There’s music in the air at Louis Vuitton’s menswear HQ in Paris. Swelling piano chords float along office hallways, buoying along a soulful, unmistakable falsetto—a voice that’s launched a thousand hits. “I stay in a flow state,” says Pharrell Williams from his light-filled executive suite turned recording studio, pausing mid-song to swivel away from his piano keyboard. “It’s like when you get in a place of absolute disconnection with the exception of what you’re focused on in your brain. It opens up a whole other world, and that world becomes a dimension unto itself.”
In the two-plus years since Williams was appointed Louis Vuitton’s creative director of menswear—only the second Black man to hold the position, after Virgil Abloh—he’s been mapping a new frontier for the storied French house, one filled with music, culture, and entertainment. Williams’s contract was announced on Valentine’s Day, auspicious timing that inspired his agenda-setting For Lovers debut collection in June 2023. Staged on the landmark Pont Neuf at sunset, backed by a gospel choir, and megastars in attendance—Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Zendaya, you name it—the show easily ranked as one of the biggest cultural moments the French capital has seen in a decade. Williams’s office is filled with subdued Paris light, and his views onto that historic bridge, the oldest standing over the Seine, are impressive.
Right now he’s working on producing tracks for John Legend’s new album, and later this afternoon he’ll be over in the design studio at the other side of the office. “I spend my day zooming back and forth on that,” he says, motioning toward an LV-monogrammed skateboard propped up by the door (surrounded by his kids’ micro-scooters). The children, with his wife, Helen Lasichanh—Rocket, 16, and his 8-year-old triplet siblings—are, he admits, learning French considerably faster than he is since the move from Miami. “I’d say I’m at 33 percent comprehension,” he says with a sigh.
Nevertheless, Parisians have embraced him: Earlier today, Williams met with President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée. His outfit for the occasion—a navy blue logo Vuitton sweatshirt with tricolor embroidery, flared jeans, rose gold aviator specs, and his yet-to-be-released chunky-soled “jellyfish” Adidas sneakers—speaks to an intuitive personal style: easy American swagger laced with Gallic savoir faire. “When I’m moving in those spaces, I always kind of like to bend the rules a little bit,” he says. “I’m not looking for attention, but I don’t necessarily want to blend in.”
Such, of course, is the spirit of this year’s Costume Institute exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” and Williams serves as a cohost for the opening Met Gala. “I see dandyism as a set of rules and standards,” he says, “that reflect a certain sophistication and well-traveled taste. For Black people to hit that mark or exceed it, and be consistent with it, is a matter of pride. And consistency garners respect.”
For a generation of music-and-fashion obsessives, Williams, 52, is revered as the original hip-hop eccentric: highly expressive, unapologetically audacious, unafraid to flout menswear conventions, especially the hypermasculine tropes ascribed to rap music. In the early aughts, he presaged hypebeast culture with Billionaire Boys Club, the streetwear label he cofounded with his friend Nigo. He also rocked Birkin bags, flaunted prized pieces from Phoebe Philo’s collections for Celine, and casually layered strands of pearls over classic Chanel tweeds. “At that time, you had to be really comfortable in who you were as a guy to walk into a Chanel store full of womenswear and find something for you,” says Williams, a longtime friend and muse to Karl Lagerfeld, and also the first man to lead a handbag campaign for the French house. “And I just loved it because it left me to be the only one.”
That sense of being the only one could be isolating. When he was growing up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, he remembers feeling that his outsize imagination was somehow bigger than his surroundings—an experience he likens to “being like a firefly in a preserve jar.” The first trip he took to Japan, in the early ’00s, proved transformative. “Traveling to Japan for the first time cracked everything open,” explains Williams, whose latest collection for Vuitton was a full-circle moment: made in collaboration with Nigo, whom he met on that eye-opening trip.
“It gave me the sense that there was more out there, that what I was sensing was real, that possibilities were really infinite,” Williams says. “That’s why I recommend that for every young mind, especially Black and brown minds, get out and see the world. You realize there really are no ceilings except the ones that you perceive.”
For Williams, the need for a cross-disciplinary collective of Black voices feels more urgent than ever. The Met Gala is a critical start: “I want it to feel like the most epic night of power, a reflection of Black resiliency in a world that continues to be colonized, by which I mean policies and legislation that are nothing short of that,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important to me to have successful Black and brown people of every stripe in the room: not just athletes and actors and actresses, entertainers, but also authors, architects, folks from the fintech world. We’ve got to invest in each other. We’ve got to connect with each other, because it’s going to take everybody to coalesce the force of Black and brown genius into one strong, reliable force. It’s our turn.”
The May issue is here! Get unlimited access to Vogue’s coverage of the Met Gala. Subscribe to Vogue.