Even when absent from the “most anticipated show of the season”, Kanye West has to be honoured, somehow

Kanye West and Pharrell Williams at the 2015 CFDA Awards. Photo: Getty Images

Kanye West did not attend Pharrell Williams’s debut Louis Vuitton presentation. We do not know if the Yeezy designer was invited. But even without showing up in what has been touted as an “epic” show (wasn’t Virgil Abloh’s first LV runway similarly described?), he was remembered, and acclaimed. During an exchange between LV’s hottest man of the moment and the US record producer/rapper Swizz Beatz that was shared on Instagram, Mr Williams said, “Louis Vuitton don is the one, great Kanye West. Period.” This salute came when Swizz Beatz introduced his pal in front of the camera as “The don; the Louis Vuitton don”, to which the latter quickly refuted, ”Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah… Pupil king. I’m a student… I’m forever the student.” That sounded like Virgil Abloh saying that everything he did was for the “17-year-old version of myself”.

Kanye West is of course the Black man among Black men, whether they consider him a “don” or not. It was, in fact, Mr West who constantly referred to himself as the ”Louis Vuitton don”. You can hear in him rapping so in 2004’s Last Call and 2007’s Stronger. So often he used the word to portray himself as a person of great importance (rather than the prefix the Spaniards use with a man’s name, such as Don Quixote) that he even called a shoe from the short-lived 2009 collaboration with LV the ‘Don’. Mr West has also claimed, in an interview with Fox News last year, that he was first to be offered “a deal” with LVMH, even saying that Mr Abloh was his assistant in the early years. No one among the three of them connected to Louis Vuitton can be considered more eminent than Kanye West. Pharrell William knew better than enjoy an accolade he didn’t earn.

But the admiration has been mutual. In 2020, when Mr West interviewed Mr Williams for an I-D editorial, he said to his Happy subject, “You’re the inspiration. Before I wore a pink polo, you were wearing a pink polo.” Both men are of course friends and collaborators, and they go way back. Mr West, therefore, knows his pal well. He ardently added in the interview, “That lineage is mapped out and proven, and you can go from then all the way up to the moment we have in culture now. You broke down the doors in fashion for us.” Among his many talents, is he a soothsayer too? Pharrell Williams certainly knew when to praise and honour his friend, controversial as the latter is. But what came to Mr West’s head if he had heard the exchange with Swizz Beatz? On the intro of his IG page, the Yeezy founder wrote: “If you are a Kanye West fan, you aren’t a fan of me. You’re a fan of yourself.”