Let’s be clear, once and for all: Louis Vuitton did not create a surf collection. Louis Vuitton created a collection about surfing, which is about as credible as Berlusconi giving lessons in chastity. Cowabunga Bunga is the name of the collection because, apparently, someone had to make a joke, even if nobody understood it.
The great little Pharrell Williams, visionary genius in sneakers and perpetually Happy, has now decided to sell us the ocean. A man who only discovered surfing last year is suddenly explaining coastal lifestyle culture with the authority of a suited-up Laird Hamilton. Nicknamed “Skateboard P” in high school, not “Surf P”, mind you, Skateboard P, he now splashes into the aquatic world with the serene humility of someone who couldn’t tell the difference between a wetsuit and a municipal swimming-pool brief, armed with the attention span of a goldfish.
And what an entrance it was! The runway wound its way out of the back of an artificial wave. Artificial, like the talent, like the surf culture, like the man’s modesty. A papier-mâché wave spraying mist over models dressed in ribbed cashmere. Cashmere, in crushing heat, for surfing. It feels like a fever dream, except it isn’t: we’re sweating, and no amount of LV sea spray is going to change that.
But the pinnacle, the apotheosis, the absolute masterpiece of this exercise in aesthetic plunder: the Monogram wetsuit. Louis Vuitton has stamped its logo onto functional diving gear. Functional! One can already picture the surfer in Biarritz emerging from the water between sets in a €4,800 monogrammed wetsuit, locking eyes with his favorite dolphin and saying, “Look how I arrived.”
Meanwhile, Hawaiian shirts covered in palm trees and cut-off denim shorts paraded down the runway, garments utterly unsuited to Virginia Beach, where Pharrell comes from. Because Virginia Beach, my friends, is not Malibu. And Pharrell knows that better than anyone, since he made a point of leaving it as quickly as possible.
We should also note, with the sort of tenderness reserved for the details that truly kill, the shell-embroidered jeans “for the mussels attending the show,” as our correspondent on the scene observed with surgical precision, along with the jacket covered in souvenir-style patches, the centerpiece of a collection that looks less like an artistic vision than the bottom of a tourist’s bag after returning from ten different countries.
The cherry on top of this terry-cloth bathrobe of an affair: Williams saw fit to declare, with all the gravity of a great thinker, “I’m a creative director, but I’m also a creator who consumes: I design things that I know I’m going to wear.”
In other words: he creates his own advertising, because when you can neither sew nor surf, you’ve got to make sure the promotion takes care of itself. The circle is complete. The wave is artificial. The monogram is on the wetsuit. And somewhere, a bimbo seated in the front row is applauding.
In this heat, Louis Vuitton only dreamed of taking a dip. What it really did was dip into everyone else’s collections. That’s luxury.
FM