Inside Nicolas Ghesquière’s triumphant first decade at Louis Vuitton

When Nicolas Ghesquière presented his fall show in a courtyard of the Louvre in March, it was with a view not only forward but a long way back. The collection marked Ghesquière’s full decade as artistic director at Louis Vuitton —an impressive tenure by any standard, and an exceptional one at a moment when creative turnover in the fashion industry seems to accelerate every year. But it also made a claim for the unity of Ghesquière’s vision over a period when, it could be said, little else in the world held. Down the runway that day came an allusive tour of his previous collections—shift dresses and turtlenecks, It bags and frock coats—building toward the revelation that so wide a sampling worked as a coherent collection in 2024. “There’s a maturation of his ideas across collections but really across seasons,” as the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, a frequent guest at Ghesquière’s shows, puts it. “The ideas have had a journey—and a life.”

Then, a couple of months later, Ghes­quière assembled a cast of models in his studio and—in the rhythm of his own life over the past decade—prepared to do it all again.

“Hi, Sacha!” he exclaims as the model Sacha Quenby enters, wearing a purple bow-like wrap top, high boots, and billowing jodhpurs, and begins to stride down a test runway in the middle of the room. The studio is bright and spare, with fine cream-​coloured carpeting and Vuitton bags arranged on open metal shelves. Ghesquière sits with his close deputies: casting director Ashley Brokaw; the house’s design and image director, Florent Buonomano; and Marie-Amélie Sauvé, the stylist and editor who has been Ghesquière’s collaborator for some 30 years.

“Did you enjoy China?” Ghesquière asks Quenby, who had walked in Ghesquière’s show in Shanghai the previous month.

“It was fun,” she says, while making another march down the runway.

Ghesquière turns to his team. “Pretty, no?”

“Beautiful,” says Sauvé.

“The flowers will look great,” he says.

In person, Ghesquière has a buoyant, well-turned aspect that seems to cast him as a perpetual courtier to the powerful female personae he helps design. He is neither tall nor short, with pale blue eyes and a rush of dark brown hair that was long in his youth but is now barbershop-crisp and slick. At 53, he wears a brush of greying whiskers and a wardrobe both low-key and precise: Nike ACGs in subdued colours (today, grey); voluminous, beautifully made sweatshirts (generally black); and casual trousers. With Brokaw, Buonomano, and Sauvé, he perches at a pair of simple chrome-framed tables, with a huge foam board of headshots leaned on a pillar nearby. The models who approach are wearing Vuitton shoes and, in place of garments, Vuitton cloth: Since most pieces of the new collection aren’t ready, the models have been done up with dummy wraps and simple cuts that simulate the finished pieces’ movement and silhouette. Such extensive pre-engineering is unusual but bespeaks the needs of the world’s largest brand; Ghesquière’s anniversary show brought 4,000 guests to the Louvre but was seen by an estimated half-billion people online.

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“Fashion used to be for weird people,” Ghesquière tells me at one point, with a laugh. When he started out in the business, in the ’90s, he explains, the fashion-forward seemed a small, sweet tribe of outsiders and passionate iconoclasts, mocked or treated as space aliens by the broader world. Now fashion turns the great machine of creative enterprise and global celebrity—embraced, evaluated, and expounded by a billion Instagram channels, as mainstream as the entertainment industry and by most measures more lucrative. Of all the successes borne on these ascents, perhaps no brand has risen higher than Vuitton, or as quickly.

“I will not say this job isn’t comparable to the one I took 10 years ago, but it has become almost another job,” Ghesquière says. Last year, to Vuitton’s three flagship women’s collections—spring, fall, and cruise, all designed by Ghesquière—the brand added a fourth full collection, called Voyager, aimed largely at the Asian markets that now account for its greatest growth. “I first proposed to do a show in Korea—everyone was a bit shocked, but Nicolas was the first one to jump on board and say, ‘Why not?’ ” explained Vuitton’s CEO for the past year and a half, Pietro Beccari, who pushed the idea along with a rapid distribution to shops. “It’s basically our version of ‘see now, buy now’ ”—a key phrase in fashion ever since the runway audience has expanded from editors and buyers to the world. It meant that Ghesquière prepared a major new collection for March, another for April, and a third for May: a breakneck creative pace.

