Alysa Liu Carries Louis Vuitton's New Highline Bag

In February Alysa Liu was standing on an Olympic podium. Now she's carrying the Highline, a new Louis Vuitton bag from Nicolas Ghesquière's Cruise 2027 collection, in her first campaign for the house.

The house describes it as a contemporary shape that turns its trunk making heritage into an everyday companion. Liu is 21 and a House Ambassador. She's selling trunk heritage to people who've never owned a trunk.

That's a fast climb, even by Olympic standards. It took her nine months.

Alysa Liu Went From Front Row to Campaign Lead

Liu won Olympic gold in figure skating on February 19, 2026, the first American woman to do it in 24 years. By March she was sitting front row at Ghesquière's Fall Winter 2026 show in the Louvre's Cour Carrée, next to Zendaya, Lisa, Chase Infiniti and Jennifer Connelly. She wore a brown denim jacket with matching jeans and carried a Monogram East West bag.

Louis Vuitton named her a House Ambassador on May 4. Ghesquière's line at the time is still the clearest pitch for her. "Alysa Liu embodies the modern Louis Vuitton Woman, confident, creative, and utterly fearless," he said. Liu called it "honestly surreal."

She's been busy wearing the job since. She went to the Met Gala in a custom Louis Vuitton ballgown, then carried an Express PM in Saga Noir crinkled calfskin to the Figure Skating in Harlem gala that month.

Her year hasn't been only luxury. In July she fronted Nike's Studio Fleece line, a 320 GSM brushed cotton crew, and on October 31 she turned up in a MrBeast video alongside Caitlin Clark and Simone Biles. Nike gets the skater in sweats. Louis Vuitton gets her holding a bag that's meant to read as heirloom.

Both deals work for one reason. People already knew her face before any brand did.

Four Women in the Frick's Galleries

Ethan James Green shot the Cruise 2027 campaign inside The Frick Collection in New York, the museum where Ghesquière showed the collection in May. Liu shares it with Chase Infiniti, a House Ambassador since December 2025, and actors Giulia Maenza and Amiah Miller. Every woman in the cast is 26 or younger.

The Frick matters to this collection. The May show was the first fashion presentation ever staged in the museum's first floor galleries, and it opened a three year cultural sponsorship between the house and the museum. Ghesquière built the clothes around a meeting of downtown energy and uptown polish, with Keith Haring as a running reference, and the opening look drew on a 1930s leather suitcase from the archive.

Coming back to those rooms for the campaign is a choice. A runway is one night. A campaign shot in the Frick keeps a 21 year old skater among its paintings for a whole season.

Trunk Making Moves Into an Everyday Bag

Louis Vuitton started as a trunk maker in Paris in 1854, and almost every new bag it launches gets explained through that history. The house's own words put Liu at the center of that story, saying she "embodies the dynamic visual language" of Ghesquière's collection.

The rest of the Cruise 2027 leather goods lean on that history too. The collection reworked the Speedy and the Alma, puffed up the Petite Malle, a bag already shaped like a miniature trunk, and added a leather bag with a gold frame. A playful In My Bag motif runs through the accessories.

Trunks are the house's oldest claim to craft. The workshop in Asnières still builds them, and for the Fall Winter 2026 menswear show the house unveiled a stained glass trunk that took 800 hours of hand painting. That show belongs to Pharrell Williams, who runs menswear, while Ghesquière has led women's since 2013.

So the Highline sits on the women's side of a house split between two creative directors, both mining one trunk room.

Putting a skater on it is the smart part. Figure skating is a sport of hand finished costumes and hard edges, years of work for four minutes on the ice. Liu knows what it looks like when craft has to survive a performance. She's spent her whole career in clothes made to be seen up close and still hold together at full speed.

The Highline is the bag Louis Vuitton put in her hands for that first campaign, a trunk maker's idea of durability carried by the 2026 Olympic champion.