As the sun set over the Seine in Paris last night, Pharrell Williams debuted his vision for Louis Vuitton. It was one of the most anticipated events in recent fashion history—maybe all of fashion history—and the superstar music producer delivered a show full of megawattage and pure joy. He shut down the Pont Neuf, wrapped it in gold, ran a runway from end to end, and filled it with a fashion spectacle that makes instantly clear Pharrell has returned to stunting—now with the power and resources of LVMH, Europe’s most valuable company, at his disposal. This was not merely a star-studded runway show. Pharrell has not just upped the ante, he has launched the entire enterprise into the stratosphere. It puts an exclamation mark on the very meaning of his appointment in February: a paradigm shift is here, one that recenters fashion in the universe of art and entertainment.
Some may assume that all fashion shows are full of celebrities and splashy live performances and champagne, which is true to some extent. But there were more one-name stars at this show than I have ever seen in one place, and a few who I have never seen at a fashion show. You couldn’t take three steps without bumping into one of them: Beyonce, Jay, Kim, Zendaya, Tyler, Lebron, Rocky, and Rihanna. This guest list was not merely the work of a high-powered celebrity wrangler. It was the work of Pharrell in conjunction with the powerhouse that is LVMH—a union of luxury and pop culture forces.
When all the guests were seated, and the sky dimmed to a rich shade of indigo, the show opened with an original composition written by Pharrell, performed by the Chinese pianist Lang Lang and his orchestra. Then began the runway, which featured cameos from Clipse, legendary designer Stefano Pilati and models driving golf carts hauling oversized LV trunks. The army of models stormed down the runway wearing clothes that encapsulated the elegant flyness for which Pharrell is known. Halfway through the show, Voices of Fire, the choir lead by Pharrell’s uncle, Bishop Ezekiel Williams, arrived, and they sang “Joy (Unspeakable),” another new song by Pharrell, that’s just as catchy and uplifting as “Happy.”
The climactic moment came as the orchestra and the choir joined together for an epic musical finale. The models filled the bridge and Pharrell bounded out to join them, wearing a Louis Vuitton suit in the checkerboard print that was all over the show—a new print he calls Damouflage, which was also being worn by Kim Kardashian and Rihanna in the crowd. Behind Pharrell came his entire design team—there must have been fifty of them. When he got to the middle of the bridge, Pharrell dropped to his knees and put his hands together in prayer, then stood to embrace his family. Pharrell lingered an extra moment on the runway, seeming to not want to let the moment end.
But the show wasn’t over yet. A DJ encouraged guests to stay as burgers wrapped in LV-branded paper and glasses of champagne were passed through the crowd. When Jay-Z appeared on a stage to perform, it was undeniable. Pharrell is playing a different game. You could feel the fashion world recalibrating around him. “Make some noise for Skateboard P tonight,” Jay Z said, with Pharrell joining him on stage for a couple songs. “This young man did something extraordinary. I’m so proud of you.”
Later that evening Pharrell posted a video on Instagram that showed him predicting his triumph in a pre-show toast that he had offered earlier in the night to LV CEO Pietro Beccari, the man who gave Pharrell his new job. “Tonight we won’t let you down,” he says. “Tonight we slay dragons.”
The seeds of Tuesday night’s event were planted when he got a call late last year that he was not expecting.
“Blindsided.” That’s how Pharrell felt sitting in his Miami studio in late 2022, looking out over the water from his balcony, when he heard that he’d been chosen by Louis Vuitton CEO Pietro Beccari to be the house’s next men’s creative director. “I never thought that it would be me. It was—and it’s still—unreal.”
Since taking over, Pharrell has been working out of a studio in the LV headquarters just across the street from the Pont Neuf in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement. When I met him there last week, the room was mostly occupied by racks of clothes, whiteboards, and a few tables, at which half a dozen or so members of Pharrell’s design team were quietly working on Tuesday’s spectacle. Pharrell’s furnishings had not yet arrived. The office is nice but unremarkable. The windows in the studio look towards the Seine, but seated on a C-shaped sofa in the corner, Pharrell and I are joined by the fifteen-metre-tall likeness of Yahoi Kusama that has been installed in front of the building, and who’s head rises to be eye level with us.
While Pharrell may have been shocked by his appointment to this position, I suggest that for others, it may not have been such a surprise.
Yes, the rumours swirling in before the announcement indicated that the position might go to a buzzy young designer, someone who graduated from a prestigious fashion school. But as one of the biggest music producers on the planet, a designer with a credible claim to the massification of streetwear, and a fashion disciple who has designed alongside legends like Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld, it’s not like he’s unqualified. He is, in many ways, perfect for the job.
