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American musician, producer and streetwear designer Pharrell Williams will be Louis Vuitton’s next creative director of men’s wear, succeeding the late Virgil Abloh.
The French luxury brand confirmed the appointment on Tuesday.
The role, one of the most prominent leadership positions in men’s fashion, had been vacant since Abloh’s death from cancer in November 2021.
Despite Williams’s high-celebrity profile, his selection may come as a surprise to fashion insiders – Jamaican designer Grace Wales Bonner was rumoured to be the front-runner for the role, as was British designer Samuel Ross and LOEWE creative director JW Anderson.
Louis Vuitton chairperson and CEO Pietro Beccari nodded to Williams’s previous work with the brand, saying: “I am glad to welcome Pharrell back home… His creative vision beyond fashion will undoubtedly lead Louis Vuitton toward a new and very exciting chapter.”
Late on Tuesday afternoon, LVMH’s landing page featured a simple black-and-white photo of Williams, wearing a white T-shirt and diamond chain, with the greeting, “Welcome Pharrell!”
As the creative director of menswear, Williams will be charged with producing two collections a year, inclusive of bags, accessories and ready-to-wear clothing. His first collection for the fashion house will debut in June at Men’s Fashion Week in Paris.
Williams’s appointment to a leading position at the world’s largest luxury brand also points to the continued cultural significance of hip hop, further cementing its status as a global driver of fashion.
The 49-year-old Virginia native’s role as a cultural tastemaker and influencer is as varied as it is extensive.
Williams is best known for his impact on the music industry, where he helped define hip hop’s sound as a producer, songwriter and frontman of N.E.R.D. Alongside his own chart-topping music (2013’s inescapable “Happy”), Williams has collaborated with or produced hits for Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, among scores of other artists.
That lengthy résumé of collaboration extends to the fashion world, where he has worked with several major brands, among them Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Tiffany, Nike and Adidas.
His most well-known partnership, though, is his work with Japanese designer Nigo, the founder of the streetwear company A Bathing Ape. Together, they launched the Billionaire Boys Club in 2003, a clothing, accessory and lifestyle brand aimed at blending streetwear and luxury. Its sneakers (released under the sub-label ICECREAM) were especially popular among youth skateboarders and hip-hop heads in Japan and the US. (Nigo is now creative director of LVMH’s Kenzo label.)
Even with his bona fides as a tastemaker, Williams has big shoes to fill in Abloh’s absence. The first black American to ever hold a head design position at a European luxury house, Abloh is credited with infusing a modern and, at times, ironic sensibility into the brand.
While rooted in the world of streetwear, Williams’s sense of style has been lauded for its irreverence and vast range (who can forget The Hat?). In 2015, he became only the second man to win a CFDA Fashion Icon award.
“I get my style from just random people, everyday people – like, construction is interesting to me. Everyday things, you know, service uniforms, sports, skateboarding, normcore, grandma sweaters – all of that stuff is interesting to me,” Williams told Vogue at the time.
He was also an early adopter of the latest wave of gender-neutral clothing and aesthetics, wearing a ballgown puffer on the front of GQ’s New Masculinity Issue in 2019.
When asked about his choices to wear a purple crocodile Birkin bag or a pastel Céline coat, Williams told the magazine that style and fit came first: “I liked something, and I put it on. Then the philosophy came behind it.”
Meanwhile Louis Vuitton’s decision to hire Pharrell Williams as the new creative director for its menswear line reaffirms the allure of celebrity within fashion’s boardrooms and the impact of music and streetwear on the luxury industry. It also serves as another blow to the belief that fashion design is a skill and not merely an attitude.
Williams follows the late Virgil Abloh, who was the first Black American to serve as artistic director of a French luxury brand.
Abloh hadn’t studied fashion design, but he had worked his way through false starts, fashion competitions, his own brand, DJing and collaborating until he grabbed one of the industry’s few brass rings.
He arrived at Louis Vuitton with a fan base that saw themselves in him. Abloh was groundbreaking.
The choice of Williams is not. It feels a bit like a company trying to recapture a certain excitement and sense of change that was fuelled by possibility – maybe, just maybe, a door had swung open for other black designers, and someone working away in a backroom or struggling to keep their own company afloat could win the big job.
