The love affair between Pharrell and Timberland

To say that the recent collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Timberland has divided the public would be a delicate understatement. Some loved it, while others see it as a lazy branding exercise. Some even deplore the fact that the wealthy and fashionable individuals of this world feel the need to appropriate an icon of the working class and youth subcultures like the Yellow Boot (scientific name: Six Inch Boot). Detractors may overlook that Timberland's connection to the fashion world didn't start or end with Louis Vuitton. Not only does the collaboration represent the peak of a long ascent that began years ago for the brand, but Pharrell has been courting and collaborating with Timberland for almost a decade. This recent link-up marks an interesting point in his fashion journey and a heartfelt nod to Virgil Abloh's work – in addition to celebrating a shoe that, during Pharrell's peak musical years and those of other great artists of his generation, truly became a symbol and an assertion of identity. And speaking of fashion for a moment: can we truly speak of ascent when the Yellow Boot surpasses in popularity and sales volumes any other extravagant luxury shoe? It seems more like the fashion world wanted to appropriate its myth and imitate it, not the other way around. If knowing that Louis Vuitton collaborated with the brand scandalized some, it might be appropriate to refresh their memory. The collaboration is not entirely random nor a copy-and-paste commercial operation – there is a genuine genealogy of the collaboration with Louis Vuitton seen in these days.

The early '10s and the Bee Line by BBC phenomenon

In the beginning, it was Pharrell who announced in the remote 2013 a collaboration between Timberland and the Bee Line by Billionaire Boys Club, the brand he co-founded with Nigo ten years earlier. The line represented a higher and more luxurious proposal for the brand's wardrobe, as well as a collaboration between Pharrell himself and Mark McNairy, a designer famous at the time for his creative direction at J.Press, which brought back the popularity of Ivy League style, and for his shoe line. The collaboration was notably successful, and during the same summer, for the celebrations of Billionaire Boys Club's tenth anniversary in Las Vegas and later at the Made in America Festival in Philadelphia, Pharrell wore another iteration of the boot called "Red Boot," which was made available the following August 2014 in a limited edition of three hundred pairs. The Timberland boot was particularly suited to the de rigueur look of the time, which included a buttoned-up shirt worn outside the pants, under a varsity jacket or puffer, with too-long pants that, placed on the high boots, twisted and creased, putting them on display – a few more years, and those pants would become joggers, and the boots would turn into expensive collaborative sneakers.

In 2015, a blue iteration would also arrive, a color chosen because it was diametrically opposite to the original yellow on the color wheel. Pharrell was photographed wearing those round Chanel glasses during his collaboration phase with Karl Lagerfeld from Chanel. It was the third of what would be nine collaborations (the last one is from 2022) between Timberland and Bee Line. In May of the same year, new versions of collaborative boots with an all-over print of grass and beehive were released – these, known as Honeycomb, were famously worn by Beyoncé in the music video for Feeling Myself with Nicki Minaj. Around the same time, Rihanna wore the version printed with grass. Both versions had Bionic Yarn as the third part of the collaboration, another brand owned by Pharrell that produced fabrics from recycled materials well ahead of its time. The success of the Honeycomb model was so extensive that in December, the boot was named "Collaboration of the Year" by the Footwear News Achievement Awards - the same edition in which Kanye won "Shoe of the Year" for Yeezy.

Virgil Abloh enters the scene

At this point, we need to leave Pharrell and take a two-year leap to 2017, the year when Virgil Abloh, fresh from the global success of The Ten collaboration with Nike, announced his collaboration with Timberland for Off-White's SS18 collection featuring a boot also green like the one first produced by Pharrell but in a fluorescent shade with a velour upper, released in March 2018 with four contrasting laces and an Off-White tag. Between January and May 2018, three more boots were added to this one: one in the more classic camel shade, one black, and another orange but with the same finishes and co-branding .

It's noteworthy that the announcement and release of these models took place during the same period as Abloh's appointment as creative director of Louis Vuitton. In the same year, for Louis Vuitton's SS19, Virgil designed the LV Creeper Ankle Boot constructed in beige calfskin suede that was practically an ultra-luxury replica of Timberlands, with gold chains, a more tapered toe, and the brand's monogram on the padded ankle insert. Timberland had made its way onto the Louis Vuitton runway much earlier than many think.

Closing the Circle

Now, beyond its commerciality, the collaboration with Off-White was also a sort of self-reference since both Jay-Z and Kanye, in 2014, gave a lot of publicity to Abloh by wearing Off-White's Royal Plaid Shirt during concerts paired with Timberland boots. Also, in 2014, talking about the album that would later become The Life of Pablo two years later, Kanye said: «This album is different. It’s like a pair of Timberlands; like how Timberlands are not quite leather and not quite suede. It’s not the smooth, slick Chicago music sound we have right now and it’s not the ruggedness of just ‘hip-hop hip-hop hip-hop.’» Around those years, Kanye often paired the boots with elevated pieces: in 2012, he wore them with a Pyrex Vision t-shirt and lacquered Balmain pants, in 2013 paired with fur at the FW14 Celine show, in 2015 again with fur but with Bottega Veneta leather pants.

Again, not coincidentally, that was the period when Abloh was the creative director of West's agency, Donda – where that creative model of elevating working-class garments to luxury, which the hip-hop world had turned into cultural icons, took shape. This process of absorbing and elevating hip-hop codes into mainstream commercial fashion began with Abloh and that period that saw rappers become the new ambassadors of the luxury industry worldwide. With Pharrell at Louis Vuitton, the process has ideally closed this circle, becoming the endpoint of a journey that began when, in '93, the Boot Camp Click first wore Timberland boots, followed closely by the Wu-Tang Clan, who ended up solidifying the connection between hip-hop and the New Hampshire brand thirty years later. The rest is already history.