“Dealing with the acceleration has become important,” he explains. These days, he rises at what seems to him an ungodly early hour (seven) and devotes himself to preparation for the day: meetings, fittings, plannings. “The studio has grown, the atelier has grown, and we have had to adapt,” he says. Whenever I saw him, he was downing large cups of French coffee in continuous succession, like a smoker using the butt of one cigarette to light the next.

Now, after a moment sitting in thought, Ghesquière rises to inspect the board.

“I think three skirts are enough,” he says cautiously. “We have four skirts, but that means we repeat a shape, which I’m not crazy about.”

“No,” Buonomano says, standing up suddenly. “There’s another.”

“Another shape?” Ghesquière lights up. “Ah-oooh! You’re right—the skirt that goes on the side!”

A new model is coming down the studio runway, dressed in culottes, high heels, and a shawl. This is América González, a former Venezuelan medical student, and Ghesquière, his mood lifted by his luck with the fourth skirt, greets her warmly.

“Hi, América!” he exclaims with a wide smile. And América grins and says hi back.

I first profiled Ghesquière for Vogue 10 years ago, on the occasion of his arrival at Louis Vuitton after a rise at Balenciaga so meteoric that it defied designers of two generations to best it. When we met for the first time then, in Paris, Ghesquière was friendly but, I thought, plainly on edge: He was reserved and inwardly cast, there but somehow lost in his mind. His looming project, in early 2014, was creating not just a collection but a vocabulary of mood, style, and codes to guide his future at the house—an endeavour he described to me, sounding at times like Paris on the heels of Helen, as “the new profile.”

I hadn’t understood what he meant until I saw it on the runway. Ghesquière’s new silhouette, elaborated across the garments of his first shows, had the effect of summing up the fashion of the past decade and setting the course for the one to come. The look was precise and strong at the shoulders, long and tailored at the torso, formed of refined new fabrics (a Ghesquière signature), and cut in futuristic geometries based on the Vuitton V. The hems fell just above the knee, with a youthful flair. The pieces were paired with little ankle boots that drew out the long, straight form of the leg. The new silhouette reflected Ghesquière’s hybrid genius, drawing together elements in such a way as to be almost anything to anyone—Parisian but international, tailored enough for workplace powerwear but romantic enough for the after-party—while remaining emblematically itself.

“He was working on a type of femininity—this sharp and strong woman,” says Julien Dossena, his longtime protégé and confidant and now the artistic director of Rabanne. “It was his own taste, and it fit with Vuitton.” Soon the profile was everywhere, and the brand, too. When Ghesquière joined Louis Vuitton, the house was doing nine billion dollars a year in retail. Last year its retail exceeded 20 billion—more than half of the overall earnings of its parent, LVMH—and his extended influence is plain. “Nicolas built codes at Louis Vuitton, where ready-to-wear is actually quite recent,” Beccari says. What was a new silhouette 10 years ago is now the heraldry of luxury’s largest empire.

