15 October 2024 |
The men’s creative director has tapped into his optimistic streak, creating a scent inspired by the generative power of light.
Pharrell Williams has always, in his way, risen with the sun. Long before he became a Grammy-winning producer, he grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, at a housing complex called Atlantis, where the nearby ocean would glow orange at dawn. As his career took off, he exuded a preternatural optimism—boundless, as if solar-powered—that trickled into his music. “Sunshine she’s here, you can take a break,” Williams sings in Happy, the up-tempo megahit from 2013, which suggests that light alone can summon a vacation mindset. The metaphor of daybreak can signal an altogether different mandate for the pop-culture polymath, too: Time to get to work.
That has certainly been Williams’s task since early last year, when he joined Louis Vuitton as its new men’s creative director. As the successor to Virgil Abloh—the interdisciplinary visionary who died in 2021—the musician signed on with equal parts reverence and verve. Williams relocated to Paris with his wife and four children; at the brand’s headquarters overlooking the Seine, he built a recording studio in his office to facilitate an intuitive flow. “Songs and shoes, accessories and harmonies,” Williams told GQ last year. “It’s one fluid thing.” His debut runway collection—which introduced his theme of LVERS for the first time, in a nod to Virginia’s unofficial state motto, “Virginia is for lovers”—arrived on a summer evening in 2023, bathing the historic Pont Neuf in the sounds of a gospel choir directed by his uncle Ezekiel. “From a vibration point of view,” Williams said in a post-show debrief, “my heart was filled and my mind was light.”
Such a description—buoyant, luminous, grounded in the moment—suits Williams’s latest launch: LVERS, his first fragrance for Louis Vuitton, which draws a hopeful energy from the sun. “We were talking about the first [light of] morning,” says the maison’s longtime master perfumer, Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, recalling his poetic exchanges with Williams throughout the collaboration. At sunrise, “everything is possible,” says Cavallier Belletrud, who embarked on his inaugural project with Williams alongside his protégée daughter, Camille—a multigenerational first in Les Parfums Louis Vuitton’s history. It wasn’t long before the trio’s fragrance discussions turned to photosynthesis, the botanical process that converts sunbeams and water into fuel for vegetation. Williams homed in on the family of green notes in perfumery, pulling open-air sensory cues from his Virginia childhood. “The trick of this creation was starting with galbanum,” says Cavallier Belletrud of the gum resin that anchors LVERS—Camille’s idea, he points out with pride. The natural ingredient, crisp and herbaceous, derives from a yellow-flowered plant native to Persia; ancient Egyptians deemed it sacred, and the Old Testament includes it in a recipe for holy incense.
But the fragrance is undoubtedly rooted in the present—much like Williams’s riffs on the checkerboard Damier pattern, an LV classic that he reimagined in camouflage tones, as seen on the leather cases sold alongside the perfume. In LVERS, plush sandalwood and cedar are layered with cardamom and refreshing bergamot. “It’s a
definition of the new masculinity,” muses Cavallier Belletrud, who launched the fragrance in the afterglow of the spring 2025 men’s show in June—even as a cohort of women quickly claimed LVERS for themselves. And as with any hit song, there’s a hook: a spicy, energizing ginger note, which acts “like a nice sun in the fragrance.”
That Williams would have a nose for a crowd-pleaser like LVERS comes as no surprise. He knows how to punch up an earworm. He knows how to package a life story. (Piece by Piece, his autobiographical film as told through Lego figures, lands in theaters this October; a star-studded coming-of-age musical called Atlantis, set in 1970s Virginia Beach, is also on deck from the director Michel Gondry.) He knows how to build a fashion following, as much through tailored essentials as through fanciful eccentricities: pearl-embellished socks, pearl-studded beanies, pearl-buttoned jackets. Now, at his perch in Paris, Williams finds himself playing the latter-day Sun King, basking in the light and smelling like it, too. The glow is unmistakable, as Cavallier Belletrud can attest. “When creators are really bright,” the perfumer says, “they are bright everywhere.”
