Wallpaper* Design Awards: Willo Perron is Designer of the Year 2026

The role of the creative director, at least in the form we know it now – the multi-hyphenate aesthete that dictates everything from imagery to experience – is a relatively recent invention. As culture and media have become more fragmented, these cross-disciplinary figures have risen up to meet the moment — the macro-thinkers able to make sense of all that dispersion and wrangle a brand or an artist into a single, cohesive vision.

No one has been more successful at it than Montreal-born designer Willo Perron. One simply has to take a cursory flip through his recent portfolio to understand his cultural impact. He’s come up with the concepts for some of the most talked about live shows of this era — Beyoncé’s Western-themed Cowboy Carter tour and Rihanna’s floating-stage performance at the 2023 Super Bowl, for instance. He’s designed slick retail stores and pop-ups for Kim Kardashian’s Skims line, as well as for brands like Cartier and H&M, and in 2021, he created the marble-and-midcentury-furniture-filled HQ for Jay-Z’s Roc Nation record label.

His work often takes a simple idea and blows it up to its most extreme or even absurd. Like his set design for the A/W 2025 Chanel runway show, with its giant black ribbon curling skywards towards the glass and wrought-iron ceiling of Paris’ Beaux Arts Grand Palais. Or that for the house's S/S 2025 haute couture show, a similarly maximalist gesture that saw the models circulating along a looping runway in the shape of massive interlocking white Cs. But despite his 20 years of choreographing culture at the highest level, ‘furniture has always felt like the thing I was meant to do’, admits Perron, who only released his first collection, outside of custom builds for interior projects, in 2022. ‘It happened when it was supposed to happen,’ he says.

Willo Perron: a multi-hyphenate's design journey

Perron, who speaks slowly with a slight French-Canadian lilt, pauses to think before he answers questions, his eyes wandering to the ceiling as if he’s conjuring up some kind of cinematic image in his mind’s eye. You can understand why mercurial creatives are drawn to him, perhaps as a grounding antidote to an artist’s naturally frenetic energy. Yet to understand his polymathic skill set, you have to first understand the specific political and cultural milieu within which he grew up.

‘Montreal in the mid-1990s has a lot to do with it,’ acknowledges Perron, who comes from a family of similarly creative minds (his father is a jazz musician and his brother Zébulon is an interior designer). ‘Quebec had just gone through a referendum, trying to secede from Canada, and there was an exodus of people and money from the province – kind of like Berlin after the wall came down. It was quite lawless,’ he says. ‘We grew up with a lot of space and no resources. It forced you to become creative.’

Perron soon began dabbling in all manner of fields. ‘Culture hadn’t fused together as it has now – everything was more segregated,’ he notes. ‘There were the punk and hardcore kids, the club scene, the skateboarders. And I was curious about it all.’ That curiosity provides a bit of context for the dizzying range of projects he undertook in that period. Early on, he was a club promoter and threw parties. Later, he owned a record and audio equipment shop, which segued into becoming the now-defunct record label Audio Research Records. He also founded a snowboard clothing line called Rewind, leading to a brief period designing for DC Shoes in LA.

His experiments with the shop and record label garnered him the attention of Jarret Myer, the founder of underground hip-hop label Rawkus Records in New York, who, after meeting Perron in Montreal, offered him a job in the label’s creative department. There, he contributed to visual campaigns and packaging concepts, but the experience was short-lived. ‘After 9/11, immigration stuff got complicated,’ he says. He returned home in 2002, where he picked up his retail ventures. ‘But then I ran into Dov,’ he recalls, referring to Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel. Impressed with how Perron had built out his own shops, Charney asked him to help with the bricks-and-mortar roll-out of his then-fledgling brand.

Perron was responsible for the brand’s spare and functional in-store aesthetic. ‘There was this book called High-Tech,’ he says of the inspiration. ‘It showed you how to create a postmodern interior with available industrial materials like ductwork and pipes. We wanted the shops to feel a bit like thrifting at Value Village [a Canadian secondhand clothing chain].’ But the pace eventually took its toll. ‘I would find the location, design the stores, staff them and merchandise them,’ he says of the workload that had him criss-crossing the globe weekly. ‘You realise your capacity when you’re put under that kind of level of pressure.’

Burnt out after several years, he left American Apparel and moved permanently to LA. Following a brief stint designing stores for Apple, Perron then embarked on a much-needed sabbatical. ‘My dad was in his seventies and caught the archaeology bug,’ he recalls. ‘He was on his way to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, so I decided to join him on the fly. It was the first time in my life I had money in the bank and no responsibilities.’

