Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière: in his own words - Vogue

With a powerful Louis Vuitton cruise show in California’s Palm Springs, Nicolas Ghesquière has made his fashion journey from futurism at Balenciaga to creative modernism at Vuitton.

Inspired by the “Journey into Space”-style home designed by architect John Lautner in 1973, Ghesquière, 43, has succeeded in synching his personal aesthetic with the LV world.

After 15 years as artistic director at Balenciaga, he made a mild start in his new artistic director role nearly two years ago. But even without the desert sun over Palm Springs, Ghesquière’s LV collections are getting hotter.

Cruise collections — once an inter-season top-up for fashion brands — are increasingly held in far-flung destinations, with Chanel earlier this week in Seoul, and Dior’s imminent show in Cannes.

 

I talked to Nicolas, as we watched a flaming sun set over the barren mountains and warm the brutal stone architecture. And he revealed that rather than a recent whim, the inspiration for this fine collection was seeded 15 years ago, when he first set his eyes on the building’s mid-century modernism.

 

Here is Nicolas — whose English language skills have marched fast forward with his fashion innovations — in his own words.

 

SUZY: Had you heard about this house or did you know about it before you came to Palm Springs?

Nicolas: I knew the house. It is such a symbolic modernist house that I had always dreamt about it. I came to Palm Springs 15 years ago. It is funny, the house is like the kind of castle of the city, it has a theatrical mood, it is interesting. I remember being here and looking at it, and being very intrigued by the shape and wondering what it was. Of course I found out very quickly that it was a John Lautner house, built for Bob and Dolores Hope.

Suzy: What about putting fashion in that category, making it more futuristic? You have done that in the past when you were at Balenciaga.

Nicolas: I love looking forward, but the idea, when I discovered the house, was also to think about the community of women that were living there and evolving. The house had a lot of influence on me. And I am a foreigner in California and America, so, as a good foreigner, I take in a lot of things — I am curious and I try to assimilate them. In the collection — I think it is very French in Palm Springs! Yet at the same time there are so many evocations of American iconography.

 

What I think is very interesting about the house is its contrast of brutalism with modernism and the Fifties. When Bob and Dolores Hope moved in, they were already at a certain mature stage of their life, and they had very Fifties taste. So some of the rooms — like the bathrooms, with flowers and wallpaper — are totally Fifties. I love this contrast between the minimalism, the brutalism, and something sweet and colourful. In a strong way, the collection reflects that.

Suzy: So when did you first come here and see inside the house?

Nicolas: February. I was there with Charlotte [Gainsbourg] for a Louis Vuitton exhibition about travel. There is a good reason to come to LA when there is something to do. So we came to Palm Springs to see the house.

Suzy: In your career at Balenciaga, the early collections looked like futurism as people would have seen it in the Sixties. Is there any of that still in your head?

Nicolas: I think it is over — I integrated that. I have different heroines in my head. Some look more like a futuristic woman, and some look like an everyday woman. I think I visualise women in a certain way, but it is multiple women — not just one. It is many different personalities of women that I project, and that is the way it is. I love a sharp line — I am not going to lie! I love architecture and a construction that is evocative of certain things — something sharp, something very intriguing. 

Suzy: What about the famous Louis Vuitton bags? You showed them in your main collection for autumn/winter 2015 — little square silver bags like space-age accessories.

Nicolas: You mean the rigid little trunks? Some of those are very animated in a Palm Springs way. There is the black palm [detail] and a real desert feeling in the collection. They are this community of women who could have evolved in the desert. But you know also that it is Louis Vuitton. I feel good. I am making my mark. I am defining my territory in Louis Vuitton and that is what I have been asked to do — to express a point of view. And so it is true also that I am getting very… curious is not the right word…

Suzy: Explorative?

Nicolas: Exactly! Explorative! I am giving myself permission to explore the most I can, and in fact it is wonderful also with Louis Vuitton to do that kind of project. When I was at the Parker (hotel) 15 years ago, and I came here and I saw this house, I never would have thought that one day I would do a collection in there. It is what this wonderful situation is bringing me. And I hope it makes people happy.

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Like a spaceship docked on an arid mountain above Palm Springs, Bob Hope’s former home welcomed the aliens: purposeful women, heads high, skirts breezing down to sneakers or legs striding out in shorts. They marched across the terrace, under the swooping saucer of a roof, out into the golden light of a setting sun reflected in a swimming basin of water. Louis Vuitton Cruise 2016 had landed! 

 

The spectacular show, with a Seventies feel to match the modernist mansion, built in 1973 by architect John Lautner to suggest a volcanic eruption, was Vuitton’s cruise collection. And it brought out the best in designer Nicolas Ghesquière.

 

From the start of his career he has held a torch for futurism. But this journey into space had all the finesse of experience and seemed a natural fit with the travel roots of the luxury brand. Even if the bags were mostly small clutch purses or square boxes, rather than travel tools, this seemed like an energetic and purposeful forward march.

 

A star-studded audience, from Michelle Williams and Selena Gomez, through Kanye West, Asian actress Maggie Cheung and French legend Catherine Deneuve, quaffed champagne on the preternaturally green lawn before taking to futuristic seats on the outside terrace.

Delphine Arnault, executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, joined her father, chairman and CEO of LVMH Bernard Arnault, and his young son Alexandre Arnault in the audience, to watch the models in their light, long dresses, often revealing a little flesh at the waistline, descend the stairs to start the show.

 

Backstage, in a room looking over the parched landscape and bare hills, Ghesquière explained why this mid-century modernism of Bob and Dolores Hope spoke to his creative soul. “As a project, it’s really visionary – I knew this symbolic house of modernism and I always dreamed 15 years ago about the house that was like the city’s castle,” he said. “I was intrigued by its shape. And when I started at Vuitton, I already had the feeling that people are travelling for art and that this could be an architectural journey. The strength of digital imagery has become another strong experience which people want to see in reality.”

 

The notion of art as a catalyst of travel was born out by a visit to the Palm Springs Art Museum, where Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Hepworth sculptures through Roy Lichtenstein panels to Anselm Kiefer’s meld of steel, plaster and fabric seemed to firm up the idea of the desert city as wedded to modern art.

 

The cruise collection was neatly balanced between long soft dresses for women who looked like they could take on the world with their sneaker strides; and the harder, sportier feeling of leather jackets in Seventies ginger and rust colours. There was also a touch of sweetness in chains of blue flowers on a white dress, daisies embroidered on black brogues and the girly look of soft drapes at the shoulders or patterns on shorts with cotton shirts.

 

Ghesquière referred to the meld of styles he found inside the Bob Hope Estate, which contrasts architectural brutalism with something sweet, referring to butterfly prints in a bathroom and greenery painted round an indoor swimming pool, while concrete and raw desert stone make up the house’s core.

I should have asked the designer about Coachella, and whether the music and arts festival in Palm Springs, with its Summer of Love vibe, had also triggered the wispy dresses hardened with leather belts. I might also have inquired whether a cruise collection should seem at times so thick and wintery, especially in this Californian dust bowel. But Nicolas was insisting to me that he was very French and that if there was a local element it was the influence of the desert, as in the black palms on the bags and the sense of a community of women.

 

So had the Bob Hope house brought to Louis Vuitton a return to the futurism that was part of Ghesquière’s vision from his earliest days at Balenciaga? “I have heroines in my head and some may look futuristic and some everyday,” Nicolas said. “I visualised it as multiple. Not one woman but many different personalities.”

Instagram @SuzyMenkesVogue 

Twitter @SuzyMenkesVogue 

Facebook.com/SuzyMenkes

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