Ghesquière’s latest contract renewal, which he signed last fall, gives him at least five more years at Vuitton—a commitment, one might say, to the idea of commitment, at a time when other designers of his generation, such as Phoebe Philo and Hedi Slimane, trace more restive careers. Ghesquière made his name at a time when feedback on a collection meant rushing to the newsstand the morning after a show, and yet the social media earthquake did not unseat him. He was at the centre of Vuitton when Brigitte Macron campaigned for her husband’s presidency, in 2016, and, a few global upheavals later, in the 2020s, when, as first lady, she wore Vuitton as a global emblem of French craft and savoir-faire. (Ghesquière’s friendship with the president’s wife—or, as he calls her, “Brigitte”—is, he insists, a matter of neither state nor trade: “She came to a show, we went to lunch very quickly after, and it was love at first sight.”) Ten years into his tenure at Vuitton, one can wonder whether Ghesquière’s path fits less with his contemporaries’ than with the lions’ of the previous generation: Jean Paul Gaultier, for whom he was once an assistant; Yves Saint Laurent; Azzedine Alaïa; and, of course, the mercurial wizard of Chanel. Since 2019, there has been a Karl Lagerfeld–size hole in French fashion, with no obvious candidate to replace that odd blend of eclectic refinement, commercial ambition, ambassadorship, and perdurance. As the longest-, highest-standing active designer in Paris, Ghesquière can seem to be the closest thing to next in line.

“He has a vision of the world in general, not just about fashion—his own specific way of seeing and interpreting that is very specific to himself—which is why, for me, yes, he’s a fashion designer, but also a true artist,” Sauvé says. Beccari, who worked with Lagerfeld at Fendi, tells me, “Nicolas never wants to do only something that he did in the past, and in that he is similar to Karl. He’s also a maniac for detail and for the construction of the clothes.”

Ghesquière himself is wary of the comparison, and protective of the idea of Lagerfeld’s uniqueness. “I’m not sure I’m that person,” he tells me one day on a sofa in his precisely, quietly decorated office. He wears black trousers and a Gaultierian marinière (also known as a mime shirt). “Karl had this character he presented to the world, and people reacted to that; I’m more of a chameleon somehow, which is I think part of my creative process.”

If he is aware of leadership responsibilities in his singular position, they have more to do with making sure that the industry, in its current enterprise and ubiquity, doesn’t lose sight of the values that shaped its iconoclastic Weird People days. We are speaking during France’s summer of political chaos, as the anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ far right seemed to amass power and support before losing its bid for governmental control in July. Ghesquière is ginger with politics—“Being at a brand like Vuitton, with this big platform, we have to be very careful, if we take strong positions, not to exclude,” he says archly—but thinks the time is ripe for reassertion of fashion’s progressive outsider values. “Dressing is a way of expressing yourself in ways that have been, sometimes, forbidden,” he says. “And there’s the principle of a new silhouette, a new perspective, new character, a new person, a new way of wearing your hair or makeup, breaking genders, making different body shapes, supporting women’s rights.” A good collection works to extend, not shrink, the frame of acceptance, all the more so in a moment of high mainstream influence. “It is a great way,” he says, “to make people understand things they wouldn’t be ready to understand.”

As an example, Ghesquière points to his spring 2020 collection, which, arriving amid trans-rights struggle, centred on a close-up of the late Scottish trans music artist SOPHIE singing “It’s Okay to Cry” projected on an enormous screen alongside both women and “genderless” models. Or his decision, he says against internal counsel, to base a collection on Japanese anime with Sailor Moon and the manga super-nerd Fernanda Ly as part of the campaigns. “That’s why I wanted to take the job—I was conscious of the possibility of celebrating different representations,” he says. (The manga collection ended up a great retail success.) “Of course, we’re creating luxury, and not everyone can afford what we do. But the way that anyone can recognize themselves in it is free.” He sees this halfway measure as one of the advantages of social media: Even people outside the market for Vuitton’s retail can draw on a culture of idiosyncratic self-expression that, he argues, the house helps value.

Ghesquière appreciates these subtler points of influence, in part because so much about Vuitton seems big and booming. He is proud of new models who have their first walks on his runway. When his team discovers someone they love, they offer a six-month exclusive contract to let the model train under their focused vision. “It’s also a way to protect the models,” he explains. “Because if they’re everywhere too quickly, what we’ve seen in the past is that it’s sometimes very hard to handle mentally.” He had his own early fashion job, with Gaultier, as a teenager, and in retrospect is grateful for the way the designer shielded him from the industry’s toxic dynamics. “I don’t know if I learned that much there—I was making coffee and photocopies—but I realize now, more than 30 years later, that they put me in the right lane, and what I represent today is people who, one after another, kept me in that lane,” he says.

