Louis Vuitton Taps Pharrell Williams as Next Menswear Designer

Louis Vuitton has hired Pharrell Williams, the music producer and streetwear entrepreneur, to be its creative director of menswear, the company said.

Mr. Williams, 49, assumes the role previously held by Virgil Abloh, who died in November 2021. Mr. Abloh was the first Black American to be appointed as the head designer at a European luxury house. Mr. Williams, a native of Virginia Beach, Va., who rose to prominence in the late 1990s as a part of hip-hop production duo the Neptunes, is now the second.

The first collection of Mr. Williams’s designs will be shown this June at men’s fashion week in Paris, the company said in a statement.

“I am glad to welcome Pharrell back home,” said Pietro Beccari, Louis Vuitton’s chairman and CEO, of Mr. Williams’s early-aughts collaborations with the company. “His creative vision beyond fashion will undoubtedly lead Louis Vuitton towards a new and very exciting chapter.”

Mr. Williams and Mr. Abloh had a longstanding relationship and shared admiration for each other. In a 2017 interview with the Journal, Mr. Abloh said Mr. Williams was one of his five ideal dinner companions. When Mr. Abloh died, Mr. Williams tweeted that his heart was broken, calling his friend “a kind, generous, thoughtful creative genius.” Days after Mr. Abloh’s death, Mr. Williams sat in the front row at the Louis Vuitton show in Miami.

At Louis Vuitton, fusing heritage and hype has been a successful play on its men’s side for several years. It collaborated with cult streetwear label Supreme in 2017, and hired Mr. Abloh as its menswear designer the following year. In collections that melded dramatic, avant-garde tailoring with high-end hoodies and sneakers, Mr. Abloh both appealed to the brand’s entrenched big-money clientele and brought in a younger, splashier consumer.

Now, the crown jewel of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA looks to extend a major run of growth that has propelled LVMH to the largest stock-market valuation in Europe—and turned Bernard Arnault, the conglomerate’s chairman and CEO, into the world’s richest person, recently outdistancing Elon Musk.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Mr. Williams and LVMH were in talks early Tuesday.

While Mr. Abloh’s profile exploded over the course of his three years at Vuitton, ultimately making him one of the most recognisable fashion designers in the world, Mr. Williams would assume the position as a genuine celebrity already—one who has been a judge on “The Voice,” voiced a character in “Sing 2” and racked up two Oscar nominations, 13 Grammy awards and a bevy of number-one singles.

LVMH’s strategy of aligning with splashy, big-name creatives contrasts with the more traditional route to hiring recently taken by Kering SA, one of its largest luxury industry rivals. In late January, Gucci, Kering’s flagship brand, named Sabato de Sarno, a little-known Italian designer who previously worked at Valentino SpA, as its new creative director.

Mr. Williams, meanwhile, is best known as a music hitmaker, responsible for chart-conquering earworms like “Happy” and “Blurred Lines”—but nevertheless has a lengthy résumé as an apparel entrepreneur.

He arrives at a highflying time for Louis Vuitton. It took the fashion house 164 years to become the luxury industry’s first $10 billion brand back in 2018, but it doubled that figure in four years. Analysts say that $20 billion in revenue makes it the biggest luxury brand in the world.

Still, there are new economic headwinds for the company and the industry. Many analysts are expecting an economic softening in key markets, including the U.S. and Europe. It is also a period of change at Louis Vuitton directly. This month, Chief Executive Michael Burke and Executive Vice President Delphine Arnault, Mr. Arnault’s daughter, handed off leadership of the brand. Taking over Louis Vuitton is Italian executive Mr. Beccari, the outgoing boss at Dior.

In one of his first forays in fashion in the early 2000s, well into his career as a pop megaproducer, Mr. Williams paired with Japanese fashion icon Nigo, who is now the creative director of Kenzo, another brand under the LVMH umbrella, to found the pioneering streetwear label Billionaire Boys Club as well as a skateboarding-inspired shoe brand, Ice Cream.

