Louis Vuitton’s Pre-Fall 2025 Is a Love Letter to Lost Voyages and Leisure Dreams
Between Paris and Miami, Pharrell Williams sketches a new voyager for Louis Vuitton—dressed in sunset tailoring, pastel silks, and the fading memory of a golden age
A new traveler
In Louis Vuitton’s Men’s Pre-Fall 2025 campaign, the sea a backdrop and an inheritance. The traveler at the center of this story—dreamed up by Men’s Creative Director Pharrell Williams—moves through a landscape that is equal parts history and reverie. Photographed with an anthropologist’s eye for idiosyncrasy by Rosie Marks and captured in motion by Gregoire Dyer, the collection floats between Paris and Miami, the old world and the new, mapping a cross-continental cruise as much philosophical as sartorial.
It is a narrative told through clothes: a wardrobe that adapts to the needs of voyage, cast-off, arrival, and leisure, while honoring the almost-forgotten rituals of dressing well in transit. The notion of the smartly dressed traveler—a relic of the golden age of transatlantic ships and Miami Beach’s midcentury heyday—is reanimated through Pharrell’s contemporary lens. Yet this is not mere nostalgia. The campaign embodies what the House calls the “LVERS philosophy,” a world where tradition and modernity, old codes and new values, float alongside each other, effortlessly intertwined.
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The voyage begins
The collection itself unfolds in two acts, like a leisurely novel divided between ship and shore. The “transit wardrobe” salutes the stately grandeur of ocean liners, with tailoring and sportswear dipped in the mellow hues of sunset. Formal jackets lose their stiffness to sporty interpretations, while cruise-ship interiors—plush, secretive, cocooned—are reimagined in tactile materials and gentle, naval nods. Graphics gesture toward maritime iconography without slipping into costume; tiny boats populate the Monogram Regatta print, a visual shorthand for the collection’s fluid migrations.
Pharrell’s vision is not content to stay onboard. As the voyage ends and the air thickens with Miami’s salt-tinged heat, the “arrival wardrobe” emerges. Here, the codes of beach and pool culture, once vulgar in their excess, are refined through amplified savoir-faire. The pastel lightness of Miami life permeates silk bowling sets in aqua and pink, while terry-cloth shawl-collared coats and strawberry-pink track tops flirt with the idea of daywear masquerading as loungewear. It is a delicate balance: clothing that speaks fluently in the language of leisure without ever losing the accent of elegance.
Naval references ripple through the collection like a slow, persistent current. Sailor stripes, moiré textures that shimmer like disturbed water, and Jazz Age silhouettes expanded into louche, three-piece suits create a subtle visual syncopation. Monogram evolves into new expressions: crystal-encrusted hoodies, flocked cotton-denim workwear, and sun-faded Damier Denim. Even raffia, that humble material of beaches and baskets, is elevated into jacket trims and embroidered Damier squares, an act of redefinition.
The accessories, too, are steeped in the ambiance of the voyage. Trunks that resemble coffee tables, totes that recall the heavy, tanned hands of sailors, and hotel key charms dangling like trophies of a peripatetic life. Pharrell’s new-aged tan VVT sfumato leather trims soften the lines between luxury and utility, between Paris and Miami, between departure and arrival.
At its core, Louis Vuitton’s Pre-Fall 2025 men’s collection is not about the destination at all. It is about the act of movement itself—the pleasures of dressing not just for where you are going, but for the journey in between. The traveler here is not a conqueror nor a consumer, but a dreamy, discerning cartographer, charting a map that spans centuries of style and shores yet to be seen.
Courtesy Louis Vuitton
Special thanks Jeanger Navarro-Ponti