He ended up spending nearly a year travelling throughout Asia. During that period, his longtime friend, Alain Macklovitch, also known as DJ A-Trak, was touring with rapper Kanye West, and he saw that they would be crossing paths in Kuala Lumpur. ‘So I texted him. We meet up and he says, “You should really meet Kanye. I think you guys would get along.”’

Pop culture's favourite designer

That chance meeting on the other side of the world would become a turning point in Perron’s career. West would later become known for his forays into fashion – most notably, his clothing line Yeezy – as well as his interest in architecture and design. But at that point, he was still early in his evolution and looking for the right person to steer his taste to a more refined and cohesive place. Perron began creative-directing West’s entire visual identity, refining his wardrobe to skew more high fashion than streetwear, designing his album art, and conceptualising his stage shows, starting with the 2008 Glow in the Dark tour. ‘We took over a space on Fairfax [in LA] and started a design office,’ he says. ‘We began filtering everything he did – if it came out of Kanye, it had to come through us.’

These mammoth jumps in Perron’s career can feel difficult to fathom. How does one person go from designing retail to honing the image of a major recording artist? But the answer lies in the instincts he honed as a curious young person jumping between underground scenes in post-referendum Montreal. ‘What [Kanye needed was] someone with an intrinsic understanding of the ecosystem and who knows how something should look,’ says Perron, who notes that West was already familiar with his work from his days at Rawkus. ‘And who will fight to the end to see it through.’

Other artists soon came calling. Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, Florence + The Machine and St Vincent (with whom he won a Grammy award for art directing the 2017 Masseduction album) have all turned to Perron to shape their visual worlds. Unsurprisingly, for him, that led to further diversification of his oeuvre. ‘The musicians I worked for began asking me to help them with their homes,’ he says. ‘The “Pillo” sofas we did for Knoll came out of one of those projects.’

Furniture design and beyond

Like many of Perron’s designs, the ‘Pillo’ conforms to a singular idea. The base is made up of two cushions stacked one on top of the other, with two more for the armrests, and one for each backrest. The original model was conceived for a private project ‘at a scale four times as big’, but he also produced a smaller prototype to ‘keep working on’, he says. ‘I wanted it to be this perfectly modular thing.’ It came together almost accidentally.

‘I went to have coffee with Willo,’ says Knoll creative director Jonathan Olivares. ‘I had no idea he made furniture.’

At that point, Perron had self-produced several pieces – the platform-like ‘FKA’ bed, the ‘Dino’ collection with a Moroccan tadelakt finish, and the ‘Sausage’ sofa, essentially a malleable oversized tube – and had collaborated on one-off projects with brands such as USM. But he had never properly developed a product for the high-end furniture market.

Yet when Olivares came across the ‘Pillo’ prototype in Perron’s Silver Lake studio, ‘we shipped it straight to our R&D facility’, he says. In 2025, Knoll came out with Perron’s second piece for the brand, the ‘Bun’ chair, which resembles a doughy cloud perched atop a slender chrome base. The same year saw Perron release a collection of modular furniture for Swedish brand No Ga – a series of colourful, cuboid fibreglass blocks that can be linked together like puzzle pieces.

All of Perron’s furniture projects have a similar DNA: inherent modularity, soft, inviting curves, and an emphasis on unfussy forms that can blend easily with their surroundings. Olivares chalks it up to his macro way of thinking. ‘He’s an ideas man,’ he says. ‘He thinks big and intuitively.’

So, where does a designer who has seemingly done everything, yet remains restless for new problems, go from here? At the moment, he’s developing a series of wellness pavilions with a marble brand, as well as experimenting with furniture purpose-built for sex. But he considers those to be personal projects, separate from the work he does with his firm, Perron Studios. In fact, Perron recently parted ways with his longtime business partner, graphic designer Brian Roettinger – the firm was previously known as Perron-Roettinger – to further streamline his portfolio of projects. ‘He’s still a close friend,’ he says of the split. ‘But we wanted to work on different things.’

Still, streamlining doesn’t seem to have narrowed his horizons. ‘I’m really curious about transportation design,’ he ponders. ‘I love hospitality. I spend a lot of time in restaurants and hotels – that’s probably in my near future.’ At this point, though, there’s nothing he would explicitly rule out. ‘There’s no five- or ten-year plan,’ he says. ‘It’s more about finding opportunities to do what I haven’t already done.’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today