GHESQUIÈRE Goes WEST

Almost a DECADE into the job, the LOUIS VUITTON creative director is putting out some of his most INSPIRED WORK YET, thanks, in part, to a LOVE AFFAIR with CALIFORNIA’S chilled-out VIBES

- RACHEL TASHJIAN

Nicolas Ghesquière has been Californiapilled.

Over the past few years, the women's artistic director of Louis Vuitton has been going back and forth between Los Angeles and Paris. This past spring, he put down roots on the West Coast when he purchased the Wolff Residence, an early-1960s modernist triumph perched above the Sunset Strip that John Lautner designed in homage to Frank Lloyd Wright.

Ghesquière calls the new house "so far away from Paris but so close in my heart at the same time." This new second home (spiritually and materially) has made him feel more positive-kinder, even. "It has definitely been a positive influence on me being more relaxed," he tells me.

Ghesquière is petite and almost wiry, and his all-black uniform is still intact, but now a pair of zaddyish aviator eyeglasses grace his chiseled face. He is wearing his thick brown hair a little longer and sculpted; his skin is dewy.

It is during this California phase that Ghesquière has turned out some of his most inspired work at Vuitton, with his stunning sci-fi resort show at the Salk Institute in San Diego in May and his Fall 2022 collection, a collage of the warm clichés of teenagerdom, serving as a sort of pronouncement on this new sense of what he calls "chill." Ghesquière was this century's first bona fide star designer.

In the late 1990s, as an unknown, he started making his mark at Balenciaga, defining the dressy-casual style of streetwise women with glitzy jackets and tops paired with casual trousers and creating the house's first It bag, the Motorcycle. From there, in 2013, he landed at the crown jewel of LVMH, insistently making daring and densely inventive clothes at a moment in fashion when many creative directors are often more highly regarded as marketers than designers.