British GQ – September 2023
English | 222 pages | pdf | 146.97 MB
welcome at British GQ Magazine September 2023 Issue
FASHION WEEK IS an arms race of theatricality. It’s a competition to build a singular moment that is seared into the minds of a few hundred attendees, one that is then beamed out to the great world beyond.
As you can imagine, after a few weeks of this – after dozens and dozens of runway shows – you’re left to reflect on a deafening cacophony of clothing, set design, music and visual stunts. A whole bunch of stuff blurs together. Inevitably, one moment, one show ascends to the front of your mind. One kind of magic always wins out.
It was patently unsurprising that Pharrell Williams – in his first presentation as the men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton – would cast the most potent magic of the menswear shows this past June. It was destined and decreed. Another chapter, another verse in a decades-long performance.
Pharrell was on the cover of the very first edition of GQ I discovered: the summer 2006 issue of Australian GQ, which my two older sisters, huge fans of NERD, had purchased. Since his emergence as a wunderkind producer in the ’90s, Pharrell has embarked on a plethora of culture-defining roles: as a solo pop artist, musical collaborator, film producer, entrepreneur, skincare magnate, and now a fashion designer at the helm
of one of the world’s most revered maisons.
We call GQ Hype – our regular digital tentpole, and the theme of this September issue – the big story of right now. Pharrell feels like the story of now, then, and undoubtedly tomorrow, too. Flip a calendar back through the past few decades, and you’ll stumble upon Pharrell magic within pop culture: a ginormous hat here, “Happy” there, “Drop It Like It’s Hot”, “Get Lucky”, a pretty extraordinary pair of Chanel shades, on the cover of GQ’s “New Masculinity” issue in a puffy Moncler gown …
I thought about these distant stars and the constellation that they form as we and the rest of the fashion world took to Pharrell’s debut Louis Vuitton show a few months ago. Guests stepped off the Seine onto the Pont Neuf, which had become a runway. I instantly dubbed it “the great bridge hang” : a slowly populating group of people milling about with very nice champagne and very astounded smiles. You could spot all corners of culture: Rihanna and The surrealist masterpiece that inspired our cover: Rene Magritte’s 1953 painting Golconda.
A$AP Rocky, Marcus Rashford and LeBron James, Beyonce and Jay-Z. There are only a handful of individuals on the planet that could congregate such a collective. It takes pull – not merely social, but gravitational.
We planned this cover shoot ahead of that runway show and that great bridge hang. Together with our close collaborator, Parisian photographer Fanny Latour-Lambert, we discussed how to capture the spirit of Pharrell’s arrival in Paris. We talked about French surrealist legends Gilbert Garcin and Rene Maltete. We looked at the Belgian painter Rene Magritte, who fell in with the writer Andre Breton to create a new superreality in Paris. Magritte’s 1953 painting Golconda became the reference image for our cover.
Like any surrealist work, the interpretation of it is up to you. Maybe, like our cover line reads, it’s Pharrell descending on Paris. But maybe he is actually ascending to the clouds, pulling us all with him.
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