LV’s latest ad for their menswear line features Riri in pregnant glory

Pharrell Williams posing in front of the billboard featuring one look from the LV collection he will soon release. Photo: pwilliamsworld/Instagram

Louis Vuitton could well be the first luxury brand to use a pregnant model in their advertising when they do not sell a shred of maternity wear. More fascinating is that the outdoor ad in Paris is to announce the upcoming launch of Pharrell Williams’s first men’s collection for Louis Vuitton, five days away. It is possible that men will be excited to buy shirts that expectant women wear, but perhaps even bigger the potential for LV is the market for men’s apparel that women—expecting or not—will rush to score. This is also, we believe, the first time LV is using a female model to peddle their menswear.

The model in question is, of course, no regular pregnant woman. It is Rihanna showing, as usual, how fecund she is. She wears what appears to be a leather shirt, or a tunic, fastened between her obscured breasts with one button. Expectedly, her bare-skin baby bump is on full display. But it appears that she is helping LV sell more than just shirts. She carries the house’s colourful monogram bags (presumably to be launched soon)—at least four of them in tow, as baby bags. To make it all appear mundane, she holds an unbranded cup of what is presumably coffee.

That Pharrell Williams would enlist Rihanna’s help and exploit a business opportunity in her visible pregnancy is not surprising. Who else can he turn to? Wifey Helen Lasichanh? Surely not the now-on-tour Beyoncé. And Rihanna is known to fiercely resist yielding to what is expected of pregnancy fashion. She wears whatever she wants to, as long as her baby bump is visible, and that seems to be what the LV ad is too—her personal advertising. But in all likelihood, the shirt was picked for her, or even made for her, just her. This could be LV’s largest marketing coup, even bigger than anything predecessor, the late Virgil Abloh, achieved. Just Fentystic.