Why we should have seen the high-profile menswear appointment coming
You know something significant has happened in the world of men’s style when the appointment of a new designer to a venerable Parisian luxury house makes the agenda-setting Today show on BBC Radio 4 — as well as receivingYesterday’s announcement from Louis Vuitton, confirming that the polymathic American pop culture impresario Pharrell Williams — producer, performer, songwriter, artist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, etc — would take over as the men’s creative director of a company founded in...
“Fashion is just a vehicle,” the effervescent Dapper Dan told me, when I interviewed him at his shop in Harlem a few years ago. “It’s an instrument to express something much deeper, and to hopefully affect change.” It was Jones, nevertheless, who first filled the front rows of Vuitton men’s shows with pop stars, rappers, athletes and assorted representatives of “the culture”, the catch-all term for the Black and minority-originated and hip-hop-associated aesthetic. Jones, too, pioneered collaborations with brands traditionally outside the world of high fashion and luxury, notably the New York skate brand, Supreme.
You don’t have to sit exams to qualify as a fashion designer. What you need, above all, is taste. An aesthetic vision for what the products and the marketing of them should look and feel like. Plus the ability to attract a loyal following of customers willing to pay for a piece of your work. On that score, Virgil Abloh was always going to be a hard act to follow. If anyone can do it, one senses that Pharrell Williams can.
What we didn’t talk about much about was his personal life, because Williams in person, for all the undeniable glamour of his existence, is a deeply unassuming man. He had only agreed to our meeting, he conceded, because “my record company goes fucking apeshit on me if I don’t do interviews.” My notes from the time record what today we would call his ‘fit: dark denim jeans from his most recent collection for Billionaire Boys Club, a white T-shirt of the same provenance, featuring the label’s distinctive astronaut logo. On his feet: trainers from A Bathing Ape. He had a thin gold chain around his neck, set with diamonds, and a diamond earring in each lobe. Discarded on an amp at his side were a yellow-diamond-studded Casio G-Shock watch, and an enormous gold and diamond ring.
Zoe Cassavetes, Sofia Coppola, Pharrell Williams, Marc Jacobs and Courtney Love attend the Louis Vuitton fashion show in paris, October 2007As with his music, Williams characterised the eclecticism of his style to his diverse background. He described his hometown, Virginia Beach, as “Normalville, not nothing out of the ordinary.
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