Nicolas Ghesquière

What you absolutely need to know is you need to have an explicit decision about what that balance is for a given brand.

And so what brief and strategy the team at Balenciaga have for that brand with such an incredible history, both from the past and in the recent past with people like Nicolas Ghesquière and Demna, what brief did they give Pier Paolo as a designer, as a creative director to say, you know, "This is what, what we're trying to do with this brand"? It's up to Pier Paolo to find a creative expression for that.

I get the sense that the brief was, "Can you mine the heritage of Cristobal Balenciaga? And then can you also keep the customers that Demna managed to attract during his very successful 10-year tenure there?" Are those things even compatible? I don't get it.

I don't understand it.

Like they, I don't...

And so there's so many different factors with her that make her special, but it, there is a thing, I keep thinking about Nicolas Ghesquière because he has two more years on his contract-

Yeah

...

but, like, kind of everybody's like, "What's gonna happen?" And when he re-signed for the extended five years after the 10 years, they said he was gonna launch his brand, and I thought, "Well, that would actually be very interesting to me to see a Nicolas Ghesquière brand." And then today, Kim Jones, the, we're, we're talking on Monday.

So on Monday, Kim Jones announced the launch of his own brand with a undisclosed investor.

It's not LVMH, I've been told by about 15 people.

Yeah.

And I'm not sure why.

I don't know if it's because Nicolas Ghesquière is, it feels a little more like his earlier Balenciaga work.

To me, it doesn't feel like that, but these clothes I can imagine on living and breathing women, which is what I struggle with typically.

Now, don't get me wrong, he still has a preoccupation with what seems to be '80s concept art of what the 2020s would look like.

The product, I think, is improving, but maybe wasn't so great for a while.

And on the womenswear side, Nicolas Ghesquière, who's been there for a long time, is, like, a very well-respected designer, but he's not really in the mix in terms of people being excited about wearing his clothes necessarily.

They sell over $2 billion worth of ready-to-wear, but you would never know that.

Probably a lot of belts or, or what have you.

So I think they are trying to figure out their, like, what is the Louis Vuitton brand aside from these designers? You don't really need a designer at Louis Vuitton.

You just need amazing leather goods, and the designer sort of amplifies all of that.

So Nicolas Ghesquière has two more years on his contract.

His collection this season was actually e- everybody was saying extremely wearable.

It was a little bit of a weird, a few weird years in fashion.

McQueen had passed away, and, uh, Alber Elbaz stopped at Lanvin along the way, and, uh, Ghesquière left Balenciaga.

So a lot of these houses or designers that I had looked up to so much were changing roles.

Of course, John had left Dior.

Mm-hmm, I remember that

... play the parts, right? And I remember I had this beautiful dress when Nicolas Ghesquière was at Balenciaga, and it had a little Watteau back, and it was adorable.

It was short.

It was very modern version of old Balenciaga, et cetera, et cetera.