Pharrell Williams on Louis Vuitton Debut: “It’s Like Love at First Sight.”
The musician plans to double down on bags and the brand's signature Damier check in what he promises will be a "crazy show."
PARIS – Last Thursday, the countdown to Pharrell Williams’ debut for Louis Vuitton officially began with the reveal of his first campaign as creative director of menswear, featuring a pregnant Rihanna.
The image did not appear on Vuitton’s social media accounts. Instead, Williams posed in front of a giant billboard on the Seine-facing side of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and posted the image to his Instagram account, underlining just how much clout he enjoys as the first global music star to take the reins of a top luxury house.
Later that morning, Williams appeared at Vuitton’s headquarters wearing the same outfit: a black biker jacket and flared pants made from the house’s signature Epi leather, which is more commonly used for bags and wallets. The look, it turns out, was pulled from his spring 2024 collection, due to be unveiled on Tuesday at 9.30 p.m. on the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris in the season’s most highly anticipated show.
Louis Vuitton chairman and chief executive officer Pietro Beccari, joining via Zoom from a car somewhere in Greece where he had just attended the brand’s high jewelry presentation, gently chided his new recruit.
“Pharrell is unveiling the collection piece by piece, because it is already 20 days that he wears the show,” he said, noting that Williams is approaching the assignment from the perspective of a prolific luxury shopper. “He’s impatient and I said, ‘He’s the client, right? So that’s it.’”
“I am the client,” assented Williams, who had accessorized the look with a $1.2 million Richard Mille RM 88 Automatic Tourbillon Smiley watch, solid gold grills, a yellow diamond necklace spelling out the words “God Is,” and an updated version of the custom-made Tiffany & Co. diamond sunglasses that have become his signature eyewear over the last 18 months.
That distinctive style has made the “Happy” hitmaker a hot commodity for luxury brands for the last two decades.
Lest anyone forget, Williams has been active in high-end fashion since codesigning a line of eyewear with Marc Jacobs at Vuitton in 2004.
That was followed by a jewelry collection for the house in 2008, when Beccari was a senior executive at the brand; projects with Moncler and Moynat, and a partnership with Chanel, in addition to his involvement with the more mass-market G-Star Raw and Adidas labels.
Williams appeared in Chanel campaigns, walked in its runway shows, and created a one-off sneaker with Chanel and Adidas Originals in 2017 that generated a waiting list of 120,000 people for 500 pairs. After that came a unisex clothing collection in 2019, designed with the brand’s late creative director Karl Lagerfeld.
“He started in fashion with Louis Vuitton; he went to university with Karl and now he’s got the job of his dreams, which I think he deserves, because he’s a genius at large,” Beccari declared.
Williams is aware that not everyone is thrilled with his appointment, which cements Vuitton’s positioning as a “cultural” brand with broad reach across segments including sports, gaming, music and art.
Some commentators were disappointed that the job didn’t go to one of the young designers rumored to be in the running, even though his predecessor Virgil Abloh also came from a non-fashion background, redefining the role of creative director into something closer to a curator.
“I didn’t go to Central Saint Martins, but I also didn’t go to Julliard either in music and I mean, we see how that turned out,” said the performer, who has won 13 Grammy Awards. “It’s cool. That’s a very fair observation. But neither did Vivienne Westwood, right? Tadao Ando was self-taught. I mean, he’s the GOAT, right? I only aspire to express myself.”
As unexpected as the offer was, “it feels natural,” he continued.
Williams was first introduced to Louis Vuitton through rappers and Harlem tailor Dapper Dan’s bootleg logo designs, but back then, the actual brand felt way out of his league.
These days, he’s firmly entrenched in the luxury world, notably through his friendship with Japanese designer Nigo, who helped him to launch the streetwear labels Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream, and is now creative director at Kenzo, a brand also owned by luxury group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Nigo helped him design the Millionaire sunglasses for Vuitton, and subsequently created several capsule collections with Abloh for Vuitton.
“It’s crazy because you can see a photo of myself with Kanye [West] and Virgil wearing the sunglasses, so it’s like all of this serendipitous connection,” Williams said.
After the picture was taken, West and Abloh went on to found their own fashion lines, laying the groundwork for the crossover between streetwear and luxury that is the template for most menswear today.
“Every day, I gotta to pinch myself because it’s an appointment, and I was chosen,” Williams continued. “Pietro saw something, and I’m touched by that and I honor that every day.”
The two started discussing the prospect of Williams taking on the menswear role in November last year. The announcement came swiftly after Beccari officially joined Vuitton from Dior on Feb. 1, capping a storied 17-year career at LVMH.
