Pharrell Williams opened Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday night with a menswear show that cemented Louis Vuitton's position as the new luxury leader in streetwear.
This collection was created in partnership with NIGO, a Japanese designer and one of the most influential figures in streetwear.
Williams, who will be creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton starting in 2023, has been friends with Nigo for decades. The partnership follows a long collaboration between the two, which included co-founding Ice Cream with streetwear label Billionaire Boys Club in 2003. Williams calls him “one of the greatest curators of taste, someone who brings… Williams is said to be a visionary, and for this collection, the pair drew inspiration from the past. In the show notes, the show was described as “looking into the future through the telescope of history.”
Exploring the codes of streetwear and dandyism, the show featured everything from stadium jackets to well-tailored suits. Housed in a giant mirrored box directly in front of the Louvre's pyramid, the models are housed in 24 glass bottles displaying a variety of items, including sneakers, T-shirts, a boom box and a gold Blackberry cell phone. I walked around the mauve colored catwalk. . Some pieces are culled from the personal archives of avid collectors Williams and Nigo, while others were acquired from previous Louis Vuitton shows. It was intended to serve as a visual history of the works that inspired and influenced the duo in creating their new collaborative collection.
The wide-leg and low-rise denim overall silhouette and tailoring pay homage to the early 2000s. The traditional streetwear metaphor camouflage is reimagined with an abstract, pixelated pattern. Monograms appear on everything from beanies to boots, but Nigo pioneered the idea of a flashy, logo-heavy aesthetic with her first brand, BAPE, in 1993. Considering that, it's no surprise. Thirty years later, he revisited the idea and monogrammed the bags. He paid homage to the brand's Parisian roots by cutting out silhouettes of himself and Williams' faces and scrawling the words “Pont Neuf” and “Since” on others. 1854”.
Nigo previously collaborated with Louis Vuitton, led by the late menswear artistic director Virgil Abloh, on a 2020 capsule collection. Abloh at the time described him As an “engineer”, he bridges the gap between “high” and “low”. Since 2021, he has been the creative director of Kenzo, which is part of LVMH, the parent company of Louis Vuitton.
Partnership with Williams signals LVMH's commitment to streetwear, a market that promises to be valuable $637bn (£516bn) by 2032.
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The show was reportedly delayed more than 90 minutes to allow the Arnault family time to return to Paris from Washington, where they attended President Donald Trump's inauguration. There, Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, along with his daughter Delphine (Chairman and CEO of Dior) and son Alexandre (Deputy CEO of LVMH Wines and Spirits), He was seated behind former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. At Tuesday night's Paris Fashion Week show, he sat in the front row alongside actors Adrien Brody and Bradley Cooper, basketball player Victor Wenbanyama and members of K-pop band Got7.
