Departure Lounge

Nicolas Ghesquière presents a daring fashion adventure for Louis Vuitton Cruise ’20, in an American architectural icon.

- Natasha Kraal

The retro-fabulous TWA Hotel, on site wiThJohn F. Kennedy Airport with spectacular views of Runway 4 Left/22 Right, really seems to have been created for an aesthete of another time. Originally built in 1962 as the Trans World Airlines Flight Center by Eero Saarinen, one of the masters of 20th-century American architecture, the historic landmark—now flanked by two new hotel wings—is a veritable design icon with its all-white gullwing design contrasted with chilli-red interiors. This is where the glamour and romance of the Jet Age began; an era when stewardesses in their Pierre Balmain–designed uniforms and mod bobs would serve up sexy martinis before every transcontinental journey. No doubt when plans to relaunch the mid-century–modernist building as a 515-room hotel after a 20-year hiatus flew right into Nicolas Ghesquière’s design consciousness, the blueprint for Louis Vuitton Cruise ’20 collection was immediately sketched out ...

It’s industry knowledge that Ghesquière is fashion’s biggest architecture bu , with a thing for neo-futurist structures. Always catching the moment on its cusp, he has staged his Cruise collections at the newly minted Niteròi Contemporary Art Museum designed by Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro, the oculus-shaped Bob and Dolores Hope Estate in Palm Springs, and last year at the Fondation Maeght, a modern art museum overlooking—and in conceptual contrast to—the quaint village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France. For more than the building, it’s also the location that adds to the frisson of the multi-references that Ghesquière is celebrated for, his innovative nature constantly nourished by street culture and community, history, and futurist energy, so alive in New York City.