Louis Vuitton’s new designer promises excellence

Nicolas Ghesquiere was appointed on Monday as the women’s design director for Louis Vuitton, taking over from Marc Jacobs, who left the fashion house last month.

“I am so happy. It is an excitement. A feeling that what I lived before was preparing me to do this,” said Ghesquiere, 42, who had been with Balenciaga for 15 years until his departure in 2012.

This major change in the most profitable company owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton – Louis Vuitton is known as the group’s cash cow – is part of wider strategic shift in the luxury world, where designers who can target a 21st-century global audience are at a premium. During Ghesquiere’s stint at Balenciaga, he worked for Kering, formally PPR, a rival to LVMH.

“Crafting is the metaphor,” Michael Burke, Vuitton’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “We are talking about Nicolas crafting his destiny today, and we, on our side, are crafting the success of Louis Vuitton.”

Although designers seem to have morphed into commodities to be bought and sold in recent years, Ghesquiere said that he felt a genuine affinity with the leather goods house.

“Louis Vuitton is a universe much more than a brand,” he said, “a community that everyone is a part of, with values of craftsmanship, of innovation and of travelling. A very complete universe.”

The designer could not have known when he found a classic Monogram bag in a vintage store several years ago – his only Vuitton possession apart from a travel bag bought in Los Angeles and now a new scarf – that he would one day be at the creative helm of the 159-year-old house.

Ghesquiere said he would be the artistic director of womenswear, with accompanying control over all visuals and advertising campaigns. The men’s side will remain separate, with Kim Jones continuing as style director, the post he took on in 2011.

Ghesquiere’s first Louis Vuitton show will be the autumn 2014 collection. The show will take place in March at a Paris landmark, the Cour CarrEe du Louvre, where Jacobs’ Vuitton collections have been shown recently.

Ghesquiere had warm words for the departing designer, saying: “I have a lot of respect and admiration for Marc Jacobs. He made Louis Vuitton relevant in fashion and will always be known as the first designer of the brand. Among the many things he did there were the artist collaborations that have become some of the fundamentals of the brand. I am very proud to succeed him.”

But what about the Nicolas Ghesquiere name above the door of a personal brand? Jacobs kept his own label under the auspices of his parent company. And when he left Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH, said that the designer had departed to concentrate on his own label.

Ghesquiere said he would not focus on his personal brand.

“This is something I always think about, since I started,” he said, “that one day maybe I will do my own name. But not now when I was asked to do something so fantastic.

“To give my point of view,” the designer continued, “to be part of that history, I am absolutely dedicated to make a new proposition” at Louis Vuitton. “I am so excited. And I think I will be very busy. I have my playground for a few years now.”

A former executive at LVMH, who did not wish to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Delphine Arnault, daughter of the group chairman and executive president at Louis Vuitton Malletier, had encouraged the company to choose Ghesquiere and that she might not be averse to the idea of his founding, in the future, a fashion company under his own name.

Louis Vuitton’s new designer admitted that ready-to-wear clothing did not play the most important role in a brand led by luggage and leather goods. But he insisted that “fashion is not only about clothes, it is between art and culture. Values that Louis Vuitton represents.”

“My idea of what is luxury craftsmanship is savoir-faire, unique and secret ways of craftsmanship and ‘exigence,’” said the designer, using a difficult-to-translate French word meaning a demanding excellence. “And time is luxury. To have time to develop, to have great ideas, to make a collection at the right time. Time is an important element,” Ghesquiere continued. “First, there is innovation. Then it becomes timeless.”