Ghesquière’s ascent at Balenciaga, which seemed a step up from a string of obscure fashion jobs but which grew from perhaps the least propitious design assignment in fashion—he was in charge of funeralwear for the Japanese market—spouted him up as the industry’s top wunderkind with incredible speed. “Being the new darling was very stimulating,” he says dryly. “You always remember that moment—and think, maybe, it’s never gone.”

These days, Ghesquière’s challenge is different: He’s a dean of the field, around yesterday, around tomorrow, dragging his large oeuvre forward while watching a new crop of new darlings turn heads. “You know you’re never going to be the surprise of the day,” he says. “But you can still be the surprise of the season, if you see what I mean.” Some of the new wunderkinder leave him cold, he confesses; some have work he admires; and some he loves so much that he has contributed to their ascents. (He won’t say who has received this beneficence.) As a mentor, he’s invested in the idea of designers aiming not just for success but for endurance. When Dossena made the leap to the helm of Rabanne in 2014, Ghesquière offered counsel. “Nicolas said to me, ‘It’s working—but the important thing is not to make a splash but to last; it’s to get to your body of work and go on and on and on, because that’s where you are going to be satisfied, not just used by the industry,’  ” Dossena remembers.

One afternoon, I follow Ghesquière to an atelier set up below his office in the sleek, discreet 2nd-arrondissement building to which Vuitton moved this year on a temporary basis: Its riverside headquarters are being renovated, and the entire operation has been uprooted. For a man in the business of endurance, Ghesquière’s life has lately been in startling flux. The homes he owns (there are a few) are also under renovation, a fact he notes sheepishly. “This is something I’ve always had—the need to initiate something,” he explains.

The Vuitton atelier is a space of both tradition and modernity. Clustered workbenches are devoted to the classic fashion disciplines—tailoring, draping, knitwear. Ghesquière races around with whoops of excitement.

“I can tell I’m going to discover some stuff I haven’t seen!” he exclaims to a wry, unflappable man named Mario Lefranc, who leads the atelier as Vuitton’s technical director of womenswear. Ghesquière pauses to admire a beige dress hung carefully under plastic. “This, I love.”

In draping, or flou, as it’s known in Paris—charmingly, the French word for “vagueness” and “blur”—all work is done on mannequins, in the round.

“This is the skirt we were looking at before, on the boards, when we were wondering whether to add another one!” he says, rushing over to a piece in progress. He pauses to consult with Margot Roszak Defays, the flou “first”—like the first chair in an orchestra—whom he has worked with for 22 years: When he left Balenciaga, he brought her with him, along with a tailoring first named Christelle Arbefeuille. “Their hands are magical,” he explains. “We assign them to flou and tailleur, but, honestly, they can do anything.

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“You always face the blank page as a designer,” he goes on. “Except now, behind the blank page, there are 10 years of fundamentals that have been developed with vocabulary: a pocket, a detail, a combination of colours, a specific shape of trouser. And that creates”—he grins—“serenity.”

“He breaks barriers in his design—he was one of the first people to say that we can wear short dresses to the Met Gala and put boots with those dresses and then sneakers and shorts with our riding jackets—but on the other hand his designs are always quite tethered,” the actress Jennifer Connelly, one of his early and enduring muses, says. “Somehow he’s able to do those things and maintain balance and wearability with the overall design.”

When Ghesquière began work on his 10th-anniversary show, he put down the pencil and, instead, assembled his studio to ask which of his past pieces stood the test of time. Then he began to mix them up and play—could a winter coat from a past season become an evening dress? “It’s a clue game that the connoisseur might recognize,” he says. “The newcomer won’t, but they might recognize a style.” Some silhouettes had more potential than he’d seen five or seven years ago and were carried forward. “In a way, this is what makes a beautiful luxury house,” he avers. “It took me a few years and an anniversary show to own it. But I’ve realized that it’s actually okay to turn in a cycle.”

