Celebrating a Decade of Nicolas Ghesquière At Louis Vuitton

It’s been a decade since the fashion press was greeted by a deep, reverberating gong beckoning them to the Louvre’s Cour Carrée for Nicolas Ghesquière’s first runway show as artistic director of Louis Vuitton. At the time, Ghesquière was coming off a wildly impactful and critically acclaimed 15-year run as Balenciaga’s creative director, a role that solidified his status as a fashion world darling and earned him a reputation as his generation’s most original designer. Successfully stepping into the shoes vacated by American designer Marc Jacobs wasn't always a given. Jacobs was, after all, the first-ever ready-to-wear creative director at Louis Vuitton, one who had invented an entirely new, fantastical design language with an emphasis on dramatic sets.

But Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton was destined to be quintessentially French. Those lucky enough to attend Ghesquière’s debut on March 5, 2014 remember a bright sunny day, an oddity for Paris at that time of year. Just before the show was set to begin, the metal blinds blinked open. The light jolted the crowd awake, and Freja Beha Erichsen stepped onto the runway in an A-line, thigh-grazing, glossy black leather jacket with a pointed caramel collar and notch lapel. Underneath, a cream 1960s mini dress, and, in her hand, the new house signature: the Petite Malle bag, a miniature version of the maison’s iconic travel trunk. It was a new day at Louis Vuitton. 

In May, backstage at the most recent Louis Vuitton cruise show in Barcelona, Ghesquière reminisced about the audience's reaction to his stark departure from his structured, sculptural work at Balenciaga and the work of his Louis Vuitton predecessor. “It was kind of a shock [at the time],” Ghesquière shares with L’OFFICIEL. “People were like, Oh wow, wow.” When pressed to identify the one most important look of his Louis Vuitton oeuvre, Ghesquière insists that he was not taking the easy way out. “[It was] the first look of my first collection. At the time, it was the first fundamentals of the aesthetic I developed for the brand. I would pick that look because there's not one season at LV when people are not coming to me and saying, Alright, we want that dress again. We want that bag again, or we want your new vision of that [original] look. So it makes me proud.”

A decade later, many editors [including this one] were feeling a sense of excited nostalgia as they traversed the Louvre’s gravel grounds this past March, the ever-present gong echoing yet again in the background. Four thousand attendees were invited to the Fall/Winter 2024 anniversary runway show. Not one to rest on his laurels, Ghesquière pushed his vision for the house forward while examining house codes like savoir-faire and travel, but he did leave fervent fashion fans a few Easter eggs: the metallic-thread embroidered jackets halfway through the collection nod to a first-season jacket and Spring/Summer 2018 coats; the furry looks were a Fall 2015 reference. The exaggerated and blown-up trunk print model Mica Argañaraz wore called to mind a more recent collection, Spring/Summer 2023. “This joy is still here,” Ghesquière shared in an intimate letter placed on each show-goer’s seat. “Ten years later, this evening is a new dawn.”