Here is an article about Nicola Ghesqiuere of Balenciaga
I found it very interesting, although to me Ghesquiere has always been 'in the groove'
Don't be put off by the size of this puppy, you'll wish for more once you're done!
"How Nicolas Got His Groove Back"
New York Times August 28, 2005
By Cathy Horin
(www.nytimes.com)
Nicolas Ghesquière likes his models at Balenciaga to race down the runway. He feels it gives his clothes the energy of sports, though Ghesquière, the son of a former swimming coach and golf-course manager, isn't athletic himself. He is slight of build, with black hair, fashionable stubble and light-blue eyes that essentially tell you everything, from intense interest to rapid disenchantment. Last March, after his fall show -- a streak of camel coats and jackets piped in fur that put editors in a good mood and announced a more mature sensibility -- Ghesquière was backstage greeting guests. Among the first to arrive was Francois-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of the French luxury and retail group Pinault-Printemps-Redoute and technically Ghesquière's boss. As a rule, backstage moments yield little information; if anything, they tend to reinforce the impression that the fashion world is insincere, the tepid congratulations offered in exchange for an advertising page. But in the several minutes that Ghesquière and Pinault talked with each other, with Pinault speaking quietly and without gesture, it was apparent that the warmth between the two men was genuine.
Five years ago, Ghesquière had the fashion world in the palm of his hand, his ultrathin pants and romantic high-necked tops defining a generation of sullen waifs as surely as Saint Laurent's pea coat and saharienne projected the battle lines of the late 1960's. "I do worship his pants," gushed the girl of that moment, Chloé Sevigny, in Vogue in March 2001, saying that once she found his pants, "my life definitely got a lot better." That summer Gucci bought Balenciaga, securing, it seemed, the future of the house as well as that of the then-30-year-old Ghesquière. Finally he would have the financial support of a big luxury group and the brand know-how of its chief executive, Domenico de Sole, and creative director, Tom Ford. Then came Sept. 11, transforming everybody's sense of security. Within a year of the Gucci deal, Ghesquière had acquired a reputation for being difficult. It was said he refused to work with certain Gucci Group executives. It was said he snubbed Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, by not showing up at one of her events. It definitely did not help his reputation as fashion's new messiah when he was caught copying, line for line, a patchwork vest by the late Kaisik Wong, a California designer of the 70's.
By the summer of 2003, as Ford and de Sole were in the middle of fervent contract negotiations with Gucci's majority owner, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, executives of PPR wanted to shut Balenciaga down. Despite its magical name and best-selling handbag, the house suddenly appeared to be less viable than Gucci's other brands: Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen. And Ghesquière himself seemed closed down, engulfed by some oppressive force, a mood reflected in the flower- and lingerie-inspired dresses he showed in October 2003. He says now: "I loved that collection, but if you look at the clothes, everything is overfitted. It was a suffering moment." He smiles and, with a laugh, adds, "And I was determined to suffer!"
Today, all has been drastically reversed. Balenciaga, according to Pinault, expects to be profitable by early 2007, and it could come even sooner, say people close to the house, based on strong sales of the last two seasons. The company has recently added several new collections, including a selection of moderately priced separates, and Edition, demicouture dresses based on originals from the Balenciaga archive. Ghesquière has expanded the shoe line; this fall it will include a chic, low-heeled boot inspired by a style he found in the archive.
He has also designed a new handbag, a compact shoulder style with silver hardware that suits the more sophisticated look of his recent collections, which, not surprisingly, have found a wider audience -- not just the model waifs but also women like the 52-year-old actress Isabelle Huppert. And next year, the designer will collaborate in a Balenciaga exhibition at the Musee de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, the first major retrospective of Cristobal Balenciaga's designs in more than 30 years.
