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FIRST, let’s acknowledge a simple truth: no one is turning out a runway experience quite like Louis Vuitton. Pharrell Williams’ music background and nuance for concert-level production has him overseeing events that are Coachella-level immersive.

For Spring-Summer 2027, the French Maison decided to build a ten-metre wall of water – a breaking wave frozen mid-crash with models emerging from its tube as though shot out of the barrel at Pipeline and the sand underfoot was real. Williams had brought Virginia Beach to Paris.

What the spectacle can occasionally obscure, however, is how good Williams is when he trusts his own instincts rather than the scale of his platform. His strongest work at Louis Vuitton has consistently come from the same place: the preppy-inflected, sun-bleached aesthetic of Virginia Beach in the early ’90s with its immersive skate and surf culture. That cultural memory runs through this collection in various degrees.

The checkerboard pattern – a reference to skate’s DIY origins and one of Louis Vuitton’s own iconic motifs, the Damier – reappears here in oversized knits and leather accessories. The daisy chain belts, the corduroy lapels, the patchwork jackets mended and re-mended until they become something else entirely: this is Williams in his element, and it shows.

The collection’s other axis is water – its mythology, its aesthetic, its effect on fabric and colour.

Williams has spoken at length over his tenure about surf culture as a democratic space, a wardrobe built on function and proximity to the ocean. Here, the studio pushed that through Louis Vuitton’s particular lens of artisanal alchemy, and the results were frequently striking.

A deep blue parka edged at hem and sleeve with coraline beading worn over a leather workwear shirt and washed leather 5-pocket trousers – one of the cleaner expressions of the collection’s central argument. A mink sweater coat in light taupe, worn with A-line shorts and a laser-cut camp hat, looked beach-worn yet remained obviously luxurious to the touch.

An embellished cashmere cardigan scattered with palm trees, worn with yellow two-pleat striped trousers and accompanied by a surfboard whose pattern derived from macro photographs of shells.

For the obsessives, the colour-coding of sections was pleasing to the eye: baby yellow, powder blue, mossy faded green, the occasional hit of burgundy. Not the saturated palette of a lesser interpretation of surf, but something closer to what actually fades in the sun.

Materials followed the same logic – washed denim carrying darker patches where fabric had been removed, wetsuits engineered by a specialist firm in the south of France with a new zip-in neck design, the house’s Monogram rendered in “silk tech,” a fabric described as silkily light but notably robust. A single jacket assembled from 480 stitched-together LV patches, then washed to achieve a salt-smacked effect, functioned as a kind of thesis statement for the collection’s relationship with time and wear.

The accessories included coral-crusted bags built up with pins and beading – tied, the show notes confirm, to Louis Vuitton’s funding of a reef restoration project in French Polynesia – and a new range of “marshmallow” bags lined in memory foam that were, by all accounts, the most interesting objects to actually hold.

There was still that child-like whimsy to the collection, something that the late Virgil Abloh worked tirelessly to embed into the Louis Vuitton DNA. But it was tempered with a more wearable silhouette that looked to everyday picks over every now and then.

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