Pharrell Williams Approaches Most Collaborations as Exercises in Omission

As Creative Director of Louis Vuitton Men’s, founder of Humanrace and Joopiter, fourteen-time Grammy winner, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, and now the creative voice behind Moët & Chandon’s summer chapter, Pharrell Williams works across music, fashion, and design with the same editing instinct. His collaboration with Moët & Chandon began in 2025, when he redesigned Brut Impérial and Nectar Impérial Rosé. For 2026, it expands into Ice Impérial, the only champagne in the world intentionally produced to be sipped over ice. The bottle, for the first time, now arrives without its all-white sleeve.

Many artist-led champagne collaborations embrace a more-is-more approach. Williams pursued the opposite direction. “The white sleeve is iconic,” he tells Surface, “but it was also a layer between the bottle and the moment. Taking it off was a way of trusting what the maison already had—the bottle in its most refined form, nothing covering it up.”

“I keep coming back to simplicity. Strip it back to what matters,” Williams says. Simplicity here produces something unusual in luxury design: a project where the artist collaborator has chosen to be less visible than the work. “It’s about being intentional,” he adds. “The more you strip away, the more the thing itself has to carry the weight. The cuvée already had a clear identity, so the design didn’t need to compete with it. It just needed to let it breathe.”

That choreographer’s instinct runs through almost everything he touches. “I’m obsessed with the details,” he says. “When something’s done well, every layer is choreographed—the smells, the sounds, the temperature, the light. It makes you feel a certain way, even if you don’t quite know why.” For Ice Impérial, he imagined the South of France in the summer. “The temperature, the light, the salt in the air. Once you have that world clearly in your head, every decision after it gets easier.”

Beneath all of the choreography, Williams keeps returning to the human element behind his vision for champagne. “I want to be with my people,” he says. “That’s the whole thing. Whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, the part that matters is who’s in the room with me.”