Surf’s Up: Inside Pharrell’s Sophomore Show for Louis Vuitton Men’s

Photographs courtesy of Louis Vuitton

The next stage of Pharrell Williams’ vision for Louis Vuitton unfolded on Thursday night in Hong Kong. As night fell over Victoria Harbour, 1,200 guests packed into the waterside Avenue of Stars, the financial capital’s answer to Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Tons of sand covered the runway, and strummy ukulele music floated through the humid air, both hinting at where Pharrell’s head was at for his sophomore show. The occasion was a pre-fall collection, a mid-season offering traditionally designed to keep stores stocked in between the main biannual drops. But it felt like one of the most anticipated fashion shows held anywhere since Pharrell’s monumental debut in June, when the generational hitmaker orchestrated one of the most memorable men’s fashion moments in history on the Pont Neuf in Paris.

The Paris show was a watershed event in menswear, one that crashed luxury and pop culture together like never before. But if Pharrell’s premiere was as much about the spectacle as the clothes, in Hong Kong we witnessed an exciting global style language coming into focus. We already have a pretty strong idea of what Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton will feel like: gravitational, in the way only few brands are. Hong Kong gave us many more clues to what Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton will look like. And if it wasn’t already clear, it now feels hard to deny—just two shows in—that Pharrell will be a force in men’s fashion for a long time.

He’s going to make sure of it. “I am consumed by the creative process and executing and getting things right,” he told me of his work at the Parisian luxury powerhouse.

Under the bright lights of the central Hong Kong skyline across the water, guests took their seats along a runway so long you could barely see it end-to-end. A boat rigged with monogrammed LV sails plied the waters alongside an immense flotilla of watercraft festooned with neon signs hailing a few of the celebs in attendance, like the Chinese actor Dylan Wang and local superstar Anson Lo. The pre-show ukulele players cleared the scene, and the show began to a beachy soundtrack penned by Pharrell, Swae Lee, and Rauw Alejandro. Pharrell had been thinking, he told me the day before the show, about “Hawaii to Hong Kong.” An imagination of sailing between the two ports of call, with lightweight suits and Aloha shirts packed in a Louis Vuitton trunk.

It’s now clear that Pharrell’s vision for Vuitton is firmly rooted in the codes of travel, and the cultural exchange that comes with it. Over the many eras of LV, noted Pharrell, “the fashion has been inspired by what that traveler is going to need, and what they'll want to wear, and where they're headed, and what those environments are going to be like. That’s what’s become the inspiration for me. We're a traveling company.” His new era continues that journey through the same east-meets-west synthesis that’s apparent in the designer’s own legendary personal style, which mixes American streetwear with European tailoring with Japanese workwear. When he took the job, Pharrell said he was designing for himself, because he was a prime Louis Vuitton customer. What he wants is getting more interesting. The shiny off-white suit that opened the show, trousers cut with a kicky flare, felt like a pure embodiment of Pharrell’s swagger and taste.

“He’s always been a fashion icon to me,” Pharrell’s longtime friend Pusha T said before the show. “Watching his ideas come to fruition is amazing.”

Pre-collections, geared toward big-spending clients, are often logo-heavy. This one was not. Pharrell was clearly more interested in articulating a legitimate style sensibility, one that spoke to him when he thought about Hong Kong. He called it a “dandy mentality,” realized in breezy and soft chambray suits, and mariner’s jackets buttoned with pearls, another touchstone of Pharrell’s personal style that has become a core motif in his designs. “What’s amazing about pearls is that they come from a living organism,” Pharrell told me. “And when we put that on our bodies, it’s quite different from diamonds. There’s a difference. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Up close, a pearl-embroidered pinstripe coat was delicate and pretty. There was an interesting dynamic at the show between the work on the runway and the outfits in the crowd. None of Pharrell’s clothes are actually available yet, unless your name is Pusha T, who wore a leather damoflage jacket from the Paris runway. Pharrell’s spring-summer 2024 collection hits stores in January. In the meantime, the 600-some clients on the Ave of Stars were decked out in older styles that, by comparison, looked glitzy but familiar. It was exciting to consider what the scene will look and feel like once they can try on the dandier side of LV, two-tone suede loafers and all.

Pharrell says that clothes are “energy-conveyors,” and as the show continued the vibration on the runway shifted. The sailor had reached Hawaii and was eyeing the waves. Surf-themed fashion is tricky, an all-time hit-or-miss category. (How many fashion designers at fancy European brands actually surf? Exactly.) Pharrell barreled right into the water with searingly vivid tropical prints covering suits, sets, and piles of bags. Though he acknowledges he’s not much of a surfer himself, Pharrell comes by his admiration of the culture honestly, having grown up in Virginia Beach, the location of the annual East Coast Surfing Championships. Pusha T called the event part of their childhood.

Several surfers—male and female—walked in the show. The day before, Pharrelll hinted that he’s interested in a more gender-agnostic Louis Vuitton men’s. “I know we're a men's line, but we make clothes for humans, in my opinion, first and foremost,” Pharrell said. “A beautiful object and article is a beautiful object and article, and that's what we should do. We should just focus on that.”

At the afterparty, where Pharrell and Swae Lee appeared to be filming a music video at their VIP table, the pro surfer Kaniela Stewart—a Waikiki native who wore the elaborately verdant prints in the show, a riot of surf scenes and LV iconography and hibiscus petals—offered his blessing. Pharrell had apparently, as intended, gotten it right.

“Being from Hawaii, some people butcher stuff, where it’s like, Ok, wait, that’s not actually Hawaii. But Pharrell, he actually made it comfortable, and he nailed the surfing parts.” Pharrell told me he consulted another Hawaiian surfer, Mahina Florence, as they developed the collection. She carried a shortboard on the runway, but more striking were the sculpted clogs on her feet. Pharrell apparently commissioned a pair of 3-D printed clogs on his first day in the LV design studio, and these—dubbed the Cobra, to match the aggressive shape—were the result.

“He’s coming out the gate taking risks,” said Pusha T of the collection. “But I feel like this is what we want, this is what the consumer wants.”

The show concluded—as many destination runway events do these days—with a drone light show. Phones whipped up as a tsunami of lights over the harbor morphed into a dhow boat which melted into Pharrell’s new LV Lovers house motto. Pharrell, wearing a raffia beret and another shiny off-white suit, hit the runway for his bow, hugging friends and family along the way. He looked incredible, every bit a modern, international dandy.

The day before, I asked him if he felt any pressure before his second show, given the scale and success of his first. How did he approach following that up? “You ask yourself that kind of question when that’s your goal,” he responded. “My goal is to just tell stories and elevate, and not just take the brand a step-up—because that's a stair. I want to go several floors up, and I want to do it every time.” To borrow another metaphor, Pharrell is positioned to keep catching bigger and bigger waves.

Originally Appeared on GQ