PARIS — For Pharrell Williams, the future of luxury is “freedom.” Not a bag, not a logo. Freedom.
I’m in Paris to meet Louis Vuitton’s new men’s creative director on the first day of September, outside the hype cycle of fashion week. Paris is just waking up from its August slumber, the air still thick with humidity.
Pharrell enters a small, quiet room in the Louis Vuitton headquarters. He is zen-like and greets me with a head bow, his hands clasped together, a bit like an Indian namaste. He’s more subdued than the last time we met at a ‘Friendsgiving’ dinner in London last November to mark the UK launch of Humanrace, the skincare line he launched in 2020. That night, he spoke passionately about US politics, his life in Miami and Kanye West.
But that was a conversation from another time, before Pharrell’s appointment as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director changed his life, turning the multi-hyphenate celebrity singer, producer and entrepreneur from the American South into one of the most visible figures in the global luxury industry.
The Vuitton role had been vacant since November 2021 following the sudden death of Virgil Abloh, who broke racial barriers when he became one of luxury fashion’s first Black creative directors in March 2018. Many fashion insiders had sniffed at Abloh’s collections, but season by season he won people over by opening up Vuitton — and the wider luxury business — to a broader audience of people, once overlooked by the industry, using narrative devices like “The Wizard of Oz” to extend Vuitton’s heritage in travel to another kind of journey: social mobility.
With the baton now passed to Pharrell, the second Black man to lead menswear at Vuitton, I was keen to hear how he would leave his imprint on the LVMH-owned house and luxury writ large.
What is luxury according to Pharrell? And what does it all mean for his vision for Louis Vuitton, the world’s first €20-billion luxury brand?
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