How Pharrell Williams staged a giant game of Snakes and Ladders for his latest Louis Vuitton show

You may or may not know that Snakes and Ladders has been played since the 2nd century BC, when it originated in ancient India as the game Moksha Patam. It was devised to teach Hindu morality to children, using ladders to represent virtues and snakes to represent vices. Supersizing the humble game, multi-hyphenate Pharrell Williams’ blockbuster Louis Vuitton S/S 2026 show staged a human-scale version on a colossal 2,700 sq m game board at the Centre Pompidou yesterday evening. Closing out day one of Paris Fashion Week Men’s, the display was a ladder-ascending win for Williams’ fifth season at Vuitton.

The set was brought to life by acclaimed Indian architect Bijoy Jain, whose practice Studio Mumbai is famed for its 'cosmic' large-scale projects. Blending traditional Indian craftsmanship and contemporary design, these have ranged from sensitively built residential projects rooted in nature to spiritual displays in art institutions. Last year, an exhibition at Fondation Cartier, ‘Breath of an Architect’, delved into ‘the sensuality of architecture’ and the forces ‘that connect us to the elements’.

Louis Vuitton’s Snakes and Ladders S/S 2026 show set

When it came to the Louis Vuitton set, the designer and his studio worked in their holistic method – rendering the various squares with wood, burnt pigments and weaving work in Mumbai. Assembling at vast scale in Paris, the resulting space – beheld by the fashion crowd and celebrities including Beyoncé and Jay-Z as the sun set over the city – saw five serpents weave through a clay-hued chequerboard outside of the Pompidou’s iconic piazza. ‘I am grateful and privileged to embark on this journey with Pharrell,’ said the architect of the project.

Using the game as a metaphor for life’s ‘journeys, growth, and transformation,’ the collection continued to hone the vision of contemporary dandyism which Williams has been carving out at Louis Vuitton over the past two years. This season, he looked towards India for inspiration – evoked in open-toed paduka-style footwear, woven trims and riffs on the cricket jumper – though the resulting clothing was typically eclectic, spanning plays on workwear, animal and palm tree motifs, and bejewelled surface embellishment.

With the set, it was impossible not to think of his predecessor, close friend Virgil Abloh, who brought a transportive joy rooted in boyhood imagination to Paris Fashion Week on more than one occasion – from the rainbow he trailed through the Jardin du Palais-Royal, setting the scene for his emotional debut in 2018, to his surreal cloud-strewn offering for A/W 2020, which was about the ‘gazing at the world through the optics of a child’.

The link, and indeed the collaboration with Jain, benefits Williams’ approach at the French house thus far, where he has extended the remit of Louis Vuitton beyond himself and the echo-chamber of fashion week. Last season, he teamed up with life-long friend Nigo, celebrating their decades-long friendship with a display inside a gleaming pink box in the courtyard of the Louvre. The season before that, he turned Paris’ Maison de l'UNESCO into a playground for the ‘Global Dandy’, using the display as a call for unity during a moment of international tension.

Last night, it was again about diverting Louis Vuitton’s juggernaut powers towards ideas of community and human connection. ‘I’ve admired Bijoy and his work for years, and I was honored when he agreed to collaborate on the set design for the show in Paris,’ said Williams in a statement following the show. ‘India has always inspired me. It’s where Snakes and Ladders was born, and the game felt like the perfect metaphor for life: the climbs, the falls, the lessons. This collaboration was a meeting of minds – human, intentional, and full of spirit.’

louisvuitton.com