Pharrell, famously, profusely humble, demures. “I didn't know it was leading to this though,” he says of his prior accomplishments. “I would've worked harder.”
It’s difficult to imagine Pharrell working any harder than he has. As soon as he accepted the role, he decided he wouldn’t be commuting from his home in Miami. This is not a gig for him. This is a new career, and a huge new job. He and his family would be moving to Paris. He presented an initial concept for his collection to LVMH chief Bernard Arnaut and Louis Vuitton CEO Pietro Beccari and got to work. There were, Pharrell says, no directives: “They just gave me the keys.”
He didn’t begin with a concept or a theme, or even a specific piece he wanted to make—he was initially driven by his intuition and his experience as a Louis Vuitton client. He imagined the five categories that would make up the collection—tailoring, comfort, resort, sport, and a core collection of perennial basics. A fully conceived universe that could only have come from the mind of a seasoned LV shopper.
Then he decided on the hero accessory, the piece around which he could build campaigns and drive gargantuan sales. He needed an It bag. His idea was to use the iconic LV Speedy bag, in primary colours, riffing on Canal Street counterfeits. But, he tells me, “I did what they can't do. Use real, next-level, buttery, buttery crushed leather.” I have touched this leather and it is, in fact, improbably soft, like it could be spread on toast. The bag is supple and unstructured and pleasantly droopy. Carrying one in your arm is like holding an adorable, fat puppy.
The bag is maybe the purest early example of where Pharrell’s genius lies: he’s an expert in crafting mass-adored products that surprise and delight. And though he’s never run a storied fashion label, his bona fides as a creator are unimpeachable. In addition to his work as a chart-topping musician and producer, he also has a long history of designing clothes and accessories that people want—creating products for his streetwear brands BBC and Ice Cream, for Adidas, for Chanel, for Tiffany. Even his personal style gets consumed and co-opted like the masses. He’s been a bellwether of fashion for the better part of twenty years. Every time he puts on a new hat or different pair of sunglasses a trend cycle begins.
So what exactly do the keys to Louis Vuitton open? “When you get this appointment, what you get is an amazing team of 55 departments, 2,500 master artisans, resources to do whatever it is that you envisage,” Pharrell says. “You never really hear, ‘No.’ And if it's ‘no’ it's because something is not possible. But then they're off in the distance trying to figure out how to engineer around it, or make something bigger.”
Pharrell’s debut collection is certainly bigger. Bigger than any men’s Louis Vuitton collection that has come before it, and bigger than what anyone might have expected. Pharrell walked me through the vast showroom where the stylist Matthew Henson and Cactus Plant Flea Market designer Cynthia Lu were finalizing looks ahead of Tuesday’s show.
The tailoring portion of the collection is vast and elegant, some of it including embroidered details of images from paintings by the American artist Henry Taylor. In the comfort category, there are oversized fur slippers with heavy rubber paw print treads and tracksuits riddled with pearls (for a quick run to the gas station when, as Pharrell suggests, “You might be out of batteries or some shit.”) For sport there are other essential items, like leather rugby shirts and a croc-skin baseball jacket.
Walking through the showroom with Pharrell touching fabrics and watching him try on his favourite pieces—like a leather Damouflage hooded work coat cut like one you’d find in a hardware store—it’s apparent that Pharrell is genuinely as excited to wear this collection as he is to be making it. He moves swiftly from rack to rack, pointing out his favourite pieces and emphasizing that they were all made by the best craftspeople in the world.
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The development Pharrell is most excited about is the Damouflage print that adorned the suit he would wear at the show—a version of LV’s famous chessboard Damier, flipped into a version of digital camo. Hence: Damouflage. It appears on flared jeans, outwear, bags and boots, sometimes in the form of pixelated images from iconic movie scenes, designed by E.T. Artist.
But if history is any indication, the thing to keep an eye on is the sunglasses, particularly the round, rubberized acetate pair with camera lenses. This is where it all started for Pharrell.
Twenty years ago, at the opening of the Louis Vuitton store on 57th Street, he was approached by Marc Jacobs, who was then the creative director of the house. “I like your sunglasses,” Jacobs said. “You want to come make some?" Pharrell explained that the pair he was wearing were made by his close friend and collaborator Nigo, and Jacobs agreed to bring them both onboard to design a collection of sunglasses. One of the dozen or so pairs they came up with is the Millionaire, originally released by LV in 2004. Today the Millionaire shades are a genuine piece of fashion history, and were recreated by Virgil Abloh when he was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s. This accessory has come to symbolize the boundary-breaking arrival of Black American artists like Pharrell, Abloh, Kanye West and others to the fashion party. Lebron James wore a pair sitting in the front row at Tuesday last night’s show.
