Louis Vuitton Chairman and CEO Pietro Beccari nodded to Williams’s earlier work with the model, saying in a press release: “I’m glad to welcome Pharrell again residence … His artistic imaginative and prescient past style will undoubtedly lead Louis Vuitton towards a brand new and really thrilling chapter.” Late Tuesday afternoon, LVMH’s touchdown web page featured a easy black-and-white picture of Williams, carrying a white T-shirt and diamond chain, with the greeting, “Welcome Pharrell!”
Because the artistic director of menswear, Williams will likely be charged with producing two collections a 12 months, inclusive of baggage, equipment and ready-to-wear clothes. His first assortment for the style home will debut in June at Males’s Style Week in Paris. Williams’s appointment to a number one place on the world’s largest luxurious model additionally factors to the continued cultural significance of hip-hop, additional cementing its standing as a world driver of style.
The 49-year-old Virginia native’s function as a cultural tastemaker and influencer is as assorted as it’s intensive. Williams is finest recognized for his influence on the music trade, the place he helped outline hip-hop’s sound as a producer, songwriter and frontman of N.E.R.D. Alongside his personal chart-topping music (2013′s inescapable “Glad”), Williams has collaborated with or produced hits for Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, amongst scores of different artists.
That prolonged résumé of collaboration extends to the style world, the place he has labored with quite a few main manufacturers, amongst them Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Tiffany, Nike and Adidas. His most well-known partnership up to now, although, is his work with Japanese designer Nigo, founding father of the streetwear firm A Bathing Ape. Collectively, they launched the Billionaire Boys Membership in 2003, a clothes, accent and life-style model geared toward mixing streetwear and luxurious. Its sneakers (launched beneath the sub-label ICECREAM) have been particularly in style amongst youth skate boarders and hip-hop heads in Japan and america. (Nigo is now artistic director of LVMH’s Kenzo label.)
Even together with his bona fides as a tastemaker, Williams has massive sneakers to fill in Abloh’s absence. The primary Black American to ever maintain a head design place at a European luxurious home, Abloh is credited with infusing a modern and, at times, ironic sensibility into the model.
Whereas rooted on the earth of streetwear, Williams’s sense of fashion has been lauded for its irreverence and huge vary (who can neglect The Hat?). In 2015, he turned solely the second man to win a CFDA Style Icon award.
“I get my type from simply random folks, on a regular basis folks — like, building is attention-grabbing to me. On a regular basis issues, you realize, service uniforms, sports activities, skateboarding, normcore, grandma sweaters — all of that stuff is attention-grabbing to me,” Williams told Vogue on the time. He was additionally an early adopter of the most recent wave of gender-neutral clothes and aesthetics, carrying a ballgown puffer on the entrance of GQ’s New Masculinity Issue in 2019.
When requested about his selections to put on a purple crocodile Birkin bag or a pastel Céline coat, Williams advised the journal that type and match got here first: “I preferred one thing, and I put it on. Then the philosophy got here behind it.”