But the most conspicuous change is in Ghesquière himself. He is happier, lighter in spirit and, when I saw him in April in Paris, utterly candid about how he acquired the "difficult" rap and how the legendary house he rebuilt nearly came apart. As he said one afternoon in his apartment, a rental overlooking the Bon Marche department store in the same Left Bank neighborhood where, 15 years ago, he was peddling African statues to galleries, "I feel I'm in a very good moment of my life -- my real life." His boyfriend of five years, James Kaliardos, the makeup artist and a founder of Visionaire, says that success made a difference. "It was really about the numbers changing and the company backing him up more," Kaliardos says. "He didn't care why. He was just happy they did." Myriam Schaefer, who gave Ghesquière his first big job in fashion, as her assistant at Jean Paul Gaultier, in 1991, and who today works with him on handbag design at Balenciaga, agrees. "I think Nicolas grew up, really," she says. "And he's a businessman -- or, let's say, he has a special nose for business now. He's so sure. And that's really why he's more peaceful and less anxious now."
And to think it all could have gone very differently. In the last days of October 2003, while Ford and de Sole were in the throes of negotiations with PPR, Ghesquière had made up his mind to leave Balenciaga. He felt that de Sole and Ford saw Balenciaga only as a niche brand and didn't fully appreciate that in a short time it had connected with a generation of women. He was convinced that the Balenciaga clothes coming out of Gucci factories in Italy looked too "industrialized" for a French label. And to compound matters, he had barely spoken to Ford and de Sole in months. On a Monday, a despondent Ghesquière called his father. When Ghesquière was in his teens, the two had gone through a bad patch, a classic war of wills, but in recent years they had grown close. Now he told his father: "I want to quit. I'm too unhappy. I feel my clothes are not selling. I feel the environment is not correct." His father agreed that he should leave. Ghesquière said, "All right, I'm going to call Domenico."
He never got the chance. The next day, Ghesquière received an urgent message from Gucci headquarters in London, telling him to call de Sole. He switched on his television, where he heard the news that the rest of the luxury-goods world would learn in a matter of hours: Ford and de Sole were leaving Gucci. After a year of contract negotiations, they had failed to save their own jobs. One career move had been averted by the unexpected turn of two others. And neither Ford nor de Sole knew of Ghesquière's plan until they were reached for this article.
Although Ford and de Sole were regarded as fashion's great communicators -- communicating desire and urgency but also the idea that creative success was inseparable from commercial success -- they seemed oddly constricted where Ghesquière was concerned.
Under the terms of a separation agreement with PPR, Ford and de Sole are not permitted to speak publicly about Gucci. Both sides, though, were eminently frustrated, especially by 2003. There were extenuating factors: on top of the negotiations, de Sole and Ford were dealing with the economic fallout from Sept. 11. Gucci, the group's moneymaker, became their focus. And while they understood Ghesquière's desire to protect Balenciaga's image, they didn't believe the industrial process was anathema to a modern brand, and they urged him to spend more time at the factories to get the look he wanted.
When I spoke with Kaliardos in July in Paris, he said: "I don't think there was a miscommunication with Domenico and Tom. There was a lack of communication." Given the promise of strategic support, he was surprised to see Ghesquière doing so much on his own, and from what he could tell, Balenciaga didn't seem that much better off than it had been under its former owner, especially after Gucci gave Ghesquière the choice of doing either shows or advertising. "The only thing they could say to him was, 'No,"' Kaliardos told me. "The business strategy was, 'We've got to cut the budget.' Every single day, I swear, Nicolas would have some shocking business disaster to deal with. Things just didn't make sense." More troubling to Kaliardos was that he started to hear gossip about Ghesquière. "There was a moment when it was suddenly 'Nicolas is difficult,"' he says. "I know Tom was saying that around, to Anna Wintour and other people. And it's not true. Nicolas is very clear about things. He doesn't play games." (Ford had no comment.) Truth be told, Ghesquière was playing a game of his own. Referring to some wisdom he often heard from his father -- "To live happy, you have to hide" -- he says now: "I was not helping myself at all. Really, I was hiding -- and not being happy." He says that some of the blame for the impasse at Balenciaga rests with de Sole and Ford, "but I played a big role in that, too."
