into his tenure as artistic director, addresses his mandate at Louis Vuitton with precision and clarity.

“When I met with Bernard Arnault, Delphine Arnault and Michael Burke, we had a few discussions about what Louis Vuitton is, and where it is today,” the designer said in conversation with WWD executive editor Bridget Foley. “We all share the same vision: It’s important that Louis Vuitton has to define a few women, and create something that is innovative and respectful of the history and patrimony of Louis Vuitton at the same. The idea was to meld those two elements.”

Having shown three runway collections thus far — fall 2014, cruise and spring 2015 — his vision is beginning to crystallize. The approach isn’t about nailing the next “It” bag that’s hot today and gone tomorrow. “My thought was that when we look at things that are considered ‘Grande Classiques,’ as we say in French — iconic classics that almost everyone wants — we sometimes forget that they were new one day,” he said. “They were totally innovative and might sometimes be shocking to some people, but with time, they become classics. Every item doesn’t become that but the challenge for the designer is to look for those things that are so consistent that they can stand [the test of] time even if they are surprising and new at the beginning. That was the concept.”

Travel, which provides the foundation of the house, is at the core of the image.

“It might be cliché but it’s true that Louis Vuitton himself was totally innovative,” Ghesquière said. “He looked at what was missing in travel and packaging things in the most beautiful way. With time, that evolved to trunks. The little bag inside, which was just an addition to the trunk, itself became a key element. When you really have a good idea and you look for one, you transform things and that’s what becomes a classic.”

During his career trajectory that spans nearly two decades, first at Balenciaga and now at Vuitton, Ghesquière has built a reputation for such transformation. He is considered one of the world’s most influential fashion designers, with a proclivity for futurism and experimental clothes that sometimes veer into couture territory. During his first year at Vuitton, however, he didn’t deliberately set out to make a big design statement. Instead, he said, he approached the brand with a wide range of women in mind.

“You never do things thinking you will make a big statement,” he said. “It just happens sometimes and you are lucky. You don’t think you will do a revolution. At the beginning, you are very honest with your idea and you want to seduce. It’s more about building a vision with time, and to dig and go deep into a woman’s wardrobe. Yes, you do like a collection with a hint of something, with a proposition, but at the same time, what I want to see is for the longer term.”

The role of the designer in fashion is “to be true to yourself,” he said, “create a strong signature, something recognizable and at the same time to create desire.”

As for his design process, Ghesquière works closely with his team. “There are many people around me that remind me I have to do right,” he said of when to know to drop an idea. “I am surrounded by people with a lot of talent. We share our ideas and it’s a process. Sometimes you think something is good and then you wake the day after and look at it and it’s so bad. You have to take time and see it again and again and refine things. [Bernard Arnault] told me Vuitton is not minimal and I agree completely. Louis Vuitton has this dimension, this crazy visibility, which is quite elaborate and complex and at the same time quite simple and effective. I understood that it has to be something with a great dimension.”

Whether intentional or not, his first three runway shows made that point. They injected the brand with a sense of pragmatism, a clear antidote to the extravaganzas staged by his predecessor Marc Jacobs, though Ghesquière downplayed that this was a deliberate decision.

“I think Marc Jacobs did extraordinary work,” he said. “He explored and developed [the brand] in so many different territories, and he built so many tools for the identity of Louis Vuitton ready-to-wear. He gave it a patrimony that is huge.”

If the spectacle of a runway show is still a consideration, “I think it’s a new phase and I find my way of doing it. It’s the fact: There is another signature.”

The choice of three photographers — Juergen Teller, Bruce Weber and Annie Leibovitz — to shoot the current ad campaign plays into the notion.

“My idea of Vuitton is talking to many facets of women,” he said. “Each [photographer] has a different expression of it. [With Leibovitz], it’s more dramatic. Juergen has this reality, this impact that is quite raw and Bruce is much more poetic and has this dimension. It’s the combination that is interesting because these are emotions that every woman has.”