The cyclical nature of life—and the forward movement it entails—has been much on Ghesquière’s mind this year, in part because his father died in April. “He was not well for a long time, but you never get ready for those moments, and it feels like a new life starting, somehow,” he says. A tight circle of close friends helped, as did his mother. “She has always been a great inspiration for me, and I admire her more in this moment,” he says. “She’s so strong, so sensitive. And she has a vision for the future.”

Ghesquière had a close bond with his father, and today thinks back on family time they had over the last year, as in an evening boating together on the Seine. “I was able to spend—not a lot of time, but a good time,” he says. “But I have to be honest.” He furrows his brow. “It’s not that I didn’t prioritise that time, but I probably put it to the side a little bit too long, for the love of my work.” It’s a mistake he doesn’t plan to make again.

In January 2020, Ghesquière was set up on a blind date by a friend who thought that something might be missing from the wide sweep of his life. The date, Drew Kuhse, an earnest, handsome man, had been born in Oklahoma but reared largely in the beach havens of San Diego and Costa Rica. At 18, Kuhse went to Los Angeles, in pursuit of a bigger life, and moved into what’s known as VIP marketing—product placement on celebrities and in films—working first for Levi’s, then for Ray-Ban and Persol, and finally, in the boom following California’s marijuana legalisation, for a cannabis start-up. Along the way, he picked up a couple of acting credits, most prominently as a pizza-delivery man in Milk, written by his onetime roommate and best friend Dustin Lance Black. He was late for his first date with Ghesquière, in the dining room of the Sunset Tower Hotel, during one of Ghesquière’s hasty four-day business trips to California, and the designer recalls being startled when he arrived. “I knew I was in trouble,” Ghesquière recalls. “I felt so good. I felt excited. I felt”—he reflects for a moment—“happy.”

When Ghesquière returned home at the end of that trip, he had a sense something had changed. “I knew it was serious,” he says. “I came back to Paris and wasn’t stressed.” He showed his fall collection; when the show ended, he flew back to LA. “I had work to do there,” he said. “But I was also there to see Drew.”

That was mid-March 2020. The Vuitton show was the last on the Fashion Week schedule that year, but Ghesquière didn’t know, as he fled to the West Coast, that it would be the final show in Paris for a long time. He stayed in LA for two weeks, fielding calls from home. “Marie-Amélie Sauvé and Julien Dossena were like, ‘There’s going to be a lockdown,’ ” he recalls. “My mom was like, ‘Come back!’ Everyone had a different way of dealing with it. I was falling in love in LA. They said, ‘You can take the plane tomorrow,’ but every day I postponed my return.” He had holed up in a Chateau Marmont bungalow with Kuhse. “Drew was very cool, but also—I don’t know how to explain it,” Ghesquière says. “There’s an authenticity about his kindness.”

With reluctance, Ghesquière eventually flew back, lovelorn in the midst of a growing crisis—“I didn’t know when I was going to see Drew again,” he says—and decamped to his country house with Dossena and Sauvé. “Like everyone, I was trying to organise a new life around dealing with domestic things,” he says. He spent weeks on the phone with Delphine Arnault, then the brand’s director and executive vice president, trying to track a global retail landscape undergoing drastic change. Louis Vuitton stores in China seemed to shut down almost overnight, and, as the weeks passed, similar lockdowns came and went across the world. “Delphine was like, ‘Okay, let’s divide the collection into drops,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘We don’t know if we’re going to be able to do shows, so we’ll do small thematic collections every month.’  ”

Promoting these mini collections was a new challenge. Ghesquière volunteered to pinch-hit as the photographer for two ad campaigns that June, including one with the tennis star Naomi Osaka, fully aware that the shoots would send him back to LA. “I could come back to Drew,” he says.

