Nicolas Ghesquière - Designer, Creative Director of Louis Vuitton

[Lola701]

^^
I don’t find his dresses that difficult to wear, even more those in fluid fabrics.
The one on Charlotte looks great but then again she is tall and has long legs.

Someone like Marina Fois, who has for years, exclusively wore NG’s clothes looked good in Balenciaga. She wore a lot of commercial stuff, wore it in her real life but somehow always made it work.

I think at Vuitton nowadays she is mostly hits/misses when she attends the shows but it works often. She is petite but she still has great legs.

Part of fashion also is to know your best assets, your body and what you want to display. It’s also a feeling rather than just pure « it’s flattering ».

The jackets are not that bad! A fitted wool/cashmere sweater works ;-)

You just had to size up tbh.
Because they had issues in terms of sizing from the early days when he joined the Gucci Group and also the very fitted silhouette thing, a lot of women sized up.
I always wore a 38 at Balenciaga except for the last few seasons when he did more boxier/oversized shapes.

I must say that more than NG, it’s really clothes from the early to mid 00´s, the very fitted silhouette. In a way we dressed in a simpler way. A jacket, a shirt, a tshirt, a scarf. The oversized trend started really in the late 00’s early 10´s allows us to layer and play with volumes.

Now the oversized trend is just too much.

 

[FashionPower]

I was gifted of a LV coffee table book featuring images of womenswear show from first MJ show (1998) to NG FW18. Nicholas has never been my favorite designer but damn looking at the MJ shows I couldn't stop thinking "Who would wear these clown looks in 2025?", while for Nicholas everything looked luxurious, elevated but most importantly wearable, relevant and actual.
Given very few exceptions (FW03) MJ either looked way too generic (Zara like with a sprinkle of COS) or drag Queen couture a la Galliano, something that you would never be able to wear with a straight face.
The topic I want to raise and discuss with you guys is the stark and steep shift in NG aesthetic at Vuitton: all the collections prior to pandemic (of course with the usual and expected highs and lows) looked super luxurious with the right amount of fashion forwardness and avant gardness you expect from NG. Nicholas likes his scifi videogame 80's aesthetic but it was done with taste and a certain Professional approach. After pandemic however...cumbersome looks, ridicolous proportions, everything now looks heavy, too pretentious and quirky looking, giving huge Raf Simons vibes "I do ugly because I am NG / Raf and I can afford to do so cause I am the Best and no one can criticize me!". I am also thinking about the customers: how do the ladies Who bought FW14, the Monaco Cruise or FW15 feel about the skateboard SS11 collection? There is no doubt the first 5 years at Vuitton were his Best but I want to know what happened to get his aesthetic and creative vision change so much.

 

[hamburgers]

^
I know everyone loves Marc for good reason, but his clothes have always looked like literal vintage replicas or costumes on the racks even moreso than Michele. I remember seeing his number 1 muse Rachel Feinstein running around in Michele's Gucci much more than MJ in the mid 10's. Sometimes too much industry goodwill is a bad thing because no one wants to criticize you, but then your business sinks when no one buys your stuff silently and you don't know why.

About Nicolas, I think it's just a mixture of him heading into his midlife crisis, Natacha Ramsay-Levi leaving, and having to deal with Gen Z/post pandemic vibe shift. After Natacha left for Chloe, most of the collections felt a little less "real" to me but I can't explain why. She freelances on the pre-fall destination shows now so you can compare pre-fall 2023 and pre-fall 2024 to the rest of that year's collections to see what I mean. Maybe it's less oversized and experimental with silhouette.

SS21 was tough to watch but easy on the racks when you took it in as casual statement separates. You could wear comfortable athleisure garbage under any of the statement jackets/coats or a plain t shirt with any of the pants/shorts and you'd have a full pandemic casual look. Just don't wear them together lol which is part of the issue with Nicolas LV now. His separates are still fantastic, but you never get to see them as separates because of full look policy and how hard the RTW is to get to.

 

[Caffeine]

I was gifted of a LV coffee table book featuring images of womenswear show from first MJ show (1998) to NG FW18. Nicholas has never been my favorite designer but damn looking at the MJ shows I couldn't stop thinking "Who would wear these clown looks in 2025?", while for Nicholas everything looked luxurious, elevated but most importantly wearable, relevant and actual.
Given very few exceptions (FW03) MJ either looked way too generic (Zara like with a sprinkle of COS) or drag Queen couture a la Galliano, something that you would never be able to wear with a straight face.
The topic I want to raise and discuss with you guys is the stark and steep shift in NG aesthetic at Vuitton: all the collections prior to pandemic (of course with the usual and expected highs and lows) looked super luxurious with the right amount of fashion forwardness and avant gardness you expect from NG. Nicholas likes his scifi videogame 80's aesthetic but it was done with taste and a certain Professional approach. After pandemic however...cumbersome looks, ridicolous proportions, everything now looks heavy, too pretentious and quirky looking, giving huge Raf Simons vibes "I do ugly because I am NG / Raf and I can afford to do so cause I am the Best and no one can criticize me!". I am also thinking about the customers: how do the ladies Who bought FW14, the Monaco Cruise or FW15 feel about the skateboard SS11 collection? There is no doubt the first 5 years at Vuitton were his Best but I want to know what happened to get his aesthetic and creative vision change so much.

Even though his LV rtw is less appealing to me than his Balenciaga rtw, I found his current offerings more forgiving for women with normal proportions. i.e. the things that hit the stores are made with better proportions than the Balenciaga offerings back in the days. The production process is probably more rigorous.

The following FW2024 dress was only altered moderately to fit a tiny bit closer to my upper body. The rest was not touched whatsoever. The armholes, the waistline, the skirt length, etc. are all scaled right for an average sized woman like me.

This is in contrast to the Balenciaga dress from my post a few days ago.

(btw, Marc's LV clothes was also "proportioned" correctly. But his MJ Collection clothes never had much model-to-average-women translation issue to begin with.
Re: NG's pre-pandemic LV RTW was never my thing lol)