Ghesquière’s Vuitton woman is not age-specific even if the runway models are young. “Age is more an identity and a style,” he said. “The qualities and the things I love when I meet a woman are her charisma, her personality, her intelligence, her personal style, her way of expressing herself. I wouldn’t say we reflect every generation in the campaign but when we shot the campaign with three different types of generation, we had a lot of comments. When we took a friend of mine, some said she may be too old for the campaign and I felt I had to defend my own age.”

Social media plays a substantial role in delivering the message. “I love social media, I love Instagram a lot, and I do like Twitter a lot too,” he said. “Instagram is very playful and it’s a wonderful tool for a designer. Louis Vuitton asked me to take over the Instagram account for a week. I had a little sweat when they gave me the phone — the responsibility of 3.1 million followers and what to show, what not to show, what to suggest. I like the no filter. I can speak to many people very directly.”

If the decision to stage the spring show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, two weeks before it opened, in any way influenced the creative process for spring, it was only in abstraction.

“We felt very lucky to be able to show there,” he said, adding that he wanted guests to see the “incredible architecture” but then, once inside, to entirely focus on the collection.

“It didn’t really influence the collection but I love architecture a lot,” he said. “One of the reasons is that I have fantasies about the woman or characters that can evolve in those different buildings and environments or even landscapes. What happened here, when you see the Frank Gehry building, I also try to imagine which woman can evolve in that building.”

The Gehry-designed foundation is mainly a space to showcase contemporary art, which brought the conversation to designers as artists and whether they should be considered as such. Ghesquière said an artistic sense can come with the creative process. “For sure there are designers who are and will be remembered as great artists....Obviously Rei Kawakubo and Azzedine Alaïa, in different expressions, are true artists.”

The sabbatical between leaving Balenciaga and joining Louis Vuitton allowed the designer to take a step back, albeit briefly. “This year went very quickly between the separation and the new wedding,” he said. “But yes, I stepped back and looked around and I found it quite fascinating how fashion is transforming itself all the time, and how the different actors are always renewing themselves. Stepping back, I missed it, even if it was short, and I couldn’t wait to be back.”

Fashion is more corporate than it was 15 years ago, but that’s not a bad thing, according to the designer. “There are cycles,” he said. “I remember, not a long time ago, couture houses that were strong and individuals who were called ‘createurs.’ Azzedine, Jean Paul Gaultier, [Thierry] Mugler and [Claude] Montana suddenly emerged and we went to a whole different part of fashion history. Today, there is something that is more corporate but at the same time there is a good thing with corporations.

“You have to be aware, things go so quickly, and the way you talk to people is completely different and also wonderful,” he added.

Asked what chief executive officers should know about the designer psyche, he wasted no time with his retort. As he put it, it’s “what a designer should know about the ceo psyche.”

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[Marc10]

Style.com/Print #7 Spring 2015

The Journey Begins Here
At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière established himself as fashion’s leading visionary. Now, at Louis Vuitton, he is out to prove that he is not only a “scientist” but a “great classic designer.”
by Nicole Phelps


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.”

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Nicolas Ghesquière Innovates at the Legendary House of Louis Vuitton
After being named artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s women’s collections last year, fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière ushers in a new chapter at one of the crown jewels of the LVMH empire, while striking a balance between the past and the future

HERE’S WHAT Nicolas Ghesquière thought Louis Vuitton needed: a new logo. It was an unlikely place to begin revamping the world’s biggest luxury-goods brand. Vuitton’s brown-and-gold monogram is one of the most recognizable on the planet. But Ghesquière, who joined Vuitton a year ago as artistic director of its women’s collections, said he wanted “something easier and more supple, less geometric and rounder” to symbolize the new style at the legendary trunk maker.

He gave his team a brief: Draw a pawnlike icon to adorn his new line of clothes. But after receiving the team’s sketches, he was stumped. Nothing matched his vision. So the designer looked to the past for inspiration. In a photo from the archives of one of Vuitton’s first boutiques, dating to “eighteen-hundred-I-don’t-know-what,” he spied the house’s slanted initials inside a circle above the door. The revived logo is now etched on the clasp of Ghesquière’s trunk-shaped clutches. “The fact that I found it reconfirmed to me that the idea was legitimate, that we need a logo now on clothes that synthesizes a round shape,” says Ghesquière, snapping his fingers for emphasis.