“What would you do? Right? Like, you know, you get to come in here with the world’s greatest house; dare I say, unlimited resources. I hardly ever hear ‘no,’ and when I do, it’s always for a real constructive reason, and then I’m given an opportunity to do something even bigger, even greater. This has been nothing but a gift,” Williams said.
Over the last few months, he has drip-fed clues about his debut collection. At his Something in the Water music festival in his hometown of Virginia Beach, Va., in April, the hip-hop star appeared on stage in a biker jacket with rhinestone patches.
An online teaser for the event showed him sitting on top of a monogram-embossed wooden pyramid with the tagline: “Virginia is for LVers,” a twist on the state’s slogan “Virginia is for Lovers” that appeared on Vuitton-branded merchandise sold at the event.
He noted that his appointment was announced on Valentine’s Day.
“It’s like love at first sight,” he said.
“LV is for Louis Vuitton, but it’s also for lovers, you know: lovers of the moment, lovers of detail, lovers of this time and people who want to absolutely squeeze the best out of life, down to the last drop.”
He sprinkled extra pointers into the teaser image, which showed Rihanna wearing a shirt in a pixelated Damier check that is only partially buttoned, exposing her pregnancy bump. Her arms are laden with Speedy bags of various sizes in Vuitton’s signature monogram, but in a range of primary colors, including red, yellow and green, and made of leather instead of canvas.
“Here, I knew I wanted to do a couple things: one, I knew I wanted to make my presence known in bags,” said Williams, citing past projects like the oversized purple Haut à Courroies bag he commissioned from Hermès, and his stint as ambassador for Chanel’s Gabrielle bag.
“Bags are very important to me, it’s very important to the house, and what better person to go on that journey with us than my really good friend?” Williams said of Rihanna, who also has a business partnership with LVMH on her Fenty Beauty line.
“The second thing is, I knew that I wanted to really lean into the Damier, something that hadn’t had such a great concentration in it, and we did so by using the Damier as a platform and as a new artistic discipline, and we have some really interesting expressions,” he said of the checkerboard motif.
Williams said he was building on the work of his predecessors, including Abloh, who made history by becoming the first African-American artistic director at the French luxury house. The men’s position had remained vacant since Abloh’s untimely death in November 2021.
“His spirit is still here and now that I’m here, it’s not cancelling out anything from the past. If anything, it’s just continuing to evolve,” he said.
Beccari noted that Williams is first and foremost a fan of the brand. “He loves details and loves to be very elegant in every occasion,” the executive said.
He described the push-and-pull that defines his relationships with designers, both in his previous jobs and now with Williams and Nicolas Ghesquière, the artistic director of womenswear at Vuitton.
“You have to find the equilibrium, to find the possibility of giving them the freedom of expression of the creative mind, and at the same time, you’re responsible for a huge business, and you have to get some rationality into it, and that’s the difficult part,” he said. “I believe I created special relationships with each single one of them, as I’m creating with Nicolas and with Pharrell, and that’s the pleasure part, when you see this balance.”
He said it involved making concessions on both sides. “I try to be always authentic with them and tell them what I think. I have no hidden agenda,” Beccari said.
He praised Williams for tackling the task with a “humble spirit” and establishing a good rapport with his team. “They see not the star, the superstar, they see a good human being. That’s what makes his coming to Vuitton not only very bold, but it makes it an incredible, positive, energetic addition to the fantastic team that we have,” he said.
Beccari declined to provide figures, but said that Vuitton has potential to increase its men’s business without adding new stores. “Pharrell has a very important role,” he said. “I believe we have a fantastic network. We need to exploit what we have, but in terms of potential, being already big, I think it can be even bigger, and with Pharrell, prosper even more.”
An entrepreneur whose activities extend to film and television, music festivals and nonprofits, Williams is acutely aware of the stakes at Vuitton, the world’s biggest luxury brand and the first to generate annual revenues of more than 20 billion euros.
“It’s a big, big, big, big, big, big plane that we take off in when we do it, you know? And here we are on a tarmac right now, headed toward the 20th, and we’re about to take flight,” he said.
It promises to be a spectacular event in every respect, and one that will go down in the annals of fashion. Williams confirmed that the front row of his show would be stacked with celebrity friends. “It’s like ‘Game of Thrones,’ House Vuitton. It’s very important. It’s just such a momentous occasion,” he said.
Expect exclusive music on the soundtrack. “One [track] that I’ve been working on for, like, 10 years,” teased Williams, who has set up a mini studio in his office at Vuitton. “I’m getting into it. I want you to see it. I want you to feel it.”
He was confident ahead of his big night, buoyed by the support of his design studio and Vuitton’s master artisans. “When you add creativity to the highest arc of quality, you get this amazing alchemical reaction, which is a crazy collection, a crazy show, crazy energy and crazy messaging,” he promised.