Louis Vuitton.
Six years after flying the fashion scene out to the futuristic TWA Flight Centre at JFK for Cruise 2020, Nicolas Ghesquière returned to New York with a very different proposition. Rather than staging another grand architectural spectacle, the artistic director of women’s collections at Louis Vuitton stepped into one of Manhattan’s most culturally guarded institutions: ‘The Frick Collection.’ Fresh off a painstaking renovation and reopening, the Gilded Age mansion hosted its first-ever fashion runway as part of a new three-year partnership between Vuitton and the museum, which includes funding future exhibitions and public programming.
For Ghesquière, who has long approached fashion through the lens of architecture, art history and cinema, the Frick represented old New York refinement at its most uncompromising. Cruise 2027 unfolded as a collision between uptown formality and the unruly spirit of downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s and 1980s. Guests entered rooms lined with Fragonards, Van Dycks and Whistlers only to encounter models carrying graffiti-marked trunks and wearing boxer shorts beneath sharply tailored coats.
Louis Vuitton.
The opening look featured an authentic Louis Vuitton trunk customised by Keith Haring in 1984, pulled directly from the house archives. Haring’s cartoon-like figures and thick black line-work threaded through the collection afterwards, appearing across leather patchwork jackets, intarsia knits and engineered jacquards. Ghesquière integrated the artist’s work into the construction itself, turning the graphics into part of the garment architecture.
That downtown reference point felt timely. Fashion has spent the last few seasons rediscovering the energy of 1980s New York, but often through an overly stylised or romanticised lens. Ghesquière approached it here with more complexity. Oversized moto jackets arrived in glossy leather with sculptural shoulders, while slim peplum tailoring and straight skirts nodded toward uptown dressing codes without becoming conservative.
The collection’s strongest looks emerged from that tension between utility and embellishment. Satin boxing shorts appeared beneath sharply cut coats. Cargo trousers came overloaded with pockets yet styled with towering Medici collars and Elizabethan lace neckpieces. One look paired metallic ruffled boots with a technical nylon jacket that looked halfway between club wear and couture. Another fused brocade tailoring with chunky trainers and sheer gloves, continuing Ghesquière’s long-running fascination with collapsing historical references into contemporary dressing.
Louis Vuitton.
Accessories quickly became the main conversation point online. Vuitton’s leather goods studio delivered some of the season’s most commercially potent pieces, particularly a new run of Speedy bags and structured trunks saturated in high-impact colour. Mango orange, acid lilac, glossy marine blue and taxi-cab yellow cut through the muted interiors of the Frick like pop-art interventions. Several bags carried exaggerated hardware and reinforced corners that referenced vintage travel trunks while feeling surprisingly graphic and modern.
There was also humour threaded through the collection, something increasingly rare in luxury fashion right now. Ghesquière introduced slick boxing gloves and boots with elongated proportions, metallic puffed bags resembling inflated gym holdalls and oversized moto outerwear styled with delicate lace collars. One particularly photographed look featured glossy satin shorts under a sharply tailored jacket, a silhouette that captured the collection’s broader attitude toward dressing: elegant but slightly disobedient.
Louis Vuitton.
On the front row, Zendaya arrived alongside longtime house ambassadors Cate Blanchett and Emma Stone, while Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt delivered a subtle ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ reunion beneath the Frick’s chandeliers.
What emerged from the evening was not simply another destination show, but a carefully considered conversation about New York itself. Ghesquière has always understood that the city’s power comes from contradiction: wealth colliding with subculture, heritage constantly rewritten by younger creative communities. Cruise 2027 captured that dynamic more convincingly than most collections attempting to channel the city in recent years. Ghesquière’s Vuitton remains compelling because it still embraces a little friction.
Discover the Cruise 2027 collection here.
photography. courtesy of Louis Vuitton
words. Gennaro Costanzo
