On the Podcast: Nicolas Ghesquière on His Women Collaborators, the Advice Jean Paul Gaultier Gave Him, and the Enduring Attraction of NYC

Reported by Vogue.

Nicolas Ghesquière has been dressing the future for decades, but his latest move for Louis Vuitton looks squarely at the past — specifically, his own. The resort 2027 collection, presented in the garden of The Frick Collection, drew from the designer's earliest impressions of New York City: the charged divide between downtown grit and uptown grandeur. "I was very interested to explore the downtown, uptown duality, confrontation, harmony," Ghesquière explained. "Where is the line, culturally, between those people?" The house has simultaneously taken on a three-year role as The Frick's principal cultural sponsor — a pairing that feels less like sponsorship and more like inevitability.

The collection carries the shadow of Keith Haring, whose graffiti-rooted energy Louis Vuitton has been teasing across its social channels. It's a fitting reference point for a designer whose aesthetic has always lived at the intersection of the quotidian and the avant-garde. Ghesquière doesn't soften edges — he sharpens them. He said it plainly on a previous appearance on Vogue's The Run-Through podcast: "Fashion needs aesthetic danger." Twelve years into his tenure at Vuitton, after reshaping Balenciaga into something genuinely strange and great, he's still committed to that particular kind of difficulty.

The Women in His World

According to Vogue, Ghesquière opened up about his relationships with his house muses — Emma Stone, Jennifer Connelly, and newly added Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu — women who seem chosen less for their fame than for the specific tension they bring to a look. He also discussed his life in Los Angeles, which he described as "such a weird place," and the advice Jean Paul Gaultier once passed down to him. He didn't elaborate in the teaser, but given Gaultier's track record of radical honesty, you can assume it wasn't soft.

What grounds all of it is Ghesquière's first memory of New York — staying in a Lafayette Street loft during SoHo's transformation, stunned by the idea that cool people lived in cool buildings, that the city existed as the structural opposite of Paris. That early shock of discovery, he said, never really leaves. "I don't think that thing ever disappears, honestly, when you first visit New York and you discover the richness of the city." Resort collections are often treated as the calendar's commercial obligation; Ghesquière treats them as personal archaeology.

When a designer this precise turns his lens on memory, the result isn't nostalgia — it's a reckoning.

Read the original at Vogue.