Pharrell’s Spring Summer ’26 LV Show Proves He’s Been Listening
Pharrell heard it. It being that some people thought his early collections for Louis Vuitton relied too heavily on prints and patterns — damier and monograms and other embellishments — and hewed too closely to the low-hanging fruit of streetwear-adjacent luxury. Well, the Spring-Summer 2026 show offered a rebuttal; a rebuttal whose ferocity was matched by that of the sound system and the live choir, Voices of Fire.
The show was an ode to Indian sartorialism, staged across a giant snakes and ladder board (a game with Indian roots) set outside the Centre Pompidou, right in the heart of Paris. It was also Pharrell’s most mature collection to date, a statement of intent aimed at those who may have doubted. The show opened with a series of smartly tailored looks, with light shirts and artfully pleated trousers that billowed in the Parisian breeze. Stripes abounded, on shirts and trousers and jackets, in various widths, ranging from the pin to the bengal. Said stripes included — for the first time in a Louis Vuitton collection — the pattern developed by the house for the 2007 Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited. The colour palette was sumptuous, luxurious and light, with greys and browns (inspired by the colour of washed coffee beans) accentuated with rich, earthy reds and pops of purple inspired by Indian dyes.
Bags were finished with gold threaded monograms and stripes (including the Darjeeling Limited pattern), dipped in colours and rendered in finishes from the new Nil M in silky smooth ostrich leather to the luxuriously textured crocodile Steamer Workwear bag. The trunks, always a star of Pharrell’s shows, were ornately encrusted and patterned, and some took on the dice motif that made up a key component of the show invitation.
In the two years since Pharrell has taken the helm at Louis Vuitton’s menswear studio, he has had some fun with the codes of the house: the iconic monogram and damier. His first collection introduced us to damouflage, which had, up until this point, featured in his collections. His Fall-Winter 2025 collection, which riffed on Western motifs, was particularly strong, thanks to its use of damier to create a Buffalo check plaid and eye-catching graphics rendered in a familiar Western style. This was the first of Pharrell’s collections where he seemed unbound by damier and the monogram — yes, they featured in the collection, but they weren’t front and centre.
It meant that there was something timeless about this collection. Previously, pieces have been easily identifiable as being from a particular season. Perhaps, in five years’ time, so, too, will these, but at a glance, they had an ageless quality to them: these are just luxurious-but easy-wearing–clothes that can be worn from Paris to Mumbai, today or twenty years ago or twenty years from now. Even in the treatment of the garments themselves, Pharrell seems to be guiding clients towards embracing the timeless nature of the clothes: jeans are rendered in the aforementioned coffee brown, not through dying, but through a weaving process that gradually allows the interwoven white threads to reveal themselves, creating a unique patina. The few logos and wordmarks that do feature in the collection tend to be rendered in an aged paint style, chipped and faded. These are clothes meant to be kept and worn.
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring Summer 2026 Show
The Spring-Summer 2026 collection may not have been Pharrell’s loudest, but the show and the statement it made definitely were. With a front row dotted by the likes of Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Pusha T, Bradley Cooper, Jackson Wang, Victor Wembanyama, Future, and many, many, many more, there was certainly an audience for the message Pharrell was imparting: he can make noise with subtlety, too.
Join The SHARP Insiders
Get the latest Culture, Style, and Automotive News from the editors at SHARP Magazine.
