FACE TO FACE

Henry Taylor's portraits are alive on the canvas and wonderfully unpredictable— much like the artist himself.

- By Dodie Kazanjian.

For his debut show at Louis Vuitton two years ago in Paris, Pharrell Williams embroidered miniature versions of Henry Taylor portraits on his suits and accessories. “Henry is a genius,” Williams said at the time. So when Vogue decided to put a painting of Williams on one of its covers this month, we asked Taylor, an artist with a singular, ineffable cool, to do it. (This marks the fifth time in the past eight years Vogue has commissioned an artist to do a painting for a cover.) There was no time for a portrait sitting, but Taylor can paint from memory, and he'd met the designer in Paris, at Williams's first Louis Vuitton show.

“I'm talking truth today,” Taylor tells me when we meet on Zoom to discuss the process. He's in his studio on Pico Boulevard in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s noon there, and he’s just finished his avocado-toast breakfast and is smoking a joint. “I'm a Rasta, man. I woke up playing Bob Marley.” Taylor has a hipness to him. “He knows himself,” says Williams. He just gets it.”

I ask Taylor why he included the words “Human Made” on Williams’s baseball cap in the