What do you do after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration?
Well, if you’re Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH and one of the world’s richest men, you go to a fashion show. Bien sur (French for "of course").
Recently, roughly 24 hours after standing on the dais at Trump’s inauguration, Arnault was checking up on Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton collection from the front row (his seatmates, French basketball star Victor Wembanyama in a green varsity jacket and friend-of-the-Obamas Bradley Cooper in a herringbone coat, certainly cut a different image than Dana White and Miriam Adelson).
But to call this particular show "Williams’ Louis Vuitton" would be misleading. This collection, as per the news release, listed both Williams and Nigo, a Japanese designer and founder of A Bathing Ape, as its “men’s creative directors”.
The pair have creatively commingled before. In the early aughts, they worked together on Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream, two BAPE offshoots that became legend for their comic-book-colored full-zip hoodies and buxom skate shoes.
“Nigo is the glue to my ideas,” Williams said some 20 years ago in a video interview, standing next to Nigo at the Ice Cream store in Tokyo.
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Of note: Today Nigo is the creative director of Kenzo, another LVMH property, albeit one whose wattage seems to be increasingly dim.
And so, what Arnault and hundreds of audience members saw was a demonstration of an LVMH-sanctioned bromance (neither designer was made available for an interview, so their creative process for this particular collection remained opaque).
There was perhaps more Nigo in this recipe than Pharrell.
A cherry varsity jacket, a rivet-studded trucker and especially the curve-brimmed flat caps – these were quintessential Nigo. A four-pocket chore coat in a vertical conductor’s stripe and some whiskered jeans could easily have wandered out of Nigo’s archive of American vintage or, for that matter, the Kenzo design studio.
Nods to Nigo’s Japanese heritage were vigorous, as in a baseball jersey with “Vuitton” rendered in Japanese syllabaries and a camo print formed from cherry-blossom-like splotches.
Husky sneakers, like bowling shoes inflated by a bike pump, could have been a lost Ice Cream sketch.
This was the chockablock 400-level section of the collection: the section for the Nigo-ologists and their Pharrell-ospher classmates. If you didn’t spend the early 2000s reading Hypebeast.com or brushing up on videos of Nigo’s clothing warehouse (this man owned Pee-wee Herman’s suit, folks!), at least some of it would be lost on you.
As if to aid the audience, a phalanx of milky white cubes on the runway turned clear at the denouement of the show, revealing a “visual history of Pharrell and Nigo’s journey”.
That history included Billionaire Boys Club varsity jackets, the dimpled 10-gallon Vivienne Westwood hats that were once a Williams signature and Louis Vuitton sacks of all shapes.
Some items are now available at auction on Joopiter, Williams’ auction site.
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Williams – a designer/music producer/skin-care magnate/hospitality entrepreneur/Lego film star – never lets an opportunity for corporate synergies pass him by.
Of course, Louis Vuitton, at its globe-spanning scale, cannot rely solely on wistful streetwear geeks. And so as this collection marched on, it unspooled to target Vuitton’s can-be-anyone-as-long-as-he’s-rich clientele.
There were walking coats in English checks, distressed ball caps and straight-up chinos. But also crystal-kissed pink cardigans, a leather hoodie made of serpentine patchwork and kooky Coogi-looking sweaters.
A Louis Vuitton show without at least a baker’s dozen bags would be like Paris without traffic, and so we were presented with cherry-blossom pink duffels, coffin-size trunks, puny rectangular pouchettes and grocery-store-style logo totes.
By the end, it was an aimless but agreeable array of stuff, one that will, undoubtedly, find its way to shopper’s closets – and most likely, for Arnault, that’s a display worth flying back for.
