Fashion enters its harrell era

With Pharrell Williams freshly enthroned at Louis Vuitton, a grand new convergence between fashion and pop culture is underway. Inside the audacious first months of Pharrell's reign-and the ambitious revolution he's planning to mount.

- Noah Johnson

PHARRELL WILLIAMS HAS a pimple. There's a bandage on his chin, and immediately after introducing myself, I ask him, "What happened?" And he says in the nonchalant, melodious voice I've heard approximately 1 billion times on speakers and in headphones but did not expect to be so perfectly his in person: "Oh, just a pimple."

He just turned 50 and his skin has the texture and tone of a nourished and wellhydrated 22-year-old. Upon clocking the bandage, I thought maybe one of his four children had caught him with a head butt. Maybe he fell skateboarding. I did not in a thousand years expect him to tell me that under the bandage he had hidden a pimple. And immediately I feel like a jerk for calling attention to it.

But Pharrell does not seem perturbed by my comment, or by the blemish or the bandage. He is full of humility. He is open and honest and ready to share himself-and his imperfections with the world.

We were in a vast parking lot in Pharrell's hometown of Virginia Beach, amid a carnival of trailers and trucks that served as the backstage area for the now-annual three-day music festival called Something in the Water that he hosts right on the sand. It was late April, a momentous time for Pharrell. He was just two months into his new job as the men's creative director of Louis Vuitton, and enormous questions were swirling about what the superstar producer would do with the keys to a global luxury superbrand.