It was perhaps inevitable that Ghesquière would run into problems at Gucci, but it was also surprising. His career has been characterized by extreme vigilance, as people who know him point out. Marie-Amelie Sauve, the stylist on his shows since he took over Balenciaga, in 1997, says: "He can see the future, a point very far away, and he wants to get there. For me, this is Nicolas -- seeing an idea very far away and having the character to get to that point." And Schaefer recalls Ghesquière's telling her, when he left Gaultier after two years: "'You had better go, too. Because you're not going to stay here.' And I was surprised when he said that, because I was a good friend of Jean Paul's. Why should I leave? But Nicolas knew. I left 10 years later, when Jean Paul fired me."
So, was it success at Balenciaga that helped Ghesquière get his groove back, or was it -- as Robert Polet, the new chief executive at Gucci, suggests -- something else?
Ghesquière was born in a suburb of Lille, but spent his childhood in Loudun, a medieval town in the Loire region, close to his mother's home in Saumur, which was the birthplace of Chanel. At 15, Ghesquière announced to his parents that he wanted to work in fashion, and with his father's help, he composed a letter to several designers. That summer he spent a month at Agnes B. in Paris. "I watched, I photocopied, I made the coffee," he says with a laugh. The next summer, he pressed his case further, and was taken on by the designer Corinne Cobson. When he informed his parents that he was quitting school to work full-time for Cobson, a battle broke out with his father. He did finish high school, leaving soon after graduation, but the rift with his father remained. Ghesquière recalls the departure scene: "I said to him: 'I'm going into fashion. I'm not going to become an athletics teacher, the thing you want. I'm going back to Paris, and I'm never coming back."' Many an artistic career has been launched on similar words. Still, he was just 18. "I mean, it was like a movie," he says. "The mother crying and me crying also. The station with the luggage. I'm arriving in Paris."
I ask Ghesquière how much money he had, and he guesses $500. His mother had slipped him a credit card for emergencies ("It's always the mother"), and he stayed with a friend from Loudun who was having a moment as a transvestite. "He was not a boyfriend," Ghesquière says with a quick smile. Ghesquière was still several years away from sorting out his own sexuality, which would be clarified when he met the shoe designer Pierre Hardy, his partner until Ghesquière met Kaliardos. "I had a girlfriend, before Pierre, but I realized very late that it was not for me so bon!" He laughs. His humor, I saw, is vastly overshadowed by the severity of his clothes.
I found it very interesting, although to me Ghesquiere has always been 'in the groove'
Don't be put off by the size of this puppy, you'll wish for more once you're done!
"How Nicolas Got His Groove Back"
New York Times August 28, 2005
By Cathy Horin
(www.nytimes.com)
Nicolas Ghesquière likes his models at Balenciaga to race down the runway. He feels it gives his clothes the energy of sports, though Ghesquière, the son of a former swimming coach and golf-course manager, isn't athletic himself. He is slight of build, with black hair, fashionable stubble and light-blue eyes that essentially tell you everything, from intense interest to rapid disenchantment. Last March, after his fall show -- a streak of camel coats and jackets piped in fur that put editors in a good mood and announced a more mature sensibility -- Ghesquière was backstage greeting guests. Among the first to arrive was Francois-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of the French luxury and retail group Pinault-Printemps-Redoute and technically Ghesquière's boss. As a rule, backstage moments yield little information; if anything, they tend to reinforce the impression that the fashion world is insincere, the tepid congratulations offered in exchange for an advertising page. But in the several minutes that Ghesquière and Pinault talked with each other, with Pinault speaking quietly and without gesture, it was apparent that the warmth between the two men was genuine.
Five years ago, Ghesquière had the fashion world in the palm of his hand, his ultrathin pants and romantic high-necked tops defining a generation of sullen waifs as surely as Saint Laurent's pea coat and saharienne projected the battle lines of the late 1960's. "I do worship his pants," gushed the girl of that moment, Chloé Sevigny, in Vogue in March 2001, saying that once she found his pants, "my life definitely got a lot better." That summer Gucci bought Balenciaga, securing, it seemed, the future of the house as well as that of the then-30-year-old Ghesquière. Finally he would have the financial support of a big luxury group and the brand know-how of its chief executive, Domenico de Sole, and creative director, Tom Ford. Then came Sept. 11, transforming everybody's sense of security. Within a year of the Gucci deal, Ghesquière had acquired a reputation for being difficult. It was said he refused to work with certain Gucci Group executives. It was said he snubbed Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, by not showing up at one of her events. It definitely did not help his reputation as fashion's new messiah when he was caught copying, line for line, a patchwork vest by the late Kaisik Wong, a California designer of the 70's.
