BRICK HOWZE WROTE THE LV SS27 WAVE SHOW

Brick Howze did not get a front row seat at the Louis Vuitton SS27 show in Paris on June 23, 2026. He got a writing credit. His poetic narration played over a tidal wave 37 meters wide and 8 meters tall that Pharrell Williams built inside the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, and the words were his before the wave was concrete. That is the distance between inspiration and acknowledgment in fashion. The signal surfaces the short version: this is who inspired the latest Louis Vuitton show. The longer version requires going back to Long Beach, California, in 1997. ## 1997. Long Beach. Already Building. Justin Howze, known professionally as Brick, was born March 7, 1997, in Long Beach, California. By the time he was 12, he was producing music and designing community events, including an annual Halloween haunted house that pulled in his neighborhood every year. That instinct for building things people want to be inside is the connecting thread from his childhood bedroom to a Paris runway set. In 2016 he wrote and produced "iSpy" alongside rapper Kyle. The track passed 500 million streams and spent months on the Billboard Hot 100, establishing Brick as a producer who could move from regional underground to commercial mainstream without losing the texture. In 2017 he directed the creative work for Kehlani's debut album cover "SweetSexySavage," one of the best selling R&B records of that year. Those credits were accumulating toward something the fashion industry had not yet registered. ## 1811 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica, 1958 The Ebony Beach Club that Brick and longtime collaborator Gage Crismond relaunched in 2020 carries the name of a real place that was taken. Silas White opened the original Ebony Beach Club in May 1957 at 1811 Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, a luxury beach club designed for Black families during an era of enforced coastal segregation. Over 2,000 prospective members enrolled. Nat King Cole's family expressed interest. The city of Santa Monica seized the property through eminent domain in August 1958 and demolished the building in January 1960, claiming the land was needed for civic parking and urban renewal. In 2024, 66 years after the seizure, the city settled a reparations case with Silas White's descendants; Constance White received $350,000. For a [Louis Vuitton show built around ocean freedom and belonging](/quick/louis-vuitton-ss27-pharrell-wave-paris-2026-m8v4k2wp), the story of a beach club taken from the community that built it is not background detail. It is the architecture. ## Brick and Gage, 2020 Brick and Gage Crismond founded the modern Ebony Beach Club in 2020 as a surf and arts collective dedicated