Musical Icon And Newly Minted Louis Vuitton Creative Director Pharrell Williams Takes Paris Fashion Week By Storm

The forbiddingly chic territory at the intersection of fashion and music is a grand, if fraught one, and at the moment no one is traversing this terrain with more brio than the legendary Pharrell Williams, 13-time Grammy winner, two-time Academy Award nominee, and the writer-performer-producer of the global hit “Happy,” among a slew of other genre-bending, chart-busting pop-soul-funk-dance-electronica-hip-hop titles. On June 20, he took the Pont Neuf, and the Paris Spring-Summer ’24 men’s shows by storm.

Unlike the jousts into fashion made by some of his contemporaries, notably that of Kanye West, Williams’ own sorties into fashion have seemed more organic. As a renowned producer he is by nature a collaborator and less the lone wolf, so he’s collaborated with European and Asian fashion houses for years on everything from scents (Nigo) and jewelry (Vuitton) to eyewear (Vuitton, Moncler). As well, he’s an original denizen of what we might call the Front Row Demographic at fashion weeks worldwide, an that he’s consistently among the nattiest of gentlemen dressers doesn’t hurt.

Which is why, on Valentine’s Day this year, as Louis Vuitton proudly announced that the bracingly polyglot Williams would become, effective “immediately,” Vuitton’s Men’s Creative Director, it was thought an apt, brilliant appointment. Now the results are in: Vuitton took over the Pont Neuf — a more iconic location for a fashion show in Paris would be hard to find — to show Williams’ assured, vervy Spring-Summer 2024 Men’s collection.

Aptly for a big, socially-aware European label and its pointedly socially-aware creative director, who find the continent in the long slog of another ground war a few hundred miles east of the Pont Neuf, on June 20 Williams’ blown-up, pixellated camouflage fabric — in Pharrell parlance, “damoflage,” pictured on Williams in the topshot here — took the classic man’s suit to the very point of the news with its palette of army-greens and darker colors on a kind of blue-and-dun-colored bone ground. The function of camoflage on the battlefield is to shape-shift the object covered — be it a tank or a soldier — to the point that it is difficult to see. By contrast, Williams’ “damoflage” makes its wearer more visible, but highlights its battlefield role in a different way. In it, the men look ready.

The example par excellence would be the indomitable Jay-Z, whose subtle custom-made dark three-piece suit brilliantly exudes its giant “damoflage” pixels in the paparazzi shot above. For her part, Beyonce is taking a break from her global tour in a bespoke Vuitton wide-legged gold trouser and caped-jacket set, also designed by Pharell.

In addition to music’s power couple, celebrities were out in force on the Pont Neuf. The ubiquitous Kim Kardashian, clad in a tight-fitting “damoflage” Catwoman kind of jumpsuit, had as her front-row-date the actor Jared Leto, who, for a gentleman, might have been carrying the white theme a bit too far with the semi-Edwardian “day gloves.” We’re just not sure if the irony — intentional and not — was really working quite as much for Mr. Leto as he might have hoped, but we’ll leave that debate for the critics and for his fellow front-row crowd.

As a creative man, Williams is nothing if not inclusive and supportive — in November 2015, after a mass shooting at Charleston, South Carolina’s, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church left nine parishioners dead, he gave a healing performance there with singers from the church. As the successor to the beloved Virgil Abloh in the seat at Louis Vuitton, it was with a characteristic message of gratefulness that Williams kneeled to take his bow in homage to his audience on the Pont Neuf on June 20.