The cyclicality of life, and the progress that comes with it, has been on Ghesquière’s mind this year, in part due to the death of his father in April. “My father had been in poor health for a long time, but I wasn’t prepared for that moment and it felt like a new life had somehow begun,” Ghesquière says. A strong network of close friends and his mother helped: “My mother has always been a great inspiration to me and this has given me a lot of respect for her.”
“She’s very strong, very sensitive and has a vision for the future,” he says.
Ghesquière has a close relationship with his father, and today he reflects on family time over the past year, including a night they spent boating together on the Seine. “We didn’t have a lot of time together, but we had fun,” he says. “But I have to be honest,” he frowns. “It’s not that I didn’t prioritize it, but maybe I put it aside for a little too long because of the love of my work.” He doesn’t intend to make that mistake again.
In January 2020, Ghesquière was set up on a blind date by a friend who thought something was missing from the wider world of his life. His date was the earnest, handsome Drew Cousse, born in Oklahoma and raised mostly in the beach resorts of San Diego and Costa Rica. At 18, Cousse went to Los Angeles in search of a bigger life, working in a field known as VIP marketing (product placement in celebrities and movies), first for Levi’s, then Ray-Ban and Persol, and finally for a cannabis start-up during California’s post-marijuana legalization boom. Along the way, he picked up a few acting credits, most notably as a pizza delivery man in Milk, a film written by his former roommate and best friend Dustin Lance Black. When Ghesquière arrived in California on a spur-of-the-moment four-day business trip, he recalls being late for his first date with Ghesquière in the dining room of the Sunset Tower Hotel, and being surprised when he arrived. “I knew something big was going to happen,” Ghesquière recalls. “I felt great. I was excited. And,” he said, for a moment, “I felt happy.”
When Ghesquière returned home at the end of the trip, something felt different. “I knew it was going to be hard,” he says. “I came back to Paris and wasn’t stressed.” He showed his fall collection and then flew out to Los Angeles after the show. “I had work to do there,” he says, “but I was also there to see Drew.”
It was mid-March 2020. The Louis Vuitton show was the last on the fashion week schedule that year, but Ghesquière, who fled to the West Coast, didn’t know it would be his last show in Paris for a long time. He’d been in Los Angeles for two weeks when he got a call from home. “Marie-Amélie Sauvé and Julien Dossena were like, ‘We’re going to be in lockdown,'” he recalls. “My mother was like, ‘Come back!’ Different people dealt with it differently. I’d fallen in love in LA. They were like, ‘You can get on a plane tomorrow,’ but I was putting off coming back every day.” He was holed up in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont with Cousse. “Drew was so cool, but at the same time, I don’t know how to explain it,” Ghesquière says. “There was something genuine about his kindness.”
Lovestruck and in the midst of a deepening crisis, Ghesquière reluctantly flew home. “I didn’t know when I’d see Drew again,” he says. He moved with Dossena and Sauvé to a country house. “Like everyone, I was trying to sort out my family situation and get my new life in order,” he says. He spent weeks on the phone with Delphine Arnault, then director and vice president of Louis Vuitton, trying to follow the dramatic changes in the global retail landscape. Louis Vuitton stores in China seemed to close almost overnight, and as the weeks passed, similar lockdowns were repeated around the world. “Delphine said, ‘Okay, let’s do a series of collections,'” he recalls. “‘We don’t know if we’ll be able to do a show, so let’s do a small themed collection every month.'”
“I knew it was going to be a big deal,” Ghesquière recalls of his first date with Cousset. “I felt great. I was excited. And,” he recalls briefly, “I felt happy.”
Promoting these mini-collections was a new challenge: Ghesquière volunteered to be a stand-in photographer for two advertising campaigns in June that year, including one featuring tennis star Naomi Osaka, knowing full well that the shoots would require him to return to Los Angeles. “Maybe I could go back to Drew,” he says.
A two-month stay in California followed, which Ghesquière describes as “time at a complete standstill.” He offered to rent a house with Cousse in Malibu. “I thought, I’ll never be able to do this for two months in my life again,” he recalls. They spent the summer at La Costa Beach. “It was acceleration. We had no choice. If we wanted to be together, we had no choice but to live together in the same house,” Ghesquière says. They brought their dogs (Ghesquière has two, Cousse one) into the same canine family as a sign of commitment.
