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. “I could 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.