Why Pharrell Williams' Louis Vuitton Is So Desirable (SS25 Menswear Review)

Today I am reviewing Pharrell Williams' latest Spring Summer (SS25) Menswear Runway Show / Collection. “It went from black, to dark brown, to brown, to light brown, to beige, a little bit of gray in there… and light beige, and then finally to white… It was a homage to human beings.” So said Pharrell Williams after this blockbuster of a Louis Vuitton menswear show that encoded the house’s complex kaleidoscope of design output within a wider narrative that required no code at all to decrypt. Williams said in a preview that it was the imminence of the Paris 2024 Olympics (“when the world will be watching”) that first inspired the shape of this show. However it was another imminent event, France’s snap elections, that gave tonight’s presentation a special piquancy. The blue, green, and black check that took off most prominently around 70 looks in was based on a pattern used in luggage created for Air Afrique, the pan-continental airline that operated from the 1960s until 2002. The name was recently revived as a vehicle for diasporic discussion and design here in the French capital by a group of creatives including Lamine Diaoune, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko, and Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, all of whom worked on this collection alongside Williams. He said: “They all have a reverence for our homeland, the homeland of the species. The way they think about things is so beautiful…And you know, all the colors come from black.” From look 1 to look 66 the color of both the collection and