Most designers at storied fashion houses are haunted by the past. Ghesquière had become burdened by the future. During the 15 years he spent as the artistic director of Balenciaga, starting in 1997, he became known for his cutting-edge designs that popularized everything from rubber and plastic to scuba fabric. Of course, Balenciaga had rich archives (which Ghesquière helped assemble). But Ghesquière’s references to the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga were conceptual, not literal. This created an expectation that he would inexorably push forward. “I’ve always been tagged as a futurist designer, and I don’t like the idea very much,” says Ghesquière, sitting in Louis Vuitton’s offices on the banks of the Seine. “For me, the future is now.”

In his new chapter at Vuitton, Ghesquière is trying to find a balance between the past and the future. But it’s not as simple as believing in the present. In a typewriter-font letter to the guests of his first Vuitton fashion show, in March, Ghesquière referred to “the desire for timelessness.” The designer has found meaning in creating fashion by looking backward. With its long history, Vuitton embodies his quest for timelessness. “You always forget that one day the classics were new. You had to find an idea that would provoke or respond to functionality in our world,” says Ghesquière. He is developing a new look by marrying Vuitton’s deep expertise in leather manufacturing with new technology and time-tested silhouettes. “In my previous role, there was always this idea of heritage and history, but I was really into the research. Now I’m more mature, so I innovate, but with this notion that the real quest is to establish great classics.”

Louis Vuitton is also stretched between its past and the future. For years, Vuitton applied its famous monogram, which dates to 1896, to millions of canvas bags and accessories. (The house itself is more than four decades older.) They are the primary source of the house’s fortune—an estimated $9.7 billion in annual sales and an operating margin that hovers around 45 percent. Vuitton is arguably the most important brand at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French luxury-goods giant that also owns such brands as Céline and Fendi in fashion, Moët & Chandon Champagne, Hennessy cognac and Christian Dior perfumes.

But Vuitton had saturated the market with its logo. Sales stagnated. Analysts began talking of “logo fatigue” and questioned how a brand could represent the pinnacle of luxury and exclusivity if its name was everywhere. Louis Vuitton management thought investing more in fashion could be the answer. Since the late 1990s, the house had produced a high-end ready-to-wear line. But its founding designer, Marc Jacobs , left in 2013 to focus on his eponymous line.

Enter Ghesquière, who had cut ties with Balenciaga, part of LVMH rival Kering, a year earlier. Ghesquière had known Delphine Arnault for a few years. Arnault, the daughter of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault , had recently made the leap from Dior to Vuitton to head up its products. Ghesquière began meeting with Delphine, and later with her father and Vuitton’s recently arrived chief executive, Michael Burke. “It’s important to have a point of view,” says Delphine Arnault. “Nicolas has always had a very precise point of view on shapes and fabrics. He is a rare talent.”

Some of his first designs for Vuitton debuted on the red carpet, as worn by the actress Jennifer Connelly, whom Ghesquière describes as one of his heroines. Connelly thinks Vuitton and Ghesquière are perfectly suited to each other. “The name Vuitton is synonymous with adventure, and Nicolas, to me, is such a pioneer,” she says. “The clothes that I see, they remind me of something that I know I love, and yet they’re nothing that I’ve seen before.”

Ghesquière himself is petite and crackling with energy. He speaks in rapid-fire French and rolls his hands about in emphasis. At 43, he still looks boyish but has intense dark eyebrows that convey his seriousness. He is dressed in black jeans, a yellow-and-black-plaid shirt and an old Rolex. He barely pauses to sip his espresso as he talks about the need he saw at Vuitton. “History and heritage is so much a part of the vision people have of Louis Vuitton—they needed someone with an anticipatory vision,” says Ghesquière. “The idea was that fashion must be the flag, the pillar, and that it must be directional.” The Arnaults and Burke were betting that Ghesquière’s fresh eye could shuck off the aftertaste of logo fatigue.