By the summer of 2003, as Ford and de Sole were in the middle of fervent contract negotiations with Gucci's majority owner, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, executives of PPR wanted to shut Balenciaga down. Despite its magical name and best-selling handbag, the house suddenly appeared to be less viable than Gucci's other brands: Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen. And Ghesquière himself seemed closed down, engulfed by some oppressive force, a mood reflected in the flower- and lingerie-inspired dresses he showed in October 2003. He says now: "I loved that collection, but if you look at the clothes, everything is overfitted. It was a suffering moment." He smiles and, with a laugh, adds, "And I was determined to suffer!"
Today, all has been drastically reversed. Balenciaga, according to Pinault, expects to be profitable by early 2007, and it could come even sooner, say people close to the house, based on strong sales of the last two seasons. The company has recently added several new collections, including a selection of moderately priced separates, and Edition, demicouture dresses based on originals from the Balenciaga archive. Ghesquière has expanded the shoe line; this fall it will include a chic, low-heeled boot inspired by a style he found in the archive.
He has also designed a new handbag, a compact shoulder style with silver hardware that suits the more sophisticated look of his recent collections, which, not surprisingly, have found a wider audience -- not just the model waifs but also women like the 52-year-old actress Isabelle Huppert. And next year, the designer will collaborate in a Balenciaga exhibition at the Musee de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, the first major retrospective of Cristobal Balenciaga's designs in more than 30 years.
But the most conspicuous change is in Ghesquière himself. He is happier, lighter in spirit and, when I saw him in April in Paris, utterly candid about how he acquired the "difficult" rap and how the legendary house he rebuilt nearly came apart. As he said one afternoon in his apartment, a rental overlooking the Bon Marche department store in the same Left Bank neighborhood where, 15 years ago, he was peddling African statues to galleries, "I feel I'm in a very good moment of my life -- my real life." His boyfriend of five years, James Kaliardos, the makeup artist and a founder of Visionaire, says that success made a difference. "It was really about the numbers changing and the company backing him up more," Kaliardos says. "He didn't care why. He was just happy they did." Myriam Schaefer, who gave Ghesquière his first big job in fashion, as her assistant at Jean Paul Gaultier, in 1991, and who today works with him on handbag design at Balenciaga, agrees. "I think Nicolas grew up, really," she says. "And he's a businessman -- or, let's say, he has a special nose for business now. He's so sure. And that's really why he's more peaceful and less anxious now."
And to think it all could have gone very differently. In the last days of October 2003, while Ford and de Sole were in the throes of negotiations with PPR, Ghesquière had made up his mind to leave Balenciaga. He felt that de Sole and Ford saw Balenciaga only as a niche brand and didn't fully appreciate that in a short time it had connected with a generation of women. He was convinced that the Balenciaga clothes coming out of Gucci factories in Italy looked too "industrialized" for a French label. And to compound matters, he had barely spoken to Ford and de Sole in months. On a Monday, a despondent Ghesquière called his father. When Ghesquière was in his teens, the two had gone through a bad patch, a classic war of wills, but in recent years they had grown close. Now he told his father: "I want to quit. I'm too unhappy. I feel my clothes are not selling. I feel the environment is not correct." His father agreed that he should leave. Ghesquière said, "All right, I'm going to call Domenico."
He never got the chance. The next day, Ghesquière received an urgent message from Gucci headquarters in London, telling him to call de Sole. He switched on his television, where he heard the news that the rest of the luxury-goods world would learn in a matter of hours: Ford and de Sole were leaving Gucci. After a year of contract negotiations, they had failed to save their own jobs. One career move had been averted by the unexpected turn of two others. And neither Ford nor de Sole knew of Ghesquière's plan until they were reached for this article.
Although Ford and de Sole were regarded as fashion's great communicators -- communicating desire and urgency but also the idea that creative success was inseparable from commercial success -- they seemed oddly constricted where Ghesquière was concerned.
