Sat waiting for Pharrell Williams’ Spring/Summer 2027 Louis Vuitton menswear show to begin, you perhaps inevitably started to think of another, even older, Louis – Louis XIV, the Sun King. His presence still looms all over Paris and not just in this summer’s blazing temperatures – there’s even a big ole’ gilded sun slapped on the front of Vuitton’s store on the Place Vendôme, a statue of the ruler given prime position inside. At Louis’ Versailles, water was a sign of might and power, of commanding the elements via elaborate fountains that drained the area of such vast amounts of water that, in summer, they were piped off and on according to how the king strolled through the gardens, to perpetuate a myth of ever-gushing plenitude. And at Louis’ Vuitton, Williams’ role as a contemporary Roi Soleil transported a giant, eternally crashing pipe wave to the outskirts of Paris, in a similarly improbable display of aquatic might.
So, surfing was the Vuitton story for Spring – fitting, wish as we did that frozen wave might magically animate and wash over a fatigued, sweat-stained audience huddled in a still-blazing sun at 9pm the day after the day after the summer solstice. Williams’ Vuitton from its inception has been based, appropriately enough, on the dandy, the idea of a man dressing to impress in somewhat tricksy, incredibly refined and stratospherically expensive finery. It’s become softer and subtler during his tenure, his idea of that figure evolving from its flashy American iteration to something closer to the French idea, as Charles Baudelaire crystallised in The Painter of Modern life – written less than a decade after Vuitton was founded, incidentally. He defined the dandy as “The man nurtured in luxury, and habituated from early youth to being obeyed by others, the man, finally, who has no profession other than elegance.” The start of that sentence kind of defines Williams himself – although he has a multitude of multi-hyphenate professions. The whole could easily define Vuitton customers, many of whom are hopelessly devoted to Williams’ singular propositions, from dunks to trunks.
And, now, to boards. This season, models toted Vuitton-branded surfing paraphernalia as befitted that watery backdrop. Some wore branded iterations on wetsuits, streamlined against the body in the most demanding of fashions, others a tsunami of surf-shop derived clothes, sunbleached and weather-worn hoodies. There was a Monogram-patterned skateboard, too – sidewalk surfing, the Vuitton Damier kind of nodding to checkerboard Vans. And many sported a compass, which in the age of the iPhone feels about as useful as a vestigial tail, but which looked very attractive encased in vachetta leather and hanging from a belt-loop. Which is, ultimately what this collection is about – technical fabrications aside, no one will actually be surfing with a Vuitton longboard, just as no one is toting a coffin-sized monogram trunk to transport their clothes anymore. Rather these oddities are objets d’art, painstakingly mounted like sculptural totems to the religion of modern luxury, to be revered.
That said, the clothes are real – no pedestals here. High-end, highly priced, but actual and practical, even when puka shells were tugged off necklaces and embroidered to form the Vuitton quatrefoil, or fur was carved up to resemble denims. As a theme, there was plenty for Williams’ to run with, so suiting was woven with Hawaiian-style flowers lifted from Aloha shirts, others flecked with crystals like sea spray, all largely executed in ocean blues and sandy beiges. Yet they weren’t detached creative exercises – you understood their relevance, and their customer. Indeed, those Vuitton dandies were seated en masse in this audience, doubtless Whatsapping orders for their very own LV boogie boards as they passed on by.
