Louis Vuitton FALL 2024 MENSWEAR
Louis Vuitton presented the show for the Men's Fall-Winter 2024 Collection by Pharrell Williams in Paris.
Evoking the iconography of the American Western wardrobe, cowboy-inspired silhouettes and workwear details are imbued with the Maison's heritage signatures. Punctuated by quintessential adornments and refined materials, iconic bags and accessories exude nuanced style codes of the frontier.
The day after Pharrell Williams’s first rodeo for Louis Vuitton—that extravaganza of a show on Pont Neuf last June—the studio he leads began work on this collection. Now that you can begin to join the dots, it appears that he is taking the house (via an ocean crossing) on something of an odyssey.
The four LV trunks wheeled down the runway tonight strongly suggest he’s still en route to somewhere, but for fall ’24 his LV caravanserai moved into what is home territory for Williams: the USA and its heritage of Western wear and workwear.
Speaking to the press during a post-show howdy, he said:
“When you see cowboys portrayed you see only a few versions. You never really get to see what some of the original cowboys looked like. They looked like us, they looked like me. They looked Black. They looked Native American.”
The native peoples of what became the United States were respected and represented in tonight’s telling via participation and acknowledgement. The house said that artists from the Dakota and Lakota tribes contributed to the accessories; these included hand-paintings and beautiful desert flower embroideries on several versions of the Speedy bag.
The opening and closing music was co-composed by Williams and Lakota “Hokie” Clairmont and performed by a group named Native Voices of Resistance, who along with the models and the studio team took a bow with Williams at the end. Amongst the models was Lakota musician Gunner Jules, who carried a painted Keepall above his hand-tooled Goodyear welted cowboy boots, jeans, LV cowboy buckle belt, and patched shearling jacket.
Still, though: American history is so fraught, freighted, and subject to fiery debate in the battleground of contemporary cultural identity. The year Louis Vuitton founded his start-up workshop by the Place Vendome, 1854, was also the year of the Achulet massacre, the First Sioux War, and the capture and re-enslavement of Anthony Burns in Virginia. Williams said:
“We’re expressing ourselves from a place of love, no judgment. Just think about telling your story and telling your people’s story as best you can and doing it candidly and with love—that’s the overwhelming feeling.”
The storytelling achieved by the studio and artisan teams of the house though the execution of their craft under Williams’s direction was often outstanding. Lace shirts were embroidered with lasso-throwing cowboys and denim jackets with yellow desert flowers. Chaps in leather or denim—possibly a first for the house—were embroidered in saddlery patterns or fringed and flowered. Suiting—including the collarless Pont Neuf jacket that is becoming a Williams LV emblem—and denim was riveted with turquoise, which was also tooled into belts, collar tips, bolos, jewelry, and bags.
