Grace Coddington & Nicolas Ghesquière Reunite for a Whimsical Travel Collection for Louis Vuitton

On the battlefield, lifelong friendships are forged by shared trauma. In the fashion industry, those relationships are often formed by shared drama. The emotionally charged moment that forever bonded the legendary stylist Grace Coddington and the fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière occurred on the set of a 2003 Alice in Wonderland–themed Vogue photo shoot, helmed by the notoriously exacting photographer Annie Leibovitz and starring the model Natalia Vodianova. Coddington, then the magazine’s creative director, somehow had recruited Donatella Versace, John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, and a host of other iconic egos to both create original looks for the story and pose together in a 19th-century French château dressed as characters from the Lewis Carroll tale. (Galliano wore a Queen of Hearts gown; Marc Jacobs sat cross-legged and smoking atop a giant mushroom.) Ghesquière, then the creative director of Balenciaga, had custom-made a blue silk chiffon minidress set off by a cascade of high-volume, semi-transparent white frills that Vodianova was meant to wear for the final image, in which she leaps through a looking glass. “It was this really adorable little thing,” says Coddington of the frock, “but when I showed it to Annie, she said, ‘Ugh! All those ruffles are on the wrong side! I’m shooting from this end, and you won’t see them. Can’t she put it on back to front or something?’ ”

Coddington was aghast. “I thought, Please don’t embarrass me!” she says. “And I saw Nicolas’s face falling.” Ghesquière, however, quickly rose to the occasion. “He said, ‘Give me 20 minutes,’ ” she remembers. Along with his seamstress, he disappeared into a wardrobe van, emerging a short while later with something “completely redone. And it was a very complicated dress! I just couldn’t believe it, and that cemented a really close friendship.”

One that endures to this day. Though Coddington, at 84, now mostly skips the European fashion weeks, she continues to sit front row at all of Ghesquière’s shows. Over the years, the pair have worked together on a succession of creative projects, starting with a 2012 mini collection of Balenciaga bags and scarves adorned with Coddington’s illustrations of her beloved cats modeling Ghesquière’s runway looks. Their collaboration continued at Louis Vuitton, where Ghesquière has served as artistic director of women’s collections since 2013. For the French fashion house’s 2019 cruise collection, Coddington designed bags and small leather goods embossed with “catograms”: classic LV logos merged with drawings of her ultrafluffy Persians. “And they sold masses and masses and masses,” she says. “Nicolas said, ‘Oh, we must do another one.’ But time went by until finally I said, ‘You better hurry up! I’m getting old!’ ”

And so, about a year and a half ago, they began work on Louis Vuitton Travels With Grace Coddington, a capsule collection—with more cats, of course—that debuts this fall. “My brief was: Do whatever you think is great for travel,” says Coddington, who came up with practical, packable items like a silky dressing gown and matching pajamas, a few tote bags, organizing pouches, and wool blankets in different patterns. There are also some actual clothes, including skirts, sweaters, and hooded sweatshirts printed with Coddington’s cartoons of her fur babies on the go—flying over Paris in a biplane, visiting the Great Wall of China, blasting off into space. (In actuality, she admits, her cats do not enjoy travel, preferring to lounge in the garden of her Long Island country house.)

On a hot afternoon in New York, Coddington is wearing one of her favorites from the new line: a crepe de chine shirtdress with LV’s monogram flower. The wasp-waisted 1940s silhouette was inspired by a vintage piece she found about a decade ago and had re-created by her tailor in various fabrics. “I do a new version each spring, and they always seem to work, and they’re very comfortable,” she says. “They’re like a uniform for me.” Indeed, just before our interview, she had been wearing the dress while gardening on the plant-packed terrace of her Chelsea apartment.

Still, Coddington insists that she’s “not a designer” and that the clothes are “all just things I would wear. I can only do what pleases me! There’s nothing directional because that’s Nicolas—I didn’t want to go into his field at all.” Her reluctance no doubt stems from her respect for the profession: She’s witnessed fashion’s most revered talents at work for more than six decades, dating back to her days as an 18-year-old model in London. While she did sew her own clothes when she was growing up on a small island off the coast of Wales, where her parents owned a hotel and where she first fell in love with fashion through reading Vogue, it’s a safe bet that she couldn’t rip apart and revamp a couture dress in 20 minutes in a wardrobe van. But there’s also the fact that Coddington has generally craved privacy, making the idea of having her name on clothing feel “dangerous,” as she puts it. Her parents, she says, were “very Victorian—it was ‘Be seen but not heard,’ ” and that message was reinforced early in her career: “When you’re a model, it’s certainly not focused on your voice or your opinion,” she says. Even at British Vogue, where she landed as a junior fashion editor in 1968 after scars from a car accident ended her time in front of the camera, she was taught to dim her light. “We didn’t even get our name on the page,” she remembers. “You were anonymous. You were not Grace; you were Vogue. And I was very comfortable with that.”

