Pharrell Williams’ latest Louis Vuitton show celebrates a ‘friendship for life’ with streetwear legend Nigo

In 2022, Tokyo streetwear designer and founder of A Bathing Ape, Nigo, invited a handful of his musician friends to collaborate on an album. With features from A$AP Rocky, Pusha T, Kid Cudi and Tyler the Creator, it was playfully titled ‘I Know Nigo’ for the way that rap and hip-hop stars would boast that they knew the designer, who with the 1993-founded BAPE (as A Bathing Ape is shortened) would change the way that we view and consume streetwear. Early collections would number just 50 or so pieces, with the same amount given away to proto-influencers to generate ‘hype’; soon, there were hours-long lines outside BAPE’s doors. The low-supply, high-demand recipe has been much replicated, spawning hype culture as we know it today.

Though it was Nigo’s friendship with the American musician and producer Pharrell Williams which would prove most formative – out of all those names, he really knows Nigo. Meeting in the early 2000s through ‘Jacob the Jeweller’, Williams would remember his first visit to his studio on a Beats 1 podcast: ‘I’d never seen anything like [it in my life]’. Later, in 2013, the duo would start Billionaire Boy’s Club, and Nigo would prove significant to Williams’ own eclectic sense of style, which remains highly influenced by Japanese street culture. In the past few years, they have taken on the Paris establishment together as creative directors of two of the city’s largest houses: Louis Vuitton menswear for Williams, and Kenzo for Nigo.

This evening in Paris, for his latest Louis Vuitton menswear show, Williams drafted Nigo as a co-designer of the collection, which celebrated the idea of friendship and creative exchange – ‘the cross-pollination between the house and the two collaborators,’ as he described via the extensive collection notes. ‘An artistic manifestation of a friendship.’ Staged in a gleaming box erected in the courtyard of the Louvre museum – its damier-check surface reminiscent of an enormous Louis Vuitton trunk – the in-the-round showspace was populated with vitrines, like those found in the house’s archive. At the end of the show, their frosted glass cleared to reveal objects from their personal collections – an amalgam of sneakers, playing cards, CDs, tapes, rails of clothing, trunks and luggage – alongside rare pieces owned by the house and its collectors.

The set, which was created by Masamichi Katayama’s design agency Wonderwall was titled ‘An Archive of LVers’, and seemed to speak to the central thread which ran through the collection – the idea of collecting objects through a lifetime, and the influence that your relationships have on the things that you buy (Nigo’s own archive – comprising vintage workwear, streetwear and ephemera – spans over 10,000 objects). It lent the collection a feeling of eclectism and free expression, whereby silhouettes largely rooted in workwear – carpenter pants, denim jeans and bomber jackets all featured prominently – were enlivened with pattern and embellishment, whether scatterings of crystal, plays on the damier check, or Japanese motifs. More idiosyncratic accessories featured a lobster-shaped handbag, and trunks decorated with prints of Williams’ and Nigo’s profiles wheeled around the runway by T-shirt-clad models (playfully, these were called the ‘Damier Phriendship’ trunks).

Williams described the look as a kind of contemporary ‘dandy’, a word he has used previously to define his vision for Louis Vuitton. It is a word he relates to the street: one cap read both ‘Shibuya’ and ‘Paris’, a reference to the bustling neon-lit district of Tokyo which has long housed the city’s subcultures. Williams says he wants to ‘lionise’ streetwear: the vitrines were a statement that alongside the century-and-a-half of objects inside the Louis Vuitton archive, a house that made luggage for emperors, these pieces are just as worthy of preservation. And what better curators for a library of streetwear than them? ‘[It’s] a conversation between the past and future,’ Williams described. ‘[A] gaze into the future through the telescope of history.’

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