Pharrell Williams' latest side gig, and the rise of inflatable fashion at New York Fashion Week

New York Fashion Week 2023 was full of surprises including roses upon roses, inflatable everything and *gasp* mixing brown with black.

Fashion columnist Mosha Lundström Halbert was in attendance, and she joined Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about everything she saw at the event of the season.

But first, the pair get into the recent announcement that music producer and tastemaker Pharrell Williams will succeed the late, revered Virgil Abloh as the head of men's designs at Louis Vuitton.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: I'm really excited to talk about the trends and everything that you saw, but before we get there, we've got to talk about Pharrell Williams. He's one of the biggest music producers on the planet, he's a fashion icon in his own right, and it was just announced that he's going to be taking over Louis Vuitton's menswear line. This is a huge deal because this is a role that's been empty since Virgil Abloh died. Virgil Abloh, of course, the star designer who died of cancer in the end of 2021. Virgil was just 41. Mosha, we're starting with this conversation. Virgil and Pharrell were really good friends. What can you tell me about the rise that they both had through the fashion industry?

Mosha: Yes, we have to discuss this breaking news, and it is so interesting. This is going to go down in the fashion history books, just the interaction that Virgil and Pharell — and of course, we have to mention Kanye — have had with the fashion industry as real disruptors, making their presence felt. The fashion world didn't exactly welcome them. Kanye and Virgil famously started off as interns at Fendi together, and Pharrell, bit by bit, kind of ingratiated himself in that world where he maintained an omnipresence since the early 2000s, and I think these three men have all supported each other throughout that. Obviously, they've all taken different paths, but I think if you pull back and really look at Pharrell — and I'm interested in your perspective as a music and culture expert as well — he's really emerged as this one-of-a-kind creative polymath, with projects spanning streetwear, music, fashion, design, restaurants, hotels. So it's kind of like, all his work has cumulated into this moment that we saw break yesterday.

Elamin: I'm really intrigued by this moment because I followed Virgil's work quite closely. Every time that I see the sneakers or the silhouettes that [high fashion is] going for, I think, "these are really inspired by street silhouettes and street styles," and it was not that long ago that the fashion world turned its nose up at these styles. But thanks to the work of someone like Virgil, in collaboration with Kanye, in collaboration with someone like Pharrell, they've changed what is fashionable. They changed the ways that the fashion world responds to street and to hip hop culture, particularly. And so, when I saw that Pharrell was the choice, I thought it was kind of interesting because to me, Virgil is someone who I would think of him as someone who's in community with a lot of other designers. And Pharrell kind of stands alone, right? Like to me, he's got his own voice, he's not really in conversation with a lot of other people. What do you make of the fact that he was the one handed the reins?

Mosha: Well, I think it's definitely a departure from the rumors that I saw swirling around more stalwart menswear designers such as Wales Bonner. But I do think it makes complete sense why Louis Vuitton would hire Pharrell over a smaller, lesser-known "designer's designer." Because ultimately for a brand like that, they really are in a lot of ways a media and marketing conglomerate, and it's all about exposure, cultural resonance and collaboration. If you look at who are really the masters of pulling from different references and creating something and putting it out into the world in a timely fashion, it's musicians and it's producers; that really is the sandbox that they play in constantly. So, applying it to a different métier like fashion, I don't think that's an impossible feat. And I think Pharrell has clearly established himself as someone who has been able to work with brands very well. He's very well-liked, he's not a politically polarizing figure like Kanye West, and he's considered an authority and a style-maker in the men's space. He has existing relationships with fashion houses, he has a streetwear brand called Billionaire Boys Club, he did a collaboration with Chanel. But, you know, it does beg the question: what is a "designer" or a "creative director" in the year 2023? Are they the ones that can drape and sketch and sew? Or are they the ones that can really take the temperature of the zeitgeist and know how to market it?

Elamin: And I think when I think of it in that framework, Pharrell is the obvious successor in the sense that both he and Virgil would challenge the idea of, "hey, this is what a capital-D-designer looks like." They are people who are very skilled at borrowing, very skilled at having conversations with other people in different genres within the same categories that they create. You can sort of see that alongside their whole career. One more question on this before we move on from it, which is how do you think you'd describe his design point of view?