But Williams was not struggling. He wasn’t pounding away in the shadows. He was sitting in the spotlight wearing diamond-bedazzled sunglasses and Chanel jackets. But okay. Fine. Life is not fair. He’ll present his first collection in June.
Williams is known for his wide-ranging interests and his ability to straddle a multitude of worlds. He doesn’t have a formal design background; his main medium of artistic expression is, of course, music.
Still, he has a history as a fashion entrepreneur, most notably with Billionaire Boys Club, which he co-founded with the Japanese tastemaker Nigo in 2003.
Williams is someone who has a sense of what’s bubbling up from the culture. He delights in collaborations and is an agile curator of talent.
Williams also has a high appreciation for a specific kind of eye-candy fashion – self-consciously defiant and flashy.
He dresses the same way a producer might put together a song: freely sampling, always riffing and trying to keep the vibe not just of the moment but also beyond it.
In his public appearances, Williams often walks a fine line between parody and subversiveness, stunt and style. With his slight build and high cheekbones, he can look younger than his 49 years.
His youthful appearance is often exaggerated by his affection for short pants – or shorts – on formal occasions.
He looks the part of a man who seems to be in touch with a rising generation of consumers. The fashion industry has been his playground for a long time.
His appointment, announced on Tuesday, to one of the industry’s most high-profile positions at the helm of one of its most lucrative brands is a powerful statement about the fashion industry’s relationship with itself. Despite its swagger, insecurity is rife.
Despite fashion’s commitment to chasing innovation, it has a habit of settling for more of the same.
Vuitton regards itself as a brand that’s bigger than mere clothes and accessories. The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris houses and exhibits world-class contemporary art.
The company has built an entire travelling show around its bags and trunks. Its logos are part of an international cultural language. It sees itself as an institution with a history that dates back to 1854.
Yet rather than confidently promoting from within, Vuitton looked outward for someone who could enhance its validity. It went outside its ateliers and even beyond the realm of designers.
Doing so suggests that a pure designer, that is someone who had committed themselves to both the technical aspects of fashion as well as its creative expression, couldn’t deliver what the company wanted.
A pure designer was not enough.
That’s disheartening. It’s also simply not true.
Other brands have been helmed by designers who have been able to jolt the culture while also juicing sales.
At Gucci, both Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele had long, successful runs during which they had an impact far beyond fashion. They tantalised musicians, actors and anonymous consumers.
Neither Ford nor Michele was a known entity when they ascended to creative director. They were staffers, not stars. Fashion fuelled their rise, and they, in turn, brought fashion to a wider audience.
Of course, countless other designers have failed to reinvigorate dying brands or even to hold the line on successful ones. But celebrity creative directors don’t have a flawless track record, either.
Rihanna’s Fenty fashion label, backed by LVMH, which also controls Vuitton, closed in less than two years.
Other stylish celebrities who had dismal showings in the fashion industry include Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé. And partnering with a celebrity has its risks, as Adidas discovered when its Yeezy sneaker business imploded after Ye (né Kanye West) spit out anti-Semitic and anti-black rhetoric.
It’s hard to imagine that Vuitton would have taken a similar tack if it had been looking for someone to helm its womenswear division.
While womenswear owes a debt to hip-hop, street style and athleticism, contemporary menswear is far more deeply indebted to those vernaculars. Choosing someone who moves nimbly between them proved irresistible.
But more than anything, the choice of Williams makes it clear how much the definition of designer has changed in a generation.
In the popular imagination, the designer is still a lone figure draping and sketching, overseeing and demanding.
Although that remains true at smaller entities and in a few rarefied spaces, in larger companies, there are a fleet of designers working on a multitude of divisions.
The creative director oversees it all and worries about advertising and marketing and store design, too.
The shift has taken a bit of the magic out of fashion. It has removed any pretence of intimacy and limited personal expression. It’s all about product and messaging.
The creative director has been absolved of needing design training. Times change. Fashion moves along, too.
But with the selection of Williams, fashion deflated just a little bit more. Not because he is untalented, but because the choice is uninspiring. – iolnews.com
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter