Pharrell Williams has previously recounted how, when Louis Vuitton was looking for a new men’s creative director, he advised them to hire his old friend Nigo. Instead, of course, they offered the gig to Pharrell himself. Nigo (who was already at Kenzo), later commented: “Pharrell is the best choice for Vuitton… Pharrell is an artist, while I am an engineer.” Tonight, at last, bromance found a way: the friends of nearly 25 years collaborated to co-design a Louis Vuitton collection that was dedicated to multiple aspects of their shared history and passions.
The two men first met in the early 2000s, when Jacob the Jeweler put them in touch before Pharrell’s first trip to Japan. Nigo, who by then had founded the brand A Bathing Ape, or Bape, invited the visitor to see his archive, and creative sparks flew: In 2003 they co-founded Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream. The following year they collaborated on behalf of Louis Vuitton for the first time, creating the Millionaire sunglasses for the house’s then-women’s creative director, Marc Jacobs. Many more collaborations followed.
They cooked up the idea for this latest one during Pharrell’s most recent visit to see Nigo in Japan. Apparently they also went fishing together and unexpectedly caught a lobster. This is why the lobster was this season’s easter egg motif, both as one-off bags and as the hidden symbol pressed into the backside of the yellow-stitched tags that are customarily found on LV bags but were here also transplanted to shoes and other categories.
Fittingly, watching this collection felt a little bit like listening to a dialogue between the two old friends. Much of that conversation was manageable enough for an outsider to parse and centered around this tour of Pharrell’s wider LV designer project across Nigo’s home country of Japan. The beautiful silk souvenir style Speedy bags, the this-season Damoflage on some pulsating ski-suits in sakura-season cherry blossom pink, an impressively executed origami bag (complete with origami lobster), gyoza-shaped clutches, the tough rockabilly section that reflected that Tokyo counterculture, a translocation of the ‘Dandy’ monogram into Shippo weave pattern, the Koi and Fuji collection logo, and trunks containing tea and sake sets were all reflective of this.
There were also many references that seemed much more personal. A flip phone key chain and the new Y2K-ish runner sneaker style called the Buttersoft were snapshots drawn from their earliest Bape-era intersections. The narrowly brimmed denim caps were nods to Nigo’s headwear of choice. One bag, and inside-out canvas leather grip, featured three time-lapse headshots of Pharrell and Nigo during their three (not quite full) decades of friendship: only 30 of these will be released on a see-now-buy-now basis.
