What Pharrell Did to a Sneaker

Ten pairs of Stan Smiths. Each one hand-customized by Pharrell Williams, sold exclusively through Colette in Paris, proceeds going to his charity From One Hand to anOTHER. That’s all it takes to turn a shoe that every media person in Berlin was already wearing into something worth actually wanting.

Pharrell’s relationship with clothes has always felt less like celebrity branding and more like a genuine compulsion. The man wore a Vivienne Westwood hat to the Grammys and somehow made it look correct. He has the collector’s instinct—the need to make things specific, individual, different from the next one. So the idea of him actually sitting down and drawing on sneakers, rather than just licensing his name to a colorway, is easy to believe.

The Stan Smith had just been relaunched by Adidas in 2014 and was spreading through fashion circles the way affordable classics always do: suddenly, uniformly, everywhere at once. Pharrell’s version didn’t redesign anything. It just marked each pair, made each one something no mass-market run can ever be. Which was the entire point.