Pharrell Williams kicked off Paris fashion week on Tuesday night with a menswear show that cemented Louis Vuitton’s position as the new luxury leader in streetwear.
The collection was created in partnership with Nigo, a Japanese designer and one of the most influential figures in streetwear.
Williams, who has held the position of creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear since 2023, has a decades-long friendship with Nigo. The partnership follows a long line of collaborations between them including co-founding the streetwear labels Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream in 2003. Williams has called Nigo “one of the greatest curators of taste and purveyors of what’s next”. Williams has also been described as a visionary but for this collection the duo took inspiration from the past. The show notes described the show as gazing “into the future through the telescope of history”.
Exploring the codes of streetwear and dandyism, the show featured everything from varsity jackets to neat tailored suits. Held in a giant purpose-built mirrored box placed directly in front of the Louvre pyramid, models walked around a mauve-coloured catwalk upon which sat 24 vitrines showcasing an eclectic selection of items including sneakers, T-shirts, a boombox and gold Blackberry phone. Some pieces were taken from the personal archives of Williams and Nigo, who are avid collectors, while others came from previous Louis Vuitton shows. It aimed to serve as a visual history of the pieces that had inspired and informed the duo in creating a new joint collection.
Wide-leg and low-rise silhouettes across denim and tailoring paid homage to the early 2000s. Camo, the traditional streetwear trope, was reimagined in abstract and pixelated patterns. Everything from beanies to boots was monogrammed – unsurprising, considering it was Nigo who pioneered the idea of a loud and logo-heavy aesthetic with his first brand A Bathing Ape (BAPE) in 1993. Three decades later he revisited the idea, plastering bags with cut-out facial silhouettes of himself and Williams and paying homage to the brand’s Parisian roots by scribbling others with the words “Pont Neuf” and “Since 1854”.
Nigo had previously collaborated with Louis Vuitton under its late menswear artistic director Virgil Abloh on a 2020 capsule collection. At the time Abloh described him as an “engineer” in bridging the separation between “high and low”. He has been creative director of Kenzo since 2021, which is also owned by LVMH, Louis Vuitton’s parent company.
His partnership with Williams hints at LVMH’s commitment to streetwear, a market projected to be worth $637bn (£516bn) by 2032.
The show was delayed by more than 90 minutes, reportedly to allow the Arnault family time to return to Paris from Washington where they had attended Donald Trump’s inauguration. There LVMH’s CEO Bernard Arnault along with his daughter Delphine (chair and chief executive of Dior) and son Alexandre (deputy chief executive of LVMH’s wines and spirits division) had sat behind former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. At Tuesday night’s Paris fashion week show they sat in the front row alongside the actors Adrien Brody and Bradley Cooper, the basketball player Victor Wembanyama and members of the K-pop band Got7.
