It’s not New York’s first time meeting Nicolas Ghesquière, and neither is his. 1989 saw him on fashion assistant duty at Jean Paul Gaultier, three decades before his first Cruise show for Louis Vuitton landed at JFK’s TWA Terminal. The Cruise 2027 collection explored uptown versus downtown New York, while the venue explored an even more radical concept: letting fashion editors indoors. The Frick Collection in Manhattan’s Upper East Side plays host this time, granting access to 18th-century-drenched galleries the general public still has to whisper through. No institution is fully immune to corporate seduction, and Louis Vuitton’s very generous three-year arrangement (complete with free-entry evenings and exhibition funding) sounds like an appealing one.
A crowd made up of Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett, Zendaya, Emma Stone, and the occasional human headline, gathered inside to watch Ghesquière’s take on one of New York’s favorite binaries, uptown vs. downtown. Uptown is made up of Frick-level silence, inherited money, and kitten heels. Downtown means clubs, street art, and anything that used to look like a problem before it looked expensive. Somewhere in the middle sits the late Keith Haring, a graffiti artist turned gallery fixture (father of those dancing figures you’ve seen on tote bags, T-shirts, and probably at least one situationship’s apartment walls). Luckily for Ghesquière, the Vuitton archives happened to contain a 1930s trunk Haring covered in black Sharpie back in the ’80s before handing it off to a roommate, and long before the house placed a winning bid on it. So naturally, out came the trunk.
And with the nostalgic opening came a 56-look collection, ranging from leather goods to boxing shoes that looked like they had been pulled from The Fifth Element. Ruffles kept company with structured jackets, Bermuda shorts arrived in vivid pied-de-poule, minis looked as if folded with origami logic in mind, while Americana denim made things feel briefly simpler. This collection is not for the faint of heart. Neither are the textured tops, placed somewhere between the Gilded Age and 2026, paired with heavily detailed cargo trousers and dense embellishment. Whether at Gucci in Times Square or Vuitton at the Frick, New York keeps choosing overstimulation as its natural state.