What followed was a two-month California visit that Ghesquière describes as “totally suspended time.” He suggested he and Kuhse rent a house in Malibu. “I thought, I will never again be able in my life to have two months for this,” he recalls. They settled into a summer on La Costa Beach. “It was an acceleration—we had no choice: If we wanted to be together, it was together in the same house,” Ghesquière says. In a gesture of commitment, they brought their dogs (Ghesquière had two, Kuhse one) into a single canine family.

For 25 years, Ghesquière had been a dutiful creature of the office: “I would have felt so guilty not to be there.” Now, to his surprise, he settled into remote work. Every morning he Zoomed with Paris. Boxes of fabric arrived in Malibu, where the local style of imagination influenced his own. “Drew has a very strong Californian culture, and he shows me places I’ve never been before. We could go see graffiti in Calabasas, vintage bookstores that are completely crazy.” In Paris, he never goes to movies, but in California he and Kuhse go all the time. “When I’m in LA—I won’t say I’m different, but I can let go. In Paris, home is an extension of work.”

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For Kuhse, though, Paris has been a brave new world. “The Paris fashion thing has really been, for me, like learning a new language, and I’ve loved every minute of it,” he says. At the moment, Kuhse is more proficient in fashion than he is in French—“We speak English at home,” he says with an apology. He first arrived in December 2020, and submitted a full dossier of recommendations from former colleagues in an application for residency “based completely on my own professional merit,” as he proudly puts it. He launched a communications consultancy (drawing on his previous experience, he works mostly with clothing brands, and to a smaller extent with American cannabis companies) and swiftly took to the Parisian life of pedestrian flaneurism (“I love, I love, I love walking—I walk everywhere always”) in a way that, for a Southern Californian, is truly a new leaf.

For Ghesquière, fascination ran the other way. After a month of renting in Malibu, he decided to buy in the area, eventually setting his sights on the so-called Wolff Residence—a stone-clad 1961 house near Sunset Plaza by the architect John Lautner. He had admired it from afar for nearly a decade, having first included it in a mood board for one of his collections in 2014. Almost a year later, the agent called him back: That very house was coming on the market. “It was important for us to be in Paris but have a place where Drew comes from,” Ghesquière explains. “It was a way to commit—to say, Okay, we spend most of our time here, but our Californian time is precious for the relationship we have.”

The Western exposure also changed his work. In spring 2022, for its cruise collection, Vuitton took over the premises of the Salk Institute, the biological-research campus that Louis Kahn designed on a seaside bluff in La Jolla. Ghesquière describes the show as one of his favourites ever. (“I thought we would never get the place, because those biologists are working on saving the world,” he says. “Like, ‘Hey, I’m a fashion designer.’ But they said yes!”) His Californian education, too, changed his idea of luxury. “It’s not about being casual,” he says. “There’s an extreme sophistication with things that don’t look sophisticated—it’s the mix, the combination, that makes it new and sophisticated. And I love the fusion between South American and Asian influences.”

“He has always had this way of twisting,” Sauvé explains. “He’ll be inspired by something and will twist the idea into something else, or cross the idea with another idea that is exactly the opposite.” At Balenciaga, there had been the frilly 18th-century-​inspired tops joined with short skirts and pipette trousers: a paradox of froufrou historicism and urbane chic. At Vuitton, there were frock coats paired with sneakers: part 19th century, part 1967, and somehow utterly forward-looking. After the lockdown, California became one more ribbon in his imaginative braid—a world of Pacific style to be turned and twisted into the next thing.