A 2005 clip shows a young Mr. Williams at Ice Cream’s Tokyo store, standing beside Nigo, who he affectionately calls “the General.” “Can’t believe it man, like it’s really happening,” said Mr. Williams, staring in awe at a display case of his brand’s lavender and baby-blue sneakers.

Mr. Williams’s earlier forays were lavish and logo-mad, defined by full-zip hoodies splayed with neon-coloured dollar-sign prints, and jewel-tone shoes. Product drops would draw crowds of cool-hunting teens and 20-somethings to the brand’s shops in New York and Japan.

Three years later, in what retrospectively looks like a sign of things to come, Mr. Williams collaborated with Louis Vuitton’s creative director Marc Jacobs on a series of jewellery designs and the blocky aviator-esque “Millionaire” sunglasses. “Vuitton for me is a school,” said Mr. Williams in a 2008 interview discussing his collaboration with Mr. Jacobs. “I’ve just learned a lot being here.” Today, pairs of those sunglasses continue to sell for over $1,000 on resale sites like Grailed.

Further collaborations followed with fashion heavyweights like Diesel, Chanel and Moncler. Mr. Williams has also worked with Adidas for nearly a decade on a co-branded line of clothes and shoes, including the sock-esque NMD Hu sneakers with New Age-y words like “Breathe,” “Clouds” and “Body” stitched along the front.

In the past few years, Mr. Williams has joined the rush of celebrities jumping in to launch skin-care products with the brand Humanrace, selling $36 “Rice Powder” cleansers and $52 “Ozone Body Protection” sunscreen.

Yet his largest impact in the fashion world is likely his own forward-looking choices in attire, even if he’s felt reticent about that role in the past. “It embarrasses me a bit to be a figure in fashion,” he told the Journal in 2014. “I think everyone is interested in what they put on, even if you dress conservatively.”

In 2015 he was awarded the Fashion Icon Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, appearing on stage to receive the award in a blue leather jacket and worn-in jeans. “No one has better style than the everyday American people,” he said during a brief speech. “Why? Because they’re the real thing and they live it everyday. I could never be as cool as them but I’m happy to take notes.”

Most recently, Mr. Williams has been the embodiment of this moment’s boundary-free mixing of streetwear and luxury, wearing both $240 putty-print hoodies from Cactus Plant Flea Market, run by his former assistant Cynthia Lu, and diamond-encrusted Tiffany & Co. sunglasses. (Tiffany & Co. is another LVMH brand.)

Over the past decade, the broader LVMH conglomerate has increasingly collaborated with celebrities, particularly musicians. In 2019, it partnered with Rihanna on Fenty, a luxury apparel line. While that brand fizzled after just two years, LVMH remains part-owner in her Fenty Beauty line, which is booming. Nigo, Pharrell’s longtime collaborator, also moonlights as a music producer and used his debut at Kenzo to tease songs from his 2022 album “I Know Nigo!”

Spanish singer Rosalía performed in January at the Louis Vuitton menswear show, which was created by the house’s men’s design studio, and featured pieces by the New York streetwear designer KidSuper. That partnership, though buzzy, didn’t provide any clarity on the long-term future of Louis Vuitton’s menswear.

Since Mr. Abloh’s death, fervent speculation has swirled about who Louis Vuitton would name to succeed him. Among the many names said to be linked to the job were independent designers like Martine Rose and Grace Wales Bonner.

What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.

Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.

Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.

We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.

Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.

A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.

However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.

So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.

Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.

Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.

No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)

Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.

This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.

“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.

Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.

And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.

Get physical

So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.

There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.

Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.

“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”

Use AI, but not too much

Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.

“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.

In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.

This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.

Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.

Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.

Louis Vuitton Taps Pharrell Williams as Next Menswear Designer

The celebrity producer will fill Virgil Abloh’s vacant role and become creative director, the company said Tuesday

As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.

Be meticulous about your calendar

Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%

Get physical

Use AI, but not too much