These days, Ghesquière’s challenge is different: He’s a dean of the field, around yesterday, around tomorrow, dragging his large oeuvre forward while watching a new crop of new darlings turn heads. “You know you’re never going to be the surprise of the day,” he says. “But you can still be the surprise of the season, if you see what I mean.” Some of the new wunderkinder leave him cold, he confesses; some have work he admires; and some he loves so much that he has contributed to their ascents. (He won’t say who has received this beneficence.) As a mentor, he’s invested in the idea of designers aiming not just for success but for endurance. When Dossena made the leap to the helm of Rabanne in 2014, Ghesquière offered counsel. “Nicolas said to me, ‘It’s working—but the important thing is not to make a splash but to last; it’s to get to your body of work and go on and on and on, because that’s where you are going to be satisfied, not just used by the industry,’ ” Dossena remembers.
When Ghesquière began work on his 10th-anniversary show, he put down the pencil and, instead, assembled his studio to ask which of his past pieces stood the test of time. Then he began to mix them up and play—could a winter coat from a past season become an evening dress? “It’s a clue game that the connoisseur might recognize,” he says. “The newcomer won’t, but they might recognize a style.” Some silhouettes had more potential than he’d seen five or seven years ago and were carried forward. “In a way, this is what makes a beautiful luxury house,” he avers. “It took me a few years and an anniversary show to own it. But I’ve realized that it’s actually okay to turn in a cycle.”
The cyclical nature of life—and the forward movement it entails—has been much on Ghesquière’s mind this year, in part because his father died in April. “He was not well for a long time, but you never get ready for those moments, and it feels like a new life starting, somehow,” he says. A tight circle of close friends helped, as did his mother. “She has always been a great inspiration for me, and I admire her more in this moment,” he says. “She’s so strong, so sensitive. And she has a vision for the future.”
Ghesquière had a close bond with his father, and today thinks back on family time they had over the last year, as in an evening boating together on the Seine. “I was able to spend—not a lot of time, but a good time,” he says. “But I have to be honest.” He furrows his brow. “It’s not that I didn’t prioritize that time, but I probably put it to the side a little bit too long, for the love of my work.” It’s a mistake he doesn’t plan to make again.
In January 2020, Ghesquière was set up on a blind date by a friend who thought that something might be missing from the wide sweep of his life. The date, Drew Kuhse, an earnest, handsome man, had been born in Oklahoma but reared largely in the beach havens of San Diego and Costa Rica. At 18, Kuhse went to Los Angeles, in pursuit of a bigger life, and moved into what’s known as VIP marketing—product placement on celebrities and in films—working first for Levi’s, then for Ray-Ban and Persol, and finally, in the boom following California’s marijuana legalization, for a cannabis start-up. Along the way, he picked up a couple of acting credits, most prominently as a pizza-delivery man in Milk, written by his onetime roommate and best friend Dustin Lance Black. He was late for his first date with Ghesquière, in the dining room of the Sunset Tower Hotel, during one of Ghesquière’s hasty four-day business trips to California, and the designer recalls being startled when he arrived. “I knew I was in trouble,” Ghesquière recalls. “I felt so good. I felt excited. I felt”—he reflects for a moment—“happy.”
When Ghesquière returned home at the end of that trip, he had a sense something had changed. “I knew it was serious,” he says. “I came back to Paris and wasn’t stressed.” He showed his fall collection; when the show ended, he flew back to LA. “I had work to do there,” he said. “But I was also there to see Drew.”
That was mid-March 2020. The Vuitton show was the last on the Fashion Week schedule that year, but Ghesquière didn’t know, as he fled to the West Coast, that it would be the final show in Paris for a long time. He stayed in LA for two weeks, fielding calls from home. “Marie-Amélie Sauvé and Julien Dossena were like, ‘There’s going to be a lockdown,’ ” he recalls. “My mom was like, ‘Come back!’ Everyone had a different way of dealing with it. I was falling in love in LA. They said, ‘You can take the plane tomorrow,’ but every day I postponed my return.” He had holed up in a Chateau Marmont bungalow with Kuhse. “Drew was very cool, but also—I don’t know how to explain it,” Ghesquière says. “There’s an authenticity about his kindness.”
With reluctance, Ghesquière eventually flew back, lovelorn in the midst of a growing crisis—“I didn’t know when I was going to see Drew again,” he says—and decamped to his country house with Dossena and Sauvé. “Like everyone, I was trying to organize a new life around dealing with domestic things,” he says. He spent weeks on the phone with Delphine Arnault, then the brand’s director and executive vice president, trying to track a global retail landscape undergoing drastic change. Louis Vuitton stores in China seemed to shut down almost overnight, and, as the weeks passed, similar lockdowns came and went across the world. “Delphine was like, ‘Okay, let’s divide the collection into drops,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘We don’t know if we’re going to be able to do shows, so we’ll do small thematic collections every month.’ ”
Promoting these mini collections was a new challenge. Ghesquière volunteered to pinch-hit as the photographer for two ad campaigns that June, including one with the tennis star Naomi Osaka, fully aware that the shoots would send him back to LA. “Icould come back to Drew,” he says.
What followed was a two-month California visit that Ghesquière describes as “totally suspended time.” He suggested he and Kuhse rent a house in Malibu. “I thought, I will never again be able in my life to have two months for this,” he recalls. They settled into a summer on La Costa Beach. “It was an acceleration—we had no choice: If we wanted to be together, it was together in the same house,” Ghesquière says. In a gesture of commitment, they brought their dogs (Ghesquière had two, Kuhse one) into a single canine family.
For Ghesquière, fascination ran the other way. After a month of renting in Malibu, he decided to buy in the area, eventually setting his sights on the so-called Wolff Residence—a stone-clad 1961 house near Sunset Plaza by the architect John Lautner. He had admired it from afar for nearly a decade, having first included it in a mood board for one of his collections in 2014. Almost a year later, the agent called him back: That very house was coming on the market. “It was important for us to be in Paris but have a place where Drew comes from,” Ghesquière explains. “It was a way to commit—to say, Okay, we spend most of our time here, but our Californian time is precious for the relationship we have.”
A few hours before the show begins, Ghesquière has settled on to one of the audience benches, flanked by Buonomano, Sauvé, Brokaw, and other members of his team. He is flustered: Rushing out of bed that morning, he had tripped and, in the course of trying to break his fall, had torn the flexor tendon in his index finger—his drawing hand. (When he finally makes it to a doctor, in Los Angeles, a few days later, the problem will be diagnosed as “jersey finger,” after athletes who hurt themselves grabbing at the jersey cloth of fleeing opponents: a fitting ailment, he thinks, for someone caught up in the rush of the fabric trade.) As the music starts, announcing the rehearsal, the models begin their procession wearing their own clothes with Vuitton shoes and wide-brimmed, flat-topped hats: a version of the sombrero cordobés which Ghesquière has brought in as a nod to the setting.
It is a couple of weeks later when I meet Ghesquière in the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite of the Paris Ritz, to which he and Kuhse have decamped during the heaviest renovation work on their Paris apartment. “I have to make room for what is coming,” Ghesquière says, speaking as much of his work as of his life, while setting his second large espresso of the hour on an 18th-century-style gilded coffee table in front of him. A distinctive feature of the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite, it must be said, is that everything in it is gold: gold silk jacquard wallpaper, gold vases, gold fixtures, gold frames, gold rugs. Ghesquière has only recently returned to Paris and its luxuries: He and Kuhse left Barcelona the day after the show to spend a precious stretch in golden California.