Ghesquière comes with a coterie of style icons, such as Connelly and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are drawn to his bold fashion statements. Gainsbourg has been a devotee of his since his early days at Balenciaga when he began dressing her. “I wasn’t very comfortable with the way I looked, and he made it fun,” says Gainsbourg. “I was keeping my figure but daring a little bit more, which made it quite exciting.” She is one of many fans who have followed him to Vuitton (and also considers him a family friend). He provides her with made-to-order dresses for special occasions, such as a sleeveless black-leather dress that seamstresses were applying silver sequins to over the summer. In early September, she wore it at the Toronto International Film Festival. “His big strength is that he’s able to be classic and at the same time completely futuristic in the fabrics, in the mix of colors, and quite daring,” says Gainsbourg. “But it’s all with very classical techniques. It’s not just futuristic, it’s based on something really solid.”

For the self-taught Ghesquière, Vuitton represents a kind of graduation. Ghesquière grew up in Loudon, in Poitou-Charentes, between Bordeaux and the Loire Valley, a region west of Paris known for its wine. As a teenager, he decided he wanted to go into fashion. But he resisted parental pressure to go to design school and instead began working at Parisian houses.

His first big break came at age 18, when he got a job with Jean Paul Gaultier. Ghesquière credits Gaultier for giving him “my eye and my hand.”

“It was complicated, though, because all the people around me were just out of school or still in school at 18,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a complex about it, but I always had the impression that I was out of step. I already had a position that was in advance of my age.” Ghesquière did some freelance gigs, including for Balenciaga, which was subsisting on licensing deals since its founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga, had died more than two decades earlier. That became his education. “For a long time I had a real, not frustration, but doubt” about not having gone to fashion school, Ghesquière says. “It’s a time for pure experimentation—for pure research, to refine your perspective and to create things and to materialize things as an exercise. I had it while working.”

Ghesquière saw his tenure at Balenciaga as one long learning curve, but the rest of the fashion world saw it as one groundbreaking collection after another. His biggest commercial success was the Lariat bag, but what has permeated all levels of fashion are the silhouettes he defined. There were high-waisted skinny pants paired with a billowing top, cropped motorcycle jackets and gladiator sandals.

Although his avant-garde designs were celebrated by the fashion press, Balenciaga began generating more of its sales through Ghesquière’s reinterpretations of the founder’s classic designs. “I developed commercial collections for Balenciaga, but I think the real challenge is that this catwalk clothing becomes reality,” says Ghesquière. He left the brand suddenly at the end of 2012 after 15 years at its helm. (Balenciaga and Ghesquière recently agreed to try to find an out-of-court settlement to a lawsuit that the brand filed against its former designer for comments he made about his departure.) “Balenciaga is a great tale even if it didn’t end very well,” he says.

Vuitton was a different play. Unlike Balenciaga, which had disappeared from the map after its founding designer’s death, Vuitton had never fallen out of the public eye. Louis Vuitton’s ancestors passed the house down within the family until the 1980s, when Arnault took control.

In his discussions to join Vuitton, Ghesquière kept coming back to the house’s classics. Part of his pitch was to design a new kind of bag. “I wanted to make a clutch that would be functional for today’s woman. It could be an evening bag or a little day bag, but one that carries the values of the brand,” says Ghesquière. “The simplest idea was the reproduction—not the reduction—of the unique design of the iconic trunks of Vuitton.” He came up with a proposal for a miniature trunk—boxy and heavy with hardware—with a thin leather strap.

Bernard Arnault, who has been keeping a closer eye on Vuitton since its sales growth stalled, was particularly smitten with the idea, Ghesquière says. “He said to me, ‘It’s formidable!’ I was very struck by his commentary, which was, ‘And it will be very beautiful on display—in clusters, it will work very well,’ ” Ghesquière says. “He has a strategic vision but also an aesthetic vision that goes as far as how we can do merchandising in the boutique, and I share that, too.”

