Pharrell pushes men’s 'it bag'
Coverage notes that under Pharrell Williams’ menswear stewardship at Louis Vuitton the Speedy has stayed central, and commentators say he’s helped make the idea of an 'it bag' for men feel normal. ELLE Men Thailand frames the Speedy as one of LV’s enduring icons tied to that cultural shift in menswear accessories. (ellementhailand.com)
Pharrell Williams has kept the Louis Vuitton Speedy at the center of his menswear era, helping turn a once women-coded status bag into a men’s fashion staple. (ellementhailand.com) Williams was named men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton on February 14, 2023, and staged his first show for the house on Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge on June 20, 2023. That Spring-Summer 2024 debut put a new Speedy at the heart of the rollout. (today.com) (lvmh.com) Days later, Louis Vuitton’s first men’s campaign under Williams showed Rihanna carrying the redesigned Speedy. Louis Vuitton’s own campaign video called it “a new rendition of the emblematic Speedy.” (youtube.com) (vmagazine.com) That choice mattered because the Speedy is not a new bag being forced into relevance. The model dates to 1930 and has long been one of Louis Vuitton’s best-known shapes, first introduced as a smaller everyday counterpart to the house’s travel luggage. (rebag.com) (pursebop.com) What changed under Williams was the framing. Instead of treating a handbag as a novelty in menswear, Louis Vuitton presented the Speedy as a core object in the men’s collection, then kept returning to it in coverage around the Speedy P9 and later seasons. (vmagazine.com) (pursebop.com) (ellementhailand.com) Fashion coverage has increasingly described that shift in plain terms: men now have “it bags,” too. ELLE Men Thailand wrote on April 12, 2026, that the old idea of the “it bag” as a women-only category is being rewritten as fashion moves further past strict gender lines. (ellementhailand.com) The Speedy also fits Williams’s broader pitch for Louis Vuitton menswear: luxury rooted in travel, celebrity visibility, and recognizable house symbols. Reuters said his June 2023 debut further anchored the label in popular culture, and the Speedy gave that strategy a product people could identify instantly. (marketscreener.com) (rebag.com) Price helped define the new version as a top-tier luxury object, not just a styling gesture. Secondary-market listings for the 2024 Speedy P9 point to an original retail price of $11,100 for one Bandoulière 40 version. (stockx.com) The result is a familiar fashion pattern in a new category: keep an old icon visible, put it on famous people, and make it feel normal in a different wardrobe. In Williams’s Louis Vuitton, the men’s “it bag” is not a theory anymore; it is the Speedy. (youtube.com) (ellementhailand.com)
