Portraits by Justine Triet, Fashion Photographs by Steven Meisel. 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-colored carpeting and Vuitton .