FROM THE MOMENT GHESQUIÈRE got the job last November, it was a mad dash to get his first collection ready for the March show. The mini trunks were rushed out by Vuitton’s made-to-order workshop in the northern Paris suburb of Asnières, which usually makes much larger trunks. “Everyone had to change the scale of their vision,” Ghesquière says. The “Petite Malle” was made in several colors and patterns, including the much-maligned classic monogram, and it bears Ghesquière’s old-is-new-again pawn-style logo.

He tapped Vuitton’s expertise in other areas to develop ready-to-wear. First, there was leather—one of Ghesquière’s signature materials. Vuitton’s craftsmen can shave leather into an ultrafine thickness for bags; Ghesquière tasked them to do the same for clothing. For the first time, the leather workshop made dresses for the runway. Some dresses had leather bodices paired with skirts made of fabric interspersed with scale-shaped embroidery in an escargot pattern. “In bags as in clothing, lightness is super important. That’s something I was seeking a lot before, and here it’s coming to fruition,” says Ghesquière. “It’s very modern—clothing that has a beautiful shape, beautiful architecture and construction and beautiful quality materials, and at the same time it doesn’t add 10 kilos.” He began working with techniques that were new to him, such as thermo-shaping leather, or using ultrasound to create patterns. He recently got a new machine that fuses two materials with heat to create a perfect finish.

The silhouette hit on one of his old favorites—the ’70s. There were big collars and A-line skirts, waists accentuated by slipknot belts and vintage-looking leather coats. “I have a lot of affection for hybrid clothes, which I did a lot, more strange mixes, but I’ve digested that now,” he says. “Now I want above all else that the clothes be very recognizable and very functional.”

Ghesquière likes to work in the middle of the studio on the second floor of Vuitton’s headquarters overlooking the Seine. “I don’t have an office,” he says. “I didn’t want one. It’s open space.” One recent morning, he and Vuitton’s marketing team met in the spacious room with ivory carpet and mirrored columns to review the demand for his mini trunks. “It’s an enormous commercial success,” he says, adding that the bags were pre-ordered in substantial quantities.

The question is whether creating new classics for Vuitton will be enough to fulfill Ghesquière. He has long toyed with the idea of starting his own house. And joining the world’s biggest luxury-goods group hasn’t quelled that. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to do it,” Ghesquière admits. “I would like to do it, but each thing in its time. Today I dedicate myself to Louis Vuitton without forgetting that I have wishes, desires.” Designing for two houses at once rarely goes well, he says. And he has set the bar high for launching his own venture. “If it’s to reproduce on a smaller scale what is done on a large scale, honestly, no, it’s not interesting,” he says. “And that’s not at all the way that I one day envisage launching myself, especially having experienced the biggest existing model.”

For the moment, Ghesquière isn’t too worried about the future. “ Azzedine Alaïa always says to me, ‘In any case, you start fashion at 40 years old; you shouldn’t start earlier,’ ” Ghesquière says. “I’m 43 now. So I should have started three years ago. I like that because it gives me lots of time.”

online.wsj.com

 

[reesewu]

I'm sorry but I don't know where to post this. Is there no Louis Vuitton Pre Fall this year?

 

[Creative]

I was thinking the same. No resort campaign either.

 

[Lola701]

I'm sorry but I don't know where to post this. Is there no Louis Vuitton Pre Fall this year?

They are usually showing their Pre-fall in January, during menswear/couture, when the editors are in the city.

 

[HeatherAnne]

Nicolas Ghesquière to Stage Louis Vuitton’s Resort Show in Palm Springs

CALIFORNIA, HERE WE COME: Given his taste for groovy modernist architecture, Nicolas Ghesquière’s destination for Louis Vuitton’s resort show is a sweet spot: Palm Springs, Calif. The French brand has fixed May 6 for the desert event, with the venue and other details to follow.

France’s biggest fashion players have chosen eclectic geographies for the interim fashion season, with Chanel to show cruise in Seoul on May 4 and Dior in Los Angeles on May 9.

wwd.com