Pharrell comes back to this story frequently, and credits Jacobs not just for setting his career in motion, but for helping to break those boundaries. “Marc was just so incredibly generous,” Pharrell says. “He shifted the paradigm. At that time, musicians were only really used here and there in the campaign, especially Black ones. And maybe we could use the clothes editorially, but there was no allowing people who looked like us to come in behind the curtains and go design and make things. You know what I'm saying? So Marc was first. He was the pioneer of that, and now you see that all over the place.”
I asked Pharrell if any part of him was unsure about taking this job. He’s already massively successful and wealthy, and sure this is going to be a lot of work. Did he hesitate? Did anything about it make him nervous?
“Hesitation and nerves are not a thing for me in this part of my life,” he says. “It's like not knowing that you were hungry. Would you hesitate to eat when the greatest meal that has ever been given to you ever is placed before you? You didn't even know you were hungry because you were complacent and thankful. Would you hesitate to eat?”
Certainly not. But Pharrell, always humble, always modest, does have one superpower that he is confident he can rely on in this new role. And it relates directly to ideas he has for the brand about ambassadorship and building community.
“All of my friends are GOATs,” he says. “I'm a shepherd who happens to know a lot of GOATS, as you can see in the campaign.” That campaign he’s referring to, his first for the house, stars Rihanna, wearing a Damo shirt, unbuttoned around her pregnant belly, her arms full with colorfully, buttery leather Speedy bags. Pharrell knew he wanted her to be the first face of the brand. “I walked in with that,” he says. “I was like, ‘I want her.’” But there are plenty more GOATs in Pharrell’s pasture. “I'm serious,” he reiterates. “That's the one thing I can brag about: my friends. Some people brag on money, some people brag on possession, the things that they have, but I brag on my associations because they're gifts. All of my friends are GOATs. And if you come playing with me, I will send my goats to your yard and they will eat all of your grass. They clear mountains of grass.”
In the show notes, Pharrell dedicated the occasion to his predecessor and friend Virgil Abloh: “This moment is dedicated to the giant before me. To our brother in spirit.” It’s a reminder of this bittersweet moment, and the inescapable reality that without the untimely passing of Abloh, none of this would have happened for Pharrell. There's no denying that this moment represents the completion of the Pharrell coronation, and brings to a full and final end the era of Abloh at LV. And yet, even as the torch is passed to Pharrell, he feels Abloh's presence enduring.
One of the show concepts, which serves as a sort of tagline for the collection, “VA to Paris. Paris to VA,” is a reference to Abloh leaving Paris to come play at Pharrell’s Virginia Beach music festival, Something in the Water in 2019. Abloh closed the main stage of the festival on Friday night, and Pharrell closed it on Saturday. “There's a huge connection with Virgil,” Pharrell tells me. “Some of the things that I put in the line are things that he created. I'm still collaborating with him in spirit.”
Collaboration in fashion, as we know it today, started with streetwear. Pharrell is intimately familiar with the history of streetwear—he’s the king of it, and he Carrie’s an LV duck designed by Nigo as proof of his commitment to that way of doing things.
“I come from streetwear. One hundred percent,” Pharrell says. “When we were doing BBC, I hated being called that. I was always trying to get away from it because I was just trying to garner respect elsewhere.” He felt the label was limiting, made him less serious. “It was a very similar thing to when we were doing N.E.R.D. I hated being called anything hip hop. I didn't realize the coolest part is to be associated with hip-hop music and sound like that. It was even cooler than all these other things that I wanted to garner respect from.” But eventually Pharrell had the realization that the coolest part was to come from hip-hop and have this new sound, not to try and shroud his roots. “And it's the same thing with streetwear,” he says. “It's like, ‘Nah, I'm not from Central Saint Martins. I didn't go there.’ I wasn't classically trained, but I got this appointment. I'm the ruler of this position.”
Luckily for Pharrell, the community he’s been cultivating in fashion and in music since the beginning—back when he was introducing the world to streetwear, and introducing a new sound to hip-hop—they’re all still with him. That history brought him to the place he is now, and represents his unique ability to upend the culture.
“I've grown with it,” he says. “We all grew together. We're different. We're in a different place. The world has shifted, clearly.”
At midnight, as the crowd exited the Pont Neuf and flooded the streets of Paris, that shift was felt acutely. This is the beginning for Pharrell and LV, but it also feels like the beginning of a new era, and fitting for it to start on a note of joy.