Ten years ago, Ghesquière went all in and showed his first cruise collection in Monaco, on a bluff overlooking the Monte Carlo port. This year, he planned it for Barcelona, in the run-up to the America’s Cup sailing race. “Pietro, our CEO, committed to start the America’s Cup in Barcelona,” he recalls. “I said, ‘I love Barcelona, and I know exactly where I want to do it.’ ”

The Park Güell, perched partway up the hills behind the city centre, had originally been conceived as a planned residential community by Gaudí, the region’s most influential architect. During construction, the site was reconceived as a public park that is today one of Barcelona’s most visited destinations. Beds of flowers, palms, and lavender run up the hills, which look out to the Mediterranean shore. Groves of Aleppo pines reach over clearings and patios along the ascent to the park’s centre, the Hypostyle Room, a Doric-​colonnaded pavilion with mosaic ceilings. For its cruise show, Vuitton managed to take over the whole park for a day, locking out all tourist traffic: an unheard-of feat, and a temporary appropriation of public space that elicited protests in town. On the day of the show, police and security officers line the periphery, checking credentials. A walkway toward a patio where visiting celebrities will take their cocktails is repaved in earth-toned carpet. The Hypostyle Room—the site of the runway—has been set with white benches of Gaudí-esque curves.

A few hours before the show begins, Ghesquière has settled on to one of the audience benches, flanked by Buonomano, Sauvé, Brokaw, and other members of his team. He is flustered: Rushing out of bed that morning, he had tripped and, in the course of trying to break his fall, had torn the flexor tendon in his index finger—his drawing hand. (When he finally makes it to a doctor, in Los Angeles, a few days later, the problem will be diagnosed as “jersey finger,” after athletes who hurt themselves grabbing at the jersey cloth of fleeing opponents: a fitting ailment, he thinks, for someone caught up in the rush of the fabric trade.) As the music starts, announcing the rehearsal, the models begin their procession wearing their own clothes with Vuitton shoes and wide-brimmed, flat-topped hats: a version of the sombrero cordobés which Ghesquière has brought in as a nod to the setting.

In practice, though, the hats invite disaster. It is a warm, clear evening, with winds off the sea. As the first model rounds a bend in her path, a gust flips her hat off her head, where it hangs, from a pin or two, like a popped top. Ghesquière gives a start—“The hat!” he exclaims to Buonomano and Sauvé—and, as the rehearsal continues, they go into a close huddle on the bench.

A few minutes later—alarmingly close to the moment when guests will swarm the park—Buonomano and the day’s hair stylist, Duffy, go to work on the hats in a temporary tent filled with makeup vanities and models in various stages of dress. The challenge is that every model’s hair is different—long, short, curly, fine. In some cases, they weave the hats into the hair with string. Others carry an Eiffel Tower of pins.

“The hats are an important signature of the beginning of the show—a very strong statement: hat on, sunglasses, almost like a drawing,” Buonomano says. “I told Nicolas, ‘Don’t stress—remember last year, in Seoul?’ ” That show, on the Jamsugyo Bridge, involved wigs, and took place during freezing, gale-like winds. “ ‘There were no wigs on the floor. You can trust me: Those hats will stay on.’ ”

The guests are arriving: DuVernay and Connelly, and others among Ghesquière’s Hollywood supporters, from Chloë Grace Moretz to Sophie Turner and the indie trio Haim. Meanwhile, in one of the park’s cavernous arcades, models are being photographed in their looks.

“Turn around, if you please! Continue!” a director shouts. “Pas de silhouette, enfin! Beautiful! Nice!”

At 8:45 p.m. the audience is settled, and the show begins. The first model appears to “Music for Chameleons,” by Gary Numan: hat on tight, sunglasses, a trim tunic with a collar in Ghesquière’s distinctive Vuitton V. Then the second: beige hat, beige jacket, beige pipette trousers, and—the startling Ghesquièrean detail—rainbow opalescent boots.

On the runway, Ghesquière is known for the way he iterates ideas, allowing each profile to develop in small sequences. “Sometimes I’ll see him start something in one show and continue the idea through another,” DuVernay observes. “It’s the way that I tell stories—thing by thing, the character coming in here and then coming back around.” From the initial looks, the collection progresses through a dazzling array of fabrics and treatments—layered, wrinkled, draped—all based on the profile he created 10 years ago.