That desire to remain safely behind the scenes continued even as she moved to New York in 1987 to work as a design director for Calvin Klein and, after a year, reunited with her British Vogue boss, Anna Wintour, when Wintour took the helm of American Vogue. At fashion shows, sitting up front among the industry’s peacocks, she was the fluffy-haired woman in simple, all-black separates and flat shoes, face in a notebook as she sketched every single look that came down the runway. (“I had to draw every look, because if I didn’t, designers might think I didn’t like something,” she says.) In 2002, when she was given the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award, she was so loath to speak publicly that she made an animated mini movie in which a cartoon Grace accepted the honor.

It makes sense, then, that when the filmmaker R.J. Cutler showed up at the Vogue offices with his crew to film his 2009 documentary The September Issue, she was horrified. “It was intrusive and all those things that I hated,” remembers Coddington, who made her feelings clear by remaining furiously tight-lipped through a long elevator ride with Wintour in one particularly memorable scene. But as she warmed up to Cutler over the course of filming, she emerged as the breakout star of the film, with a wickedly grumpy sense of humor, a seemingly endless ability to find inspiration in the world around her, and an ingenious knack for getting her way with Wintour that was deeply satisfying to behold.

In the weeks before the movie debuted, Coddington recalls, a colleague told her, “ ‘You know when this comes out, people will come up to you and recognize you.’ And I said, ‘That’s stupid—of course they won’t! I’m just a small part of that movie.’ But I didn’t realize how it had been cut, and sure enough the movie came out, and I walked out of my apartment building and everyone was like, ‘Grace!’ And I thought, Oh god, here it starts. But everybody was very nice, very charming, very sweet, and it wasn’t aggressive. So slowly, slowly, I got used to it, and then ultimately it helped me. It opened a lot of doors, and I did my memoir, which was fun. It wouldn’t have meant anything before because people would have said, ‘Who’s Grace?’ ”

Grace: A Memoir was published in 2012, to much success. And in 2015, Phaidon reprinted her coffee table book Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue, which was priced at $125 when it was published in 2002 but, following her big-screen star turn, was selling for upwards of four figures at resale. A third volume, a compilation of her newer works, is due out next year.

In 2016, when Coddington stepped down from her full-time post as Vogue’s creative director at the age of 75, many assumed the move amounted to retirement. In fact, the opposite has proven to be true. Even as she continued to produce shoots for Vogue on a freelance basis and embarked upon her collaborations with Ghesquière, she began styling for other magazines (including this one), teamed up with the Parisian pottery house Astier de Villatte on a line of home decor (cat-themed, bien sûr), and even did a namesake perfume with Comme des Garçons. It was the fragrance launch, she says, that finally compelled her to join social media, after the brand told her she needed an Instagram account in order to promote it. For her very first post, she shared a cartoon of herself sitting naked on a slingback chair to advertise Grace Coddington: No Clothes, an online charity auction of nude portraits she’d curated. “And they took me down! It wasn’t even indecent! You couldn’t see anything, and it’s not like it was a life drawing. It was so mad,” she says, laughing, adding with a canary-eating twinkle in her eye, “but I got it put up again.”

It would be inaccurate to describe Coddington—a woman who’s been everywhere, met everyone, and worked at the absolute pinnacle of her industry for the majority of her life—as a late bloomer. But it’s undeniable that, in her 80s, without a powerful magazine or a high-profile boss to hide behind, she’s truly come into her own. Perhaps the most obvious indication? After half a century of dressing entirely in black—in order to avoid visually “getting in the way” while styling, she says, but also because “the thing about black is you look thinner”—she decided this year, almost on a whim, to start wearing color. “It just sort of happened,” she says. “I went into a showroom, and I saw some beautiful colored sweaters and things, and I grabbed them. I succumbed.” Shrinking herself is clearly no longer on the agenda.

Hair by Shay Ashual at R3 MGMT; makeup by Francelle Daly for Love+Craft+Beauty at 2B Management; manicures by Mayumi Abuku for Chanel at Susan Price NYC. Models: Lily Nova at One Management; Zoe Head at Women Management. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting. Set design by Piers Hanmer at Art + Commerce.

Produced by Gracey Connelly; First Photo Assistant: Shri Prasham; Photo Assistants: Alexander Johnstone, Logan Khidekel; Digital Technician: Tadaaki Shibuya; Retouching: Gloss Studio; Fashion Assistant: India Reed; Production Assistant: Dylan McDean; Hair Assistant: Taichi Saito; Makeup Assistant: Madrona Redhawk; Manicure Assistant: Kuniko Inoue; Set Assistants: Neda Mouzayanni, Louis Sarowsky, George DeLacey, Giorgia Cantoni; Tailor: Hailey Desjardins.