Pharrell Williams' star-studded runway debut set the tone for the next generation of menswear.
Wearing a blue blazer over a white T-shirt and jeans in a pixelated version of Vuitton’s famous damier check that resembled camouflage , Williams underscored that he is humble. Grateful. And just as surprised to find himself here as the rest of the fashion industry.
In other words, Williams thinks like a consumer, but one who dreams wildly, the kind of person who walks into a store and says, “But whyI have that?” Brands used to rely on celebrities to interpret their wildest fantasies — to make them digestible on the red carpet or concert stage. Williams collapses those two roles into one, as the ultimate evolution of the notion that the customer is always right: The customer is, ultimately, the designer.
The boat took us to the Pont Neuf, one of Paris’s most storybook bridges, which was slathered in a honey-gold damier check. The sun began its pink descent, casting the city with a rosy glow as folksy accordion renditions of such Paris classics as “Sous le ciel de Paris” played. It was so vividly, cartoonishly Paris that it almost looked like AI.
Does Williams have the chops to lead a fashion house? With an atelier as talented as Vuitton’s, it was nearly impossible for him to fail. Still, his clothes were straightforward and commercial, suiting and sportswear that mostly played with the damier check, a print that has made Vuitton a Canal Street mainstay. Like Abloh, Williams’s models looked like archetypes — the banker, the hustler, the student, the fashion nerd — but his buzzed with more obvious desirability than his predecessor’s.
Stepping into this new role, Williams feels responsible, he said, to emphasize Black culture, “from pushing the damier all the way to working with a Black American artist, a painter by the name of Henry Taylor.” He embroidered pieces with Taylor’s portraits, replacing some of the LV monograms’ stars and flowers with the faces of Taylor’s friends. “Seeing black faces on here lined up like the monogram — that’s a gift to be able to do that.
Anderson is often accused of being too twee, too White, but his films also argue that a well-articulated aesthetic, and a respect for it, is the backbone of humanism. It isn’t that everyone and everything should look the same, but that everyone should be lovely. Beauty is a sign of respect, both for oneself and those around you.
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