The first time Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière visited New York, he stayed downtown at a friend’s loft on Lafayette Street, in the then-transforming neighborhood of SoHo. “It was really a shock for me to see that you could live in those cool buildings and apartments,” he tells Nicole Phelps on this week’s episode of The Run-Through. “It was literally the opposite of Paris, somehow.” Later on that same trip, he recalls, he explored uptown, taking in the beauty of Central Park, which instantly reminded him of iconic films. “I don’t think that thing ever disappears, honestly,” he said, “when you first visit New York, and you discover the richness of the city.”
Ghesquière is back in New York, having presented his resort 2027 collection for Louis Vuitton in the garden of the Gilded Age mansion-turned-museum, The Frick Collection, where the house has just taken on a three-year role as principal cultural sponsor. Fittingly, the collection explores the designer’s first memories of the city. “I was very interested to explore, again, the downtown, uptown duality, confrontation, harmony,” he said. “Where is the line, you know, culturally between those people?” People like the late Keith Haring—the brand has been teasing inspiration from the famed graffiti artist on its social media channels.
A dozen years into his tenure at Vuitton—and after an influential run at Balenciaga—Ghesquière is not one to shy away from the strange and challenging on his catwalk. His work is meaty and provocative, a mix of the quotidian and the avant-garde. As he told Phelps on his previous appearance on the pod: “Fashion needs aesthetic danger.” He remains dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what fashion can be, especially as it pertains to one of the world’s largest luxury brands.
Here, the designer talks about how he approaches designing resort collections for a modern age, his relationships with house muses like Emma Stone, Jennifer Connelly, and the new addition, gold medalist Alysa Liu, his life in Los Angeles, and why it’s “such a weird place,” and the advice Jean Paul Gaultier once gave him. Listen in.