Mosha: Well, Pharrell's very worldly, and I think his point of view, I would describe it as elevated and also very playful. One of his recent large-scale projects is right here in Miami, where I'm speaking to you from, where he is based, and it's a hotel called The Good Time that has a pink pool on its rooftop. I think his style is very ever-evolving and it's reactionary to the world around him. He has a way of collaging different references. But I also think Pharrell, if you look at the timeline, even before someone like Harry Styles, he embraced wearing women's wear or reinterpreting women's wear or dressing in a more gender-neutral fashion earlier on, and I think having a creative director who speaks that language will be very helpful to Louis Vuitton.  

Elamin: Mosha, you were just at New York Fashion Week. It's going to end today. Let's talk about some of the trends that you saw. What did you see throughout the week?

Mosha: Some of the key things that you should be looking out for: one, inflation. Everything has gotten really puffy; there's even, like, "inflatable" fashion, like literally has air in it. From accessories to outerwear, just this voluminous expression; certainly we saw that even during Rihanna's Super Bowl performance with that great big coat she wore.

Elamin: And Sam Smith's outfit at the Brit Awards, same kind of deal, right? It kind of basically looked like Sam Smith was wearing a big balloon, sort of.

Mosha: Yes, it's about taking up space in an unconventional way. The key color that's come out of the season that I've noticed is brown as the new neutral — head-to-toe brown everywhere, and brown even, shockingly, mixed with black (which used to be a no-no). And then a 90's trend we've seen is burnt-out velvet, kind of done as a print. 

Elamin: I didn't expect that to be coming back.

Mosha: I know. And the big rosettes, big floral corsage rosette details on everything. We saw it on Harry Styles in that Nina Ricci look at the Brit Awards, but it's all over the runways as well — for men, for women, for everyone.

Elamin: There's something about the energy of New York Fashion Week: yes, you have the established fashion houses, but also you get emerging designers. What are some of the shows that stood out for you?

Mosha: Well the very first show of the week, Marc Jacobs, really was a seminal moment for me. It was an ode to the late Vivienne Westwood, who the fashion world lost in January, and Marc Jacobs was so inspired by Westwood. I mean, she was one of the original, rebellious rule-breakers in fashion and his homage to her, in this collection called "Heroes," was, I thought, really poignant and poetic.… It was a reminder that fashion is so cyclical, but everyone's inspired by somebody, even somebody as established as Marc Jacobs. And then on the other end of the spectrum, what really stood out for me is the designer LaQuan Smith, who was championed early by André Leon Talley and has really come into his own in the past few years. He's a Black designer who reminds me very much of a young Tom Ford in that he just has this deft hand for sexy, distinctly American sportswear, similar to Ford's early work. Those really stood out to me, I have to say.

Elamin: I liked that you referred to the idea of fashion sometimes being cyclical, because I think that is the thing that people who might not be too deeply in the fashion world, they sort of are familiar with that. But of course, so much of that has to do with the sort of self-referential culture and then a referential culture of saying, "I'm inspired by this person, this person has pushed my work into this new realm," and you're seeing that in this New York Fashion Week.

Mosha: Yes, definitely. Another example of that was, I went backstage at the Christian Siriano show. I was a guest of Tresemmé, the haircare brand. The runway was covered in tens of thousands of roses, and then I went backstage and they were actually creating hairdos that resembled a rosette on the models. And it was such a reminder for me of how many creatives are involved behind the scenes in order to put forth a runway vision. The collection was inspired by Audrey Hepburn's Breakfast at Tiffany's era, and what I thought was really interesting is Audrey Hepburn had this muse relationship with Givenchy, and we really saw that mirrored with Coco Rocha, the supermodel who's a muse to Christian Siriano, opens and closes his show. And it's like this symbiotic relationship where they both keep each other relevant, help publicize each other's work, and kind of present it on the world stage in a very dramatic way. So it was interesting to see all that play out from a real 360-point of view.

Elamin: Well, what I'm going to do is go find myself some kind of inflatable jacket. That's my plan for the rest of today. Mosha, thank you so much for being here.

Mosha: Of course, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.