Under the terms of a separation agreement with PPR, Ford and de Sole are not permitted to speak publicly about Gucci. Both sides, though, were eminently frustrated, especially by 2003. There were extenuating factors: on top of the negotiations, de Sole and Ford were dealing with the economic fallout from Sept. 11. Gucci, the group's moneymaker, became their focus. And while they understood Ghesquière's desire to protect Balenciaga's image, they didn't believe the industrial process was anathema to a modern brand, and they urged him to spend more time at the factories to get the look he wanted.
When I spoke with Kaliardos in July in Paris, he said: "I don't think there was a miscommunication with Domenico and Tom. There was a lack of communication." Given the promise of strategic support, he was surprised to see Ghesquière doing so much on his own, and from what he could tell, Balenciaga didn't seem that much better off than it had been under its former owner, especially after Gucci gave Ghesquière the choice of doing either shows or advertising. "The only thing they could say to him was, 'No,"' Kaliardos told me. "The business strategy was, 'We've got to cut the budget.' Every single day, I swear, Nicolas would have some shocking business disaster to deal with. Things just didn't make sense." More troubling to Kaliardos was that he started to hear gossip about Ghesquière. "There was a moment when it was suddenly 'Nicolas is difficult,"' he says. "I know Tom was saying that around, to Anna Wintour and other people. And it's not true. Nicolas is very clear about things. He doesn't play games." (Ford had no comment.) Truth be told, Ghesquière was playing a game of his own. Referring to some wisdom he often heard from his father -- "To live happy, you have to hide" -- he says now: "I was not helping myself at all. Really, I was hiding -- and not being happy." He says that some of the blame for the impasse at Balenciaga rests with de Sole and Ford, "but I played a big role in that, too."
It was perhaps inevitable that Ghesquière would run into problems at Gucci, but it was also surprising. His career has been characterized by extreme vigilance, as people who know him point out. Marie-Amelie Sauve, the stylist on his shows since he took over Balenciaga, in 1997, says: "He can see the future, a point very far away, and he wants to get there. For me, this is Nicolas -- seeing an idea very far away and having the character to get to that point." And Schaefer recalls Ghesquière's telling her, when he left Gaultier after two years: "'You had better go, too. Because you're not going to stay here.' And I was surprised when he said that, because I was a good friend of Jean Paul's. Why should I leave? But Nicolas knew. I left 10 years later, when Jean Paul fired me."
So, was it success at Balenciaga that helped Ghesquière get his groove back, or was it -- as Robert Polet, the new chief executive at Gucci, suggests -- something else?
Ghesquière was born in a suburb of Lille, but spent his childhood in Loudun, a medieval town in the Loire region, close to his mother's home in Saumur, which was the birthplace of Chanel. At 15, Ghesquière announced to his parents that he wanted to work in fashion, and with his father's help, he composed a letter to several designers. That summer he spent a month at Agnes B. in Paris. "I watched, I photocopied, I made the coffee," he says with a laugh. The next summer, he pressed his case further, and was taken on by the designer Corinne Cobson. When he informed his parents that he was quitting school to work full-time for Cobson, a battle broke out with his father. He did finish high school, leaving soon after graduation, but the rift with his father remained. Ghesquière recalls the departure scene: "I said to him: 'I'm going into fashion. I'm not going to become an athletics teacher, the thing you want. I'm going back to Paris, and I'm never coming back."' Many an artistic career has been launched on similar words. Still, he was just 18. "I mean, it was like a movie," he says. "The mother crying and me crying also. The station with the luggage. I'm arriving in Paris."
I ask Ghesquière how much money he had, and he guesses $500. His mother had slipped him a credit card for emergencies ("It's always the mother"), and he stayed with a friend from Loudun who was having a moment as a transvestite. "He was not a boyfriend," Ghesquière says with a quick smile. Ghesquière was still several years away from sorting out his own sexuality, which would be clarified when he met the shoe designer Pierre Hardy, his partner until Ghesquière met Kaliardos. "I had a girlfriend, before Pierre, but I realized very late that it was not for me so bon!" He laughs. His humor, I saw, is vastly overshadowed by the severity of his clothes.