Then, gradually, a new thread emerges, gently tracing the contours of Ghesquière’s West Coast life. Dresses take on a caftan-​like draping. A hoodie has been reimagined into a Vuitton profile, wide at the shoulders, the hood expanding outward. The allusions are eclectic but precise: California, after all, is a place imprinted by Spanish conquest, and the stylistic leap between Barcelona and the Salk Institute is shorter than one might think. (“For me,” Ghesquière tells me later, “Barcelona is the most Californian European city, the same way of living.”) As the show ends, in ovation, Ghesquière, dressed in a black sweatshirt, black work trousers, and black Nikes, jogs the runway, winking at guests as he goes.

He arrives past midnight that night at the Vuitton after-party, held at the Espai Xavier Corberó: a villa built, in the 1970s, by the Catalan artist whom it is named after. The site resembles a modernist ruin, open and low, with a courtyard in which servers pass small plates of paella, cones of roast potatoes, croquettes of Iberian ham, tomato sandwiches, ceviche, and, as the night wears on, matcha shortcake, lemon meringue, cream puffs, and fruit set in steaming dry ice. Guests in Vuitton finery dance at a smoky red-lit disco in a large bunker below. At nearly 1 a.m., with Kuhse in tow, Ghesquière arrives, drifting through the group and into a VIP room. They have spent the evening enjoying a long meal on a boat moored in the Mediterranean.

“The hats stayed on!” he marvels to a visitor as he settles in. “That was one of those things—you prepare everything, but in the end nature takes over. It’s really cool.”

It is a couple of weeks later when I meet Ghesquière in the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite of the Paris Ritz, to which he and Kuhse have decamped during the heaviest renovation work on their Paris apartment. “I have to make room for what is coming,” Ghesquière says, speaking as much of his work as of his life, while setting his second large espresso of the hour on an 18th-​century-style gilded coffee table in front of him. A distinctive feature of the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite, it must be said, is that everything in it is gold: gold silk jacquard wallpaper, gold vases, gold fixtures, gold frames, gold rugs. Ghesquière has only recently returned to Paris and its luxuries: He and Kuhse left Barcelona the day after the show to spend a precious stretch in golden California.

“It was Drew’s 40th birthday, which is very important to me,” he says. “We went down to San Diego to see his friends for a long time, and his mom and his stepfather were there, too.

“Also, I started some research,” he adds shyly. “For summer 2025.”

For Ghesquière, research usually involves making lists of ideas, wandering galleries and vintage shops, and starting to sketch, but the path from compilation to collection is indirect and might take years. (“Nicolas doesn’t look for inspiration, but inspiration somehow always finds him,” Kuhse says.) “It’s a quest for something that only you can see—something accidental and quite beautiful,” Ghesquière explains. “It’s something you see that’s totally out of context that makes sense with the story of the house.”

At the moment, Ghesquière has no concrete plans for a life after Vuitton (the most formulated notion, he says, is that he’d like to do more costume design for movies) and no plans to retire from his trade as long as the world keeps giving him ideas. “It’s not that I wake up every day and say, ‘Give me the pen!’ ” he says. But the impulse to creative expression is always there, and the ideas are still flowing—even during a San Diego week of birthday gatherings.

“Drew’s stepdad is in charge of the San Diego Air and Space Museum,” Ghesquière says. “We went in the morning and had lunch with them, and then I said, ‘Can I come back in the afternoon?’ ” As he toured the space capsules and jet planes—the bright colours, the sleekness, the travel, the speed—something clicked in his mind: “I was like, ‘This is so Louis Vuitton!’

“That’s not in my summer 2025 collection,” he adds, running his eyes over the silk wallpaper in Paris, 10,000 miles away. “But it’s a good example of something that will stay in my mind.”