Pharrell’s golden-hued, India-inspired dreamworld took over the Centre Pompidou last night, transforming it into a surreal board game for Louis Vuitton’s Spring-Summer 2026 menswear show. On the surface, it was “Snakes and Ladders” blown up to architectural scale, while beneath, it was a layered tribute to India interpreted through Pharrell’s global vision and Vuitton’s heritage.
The clothes carried the mood of a slow train across the subcontinent with silks that looked sun-faded, tailoring that was loose and weathered, and the colour palette was also laid back with hues of blue, deep purples, turmeric golds, and dusty browns. Offering contradictions: lived-in vs yet elevated, regal yet relaxed. The contrasts didn’t stop there as the mountaineering silhouettes sat against formal suiting with rich brocade details. As for accessories, bags were pulled straight from The Darjeeling Limited and sat alongside reworked Vuitton classics, dipped in saffron, orange, and indigo. Familiar, but Pharrell gave them a playfulness, cue the pink polycarb trunk. Jewellery came in aged golds and unpolished stones, and footwear took on left-of-centre shapes, think offbeat derbies, twisted flip-flops, utilitarian boots that took on a new iteration.
Studio Mumbai’s Bijoy Jain designed the set, placing architectural focus at the heart of modernist Paris and putting craft at the centre of it all.
Pharrell also scored the show himself, of course he did, and it featured a live performance with Voices of Fire, Tyler, the Creator, and A.R. Rahman, which resulted in a genre-fluid soundscape that complemented the clothes, the setting, and the inspiration.
