Fashion
The World’s Richest Men, Their Friends and Their Frocks
For his latest Vuitton collection, Pharrell Williams tapped his best bud Nigo to be co-creative director. And Bernard Arnault made it back from the Trump inauguration to see it.
What do you do after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration?
Well, if you’re Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of LVMH and one of the world’s richest men, you go to a fashion show. Bien sûr.
On Tuesday evening, roughly 24 hours after standing on the dais at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Arnault was checking up on Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton collection from the front row. (His seatmates, the French basketball star Victor Wembanyama in a green varsity jacket and friend-of-the-Obamas Bradley Cooper in a herringbone coat, certainly cut a different image than Dana White and Miriam Adelson.)
But to call this particular show Mr. Williams’s Louis Vuitton would be misleading. This collection, as per the news release, listed both Mr. Williams and Nigo, the Japanese designer and founder of A Bathing Ape, as its “men’s creative directors.”
The pair have creatively commingled before. In the early aughts, they worked together on Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream, two BAPE offshoots that became legend for their comic-book-colored full-zip hoodies and buxom skate shoes.
“Nigo is the glue to my ideas,” Mr. Williams said some 20 years ago in a video interview, standing next to Nigo at the Ice Cream store in Tokyo.
Of note: Today Nigo is the creative director of Kenzo, another LVMH property, albeit one whose wattage seems to be increasingly dim. And so, what Mr. Arnault and hundreds of audience members saw on Tuesday was a demonstration of an LVMH-sanctioned bromance. (Neither designer was made available for an interview, so their creative process for this particular collection remained opaque.)
