Is Fashion’s Next Great Creative Director Already in the Front Row?
It’s not just Pharrell Williams. Musicians, artists, and actors were the talk of the Spring 2024 shows.
Pharrell Williams first attended a Louis Vuitton show in 2004. He wore a crystal-studded tee and LV glasses, posing for the cameras beside his seatmate, Catherine Deneuve. In The New York Times, the critic Cathy Horyn called the show “one of the splashiest seen [in Paris] in awhile,” crediting Williams, Deneuve, Uma Thurman, and Sharon Stone for the high wattage.
Let’s call it Louis Vuitton’s celebrity tipping point—a moment, Horyn argued, when LV seemed to be channeling the opulence and gaudiness of early Versace. Even with Marc Jacobs at the helm of the brand—unquestionably one of fashion’s greatest talents of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Louis Vuitton’s short and glitzy collection was no more than “some exciting window dressing for its bags.”Eighteen years later at an even more opulent Louis Vuitton show, on a golden bridge at the golden hour on a blessed day, Williams presented his first collection as the creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear. He took up the helm from the late Virgil Abloh, whose work brought the worlds of celebrity and fashion so close they could touch. Now, with Williams, they are one. Listing the celebrities in the front row would require the rest of this article; highlights include Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton, J Balvin, Zendaya, and (of course) Deneuve.For the two weeks before and two weeks after, when menswear experts and enthusiasts gathered to see the Spring 2024 collections, every show, every garment, and every designer existed in the colossal shadow of Louis Vuitton. It was almost impossible to strike up a conversation that didn’t include mention of the event, its magnitude (city blocks were closed for days!), its casting (Stefano Pilati! Dao-Yi Chow!), its location (Pont Neuf at dusk!), or the concert that followed (Jay-Z! Leonardo DiCaprio dancing and filming with his iPhone horizontally!).
The Louis Vuitton show was the Super Bowl. It was Coachella. It was Emily in Paris–core. It was Disneyland and it was going to make LVMH into Disney. No, it was the MCU. No, it was Mattel! And soon we will watch movies not even about designers (sorry to Jared Leto’s Karl Lagerfeld biopic), or about models (sorry docu on Apple TV+), but stories spawned from single inanimate objects. Forget Ben Affleck’s feature-length Jordan commercial. Imagine the film developed around Pharrell’s own Louis Vuitton Millionaire Speedy.As this was happening Hollywood’s writers went on strike and Mattel announced a Michael Chabon-written movie about an action figure and Greta Gerwig’s agent said, “Her ambition is to be not the biggest woman director but a big studio director. And Barbie was a piece of IP that was resonant to her.”For the past two decades in fashion, CEOs bet on preexisting IP of heritage brands, spending years—and billions—resurrecting fashion houses of the 1930s and 1940s. Chanel and Dior became huge successes with globally identifiable products. By the 1990s, brands of the more recent past were revived with bright young designers to court a modern Gen X and young millennial audience. Balenciaga. Yves Saint Laurent. Givenchy. Gucci. Today, the preexisting IP of a fashion brand isn’t enough. Fashion can think bigger. Louis Vuitton hit 20 billion euros in sales in 2022; Williams is on track to hit over 382 billion streams on Spotify this year.
The real heads are concerned that this signals clothes-making is over (the real heads are always concerned about this). The final chapter in merchtainment is upon us, and the industry that birthed Alexander McQueen will become an industry of McDonald’s-style marketing. (Happy belated birthday, Grimace.)Suddenly the celebrities that alit on the long benches of the Palais de Tokyo, the Pont Neuf, and the Palazzo Corsini weren’t just fun guests to take selfies with, they were…the future of fashion? Which is to say, with the right blend of style, gusto, and connections, any of these A-listers could not just become a fashion house’s creative director—they could become the sun king at the center of fashion’s most powerful empire.
Days into PFW, Lanvin announced a capsule with Future. Fair. But what about Tommy Cash’s brazen costume play, which some regarded as Insta fodder, but to me seems like the mark of a true fashion freak in the best sense. “Every costume, [my team was] making until four in the morning,” Cash told me at the Doublet show while he was ensconced in a seafood platter. Later at Marine Serre he sat silently in a Cousin Itt–style hair suit.’s idols Moses Sumney and Troye Sivan were out and about in Milan and Paris—already multihyphenate musician-actors. Why not designers? d4vd, an emerging musician who performed at the Valentino show in Milan, found the experience of meeting the fashion community invigorating. “It used to be very much streetwear but now that I’m around a lot of high fashion, [my style] definitely needs to go more in that direction,” he said. “Luxury and streetwear are kinda being blended. It’s like the casualness of the streetwear blending in with the super high fashion.”
Would he design? “For sure. I’m thinking about it right now. I got a couple drafts of projects in the works going beyond just merchandise with my name on it, you know?”At Botter, Aminé chatted about his upcoming New Balance collab. Tyler, the Creator, one of the names I’d heard rumored for the Louis Vuitton job, was front row at Wales Bonner, while Victoria Beckham (who runs her own well-reviewed fashion brand) sat on a petit bateau in Versailles for Jacquemus.
At that Jacquemus show, two editors and I crowded around the step-and-repeat to capture videos of Emily Ratajkowski, Tina Kunakey, Karol G, and Monica Bellucci before setting sail. The Louis Vuitton show came up again. “There’s so much value in discussing fashion online and brands are now starting to tap into that—and the best way of tapping into that is through celebrities that bring attention to a brand,” ’s José Criales-Unzueta said. “At the end of the day, creative directors are just directing; these brands have massive teams. It’s more about taste and about a point of view than it is about designing.”Don’t sound the death knell yet. As we stood around waiting for Dua Lipa or Jennie or Bad Bunny—none in attendance, just rumors we’d seemingly started ourselves—conversation finally settled on the clothes that stood out. Dries Van Noten’s slender, sexual belly chains and wafty tunics. The bubbly and knubbly JW Anderson knits. Rick Owens’s ultrahigh-rise trousers and splint shoes. The impeccable beauty of a polo shirt at The Row and of a weightless khaki jacket at Lemaire. The handmade, rolled embroidery on knits and trousers at Kiko Kostadinov.
“I think a very good example of fashion versus spectacle is seeing a designer like Kiko Kostadinov,” Criales-Unzueta said. “It’s a very subtle, quiet show. Maybe people that are there are mostly press, there’s very few celebrities. And what you see is clothes. And then you talk to him backstage, he says, ‘I wanted to make clothes about clothes.’”
Clothes about clothes is how my colleague Thom Bettridge also described the best of the season—garments you need to see, feel, wear to experience their magic. The coffee-dyed jackets of RANRA. The frilled pajama sets of Edward Cuming. The double shoes of Comme des Garçons Homme Plus—the entire CDGHP collection of suits printed with suits and made from suits on top of suits.At the CDG showroom, someone told me, “Kawakubo has been wearing sparkles for four days and counting.” Everything is glitter. Maybe fashion’s future bright after all.
