Pharrell’s Buttersoft trainer marries couture craft with pop flair
Its pillow-like shape makes it one of the most distinctive silhouettes that Louis Vuitton has produced
AT LOUIS VUITTON’S Manufacture de Souliers in Fiesso d’Artico, a short drive from Venice, Pharrell Williams’ new Buttersoft trainers are made with the same painstaking care as a pair of bespoke dress shoes.
When Esquire visits the factory, we find a vast building, shaped like a shoebox, designed by architect Jean-Marc Sandrolini in 2008. Today, it employs around 500 people, more than half of them artisans. “The people who work here really become gurus in a single operation,” explains communications supervisor Francesca Bergami. “Luxury for us is the sum of every step of production made by a specialist, by hand.”
The Buttersoft was unveiled on Vuitton’s autumn/winter 2025 runway – Williams’ fifth season as men’s creative director – and is already tipped as the successor to Virgil Abloh’s iconic LV Trainer.
With prices starting at upwards of $2000, it arrives in no fewer than 24 colourways, from sober monochromes to bright pastels, echoing Williams’ 2015 Adidas “Supercolor” project. Its exaggerated, pillow-like shape makes it one of the most distinctive silhouettes that Louis Vuitton has ever produced.
Its story begins with the leather. “We wanted to use a nappa leather, which is not usually suitable for sneakers as it creates wrinkles,” says Walter Carinelli, Vuitton’s style coordination manager for men’s shoes. “After a long search, we found a specially made ‘nappa butter leather’ with both subtleness and strength. That became the name of the shoe.”
The result is a trainer that, when touched, feels improbably soft and pliant yet reassuringly dense, like a padded glove. Every pair starts with the last – the wooden mould that defines its shape. Gigi Agostini, Vuitton’s master last-maker, has been carving hornbeam blocks here since 1979. “First of all is the last,” he said. “From the sketch to the last, then measurement, fitting test and industrialisation – until production. Last is first.”
Once perfected by hand, the form is digitised so that it can be reproduced in recycled plastic for production. From there, the process spans four ateliers: cutting, stitching, assembly and finishing. Veteran stitcher Katia Fabian, whose mother also worked for LV, handpaints the edges of calf-leather patches with three coats of colour before stitching them into the upper. “From zero to the end, I can make an entire upper of the Buttersoft,” she says.
LV’s latest trainer combines Williams’ pop-cultural sensibilities with the kind of devotion usually found in couture workshops – a shoe as soft to touch as it is rooted in centuries of Venetian craft.
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