Last October, Nicolas Ghesquiere Lit Up The Louvre – Literally…

FOR HIS SS19 LOUIS VUITTON SHOW, Nicolas Ghesquière commissioned set designer Es Devlin to construct a luminous, space-age tubular structure that made the cobblestone Cour Carrée feel like the inside of a spaceship.

The effect was futuristic, but also strangely unmoored from time. It was like watching a show through a dream, or avoid.

The clothes shared the same fluidity: of the present and the past at once, with ’80s throwbacks alongside high-tech fabrics, space-suit sleeves, and Memphis prints. Take the first look that Ghesquière sent out: Dominican model Ambar Cristal Zarzuela wearing a billowing blouson jacket in turquoise and tan with a pair of prim patent leather lace-up booties. It was part Mad Max heroine, part Victorian schoolgirl crossed with a Star Wars fighter pilot. It was 1900, 1980 and 2080 all at the same time, seamlessly blended into the upside-down triangle silhouette that has become Ghesquière’s signature.

“It’s about a world where imagination is endless,” he explains, sporting a navy plaid shirt, short beard, and playful grin when I meet with him months later at New York’s Milk Studios, where he’s being photographed with his friend and muse Michelle Williams for ELLE. According to Ghesquière, he references science fiction in his designs not because he sees it as an escapist fantasy, but as a “sooner present”: the aesthetics of a world that is almost already here. “I was always interested in anticipation,” he explains. “In every way – in movies and comics and different expressions that exist to look forward.”

It’s a fitting expression of what has become Ghesquière’s USP. For the past 20 years – first at Balenciaga and now at Vuitton – he has established himself as a visionary of understated, almost translucent glamour. He’s been at Vuitton for almost six years now, and he’s relaxing into the role, embracing playful imagery and pop-culture references from his youth (his Instagram is a vivacious mixture of Star Wars memorabilia, heavy-metal T-shirts and his two black labradors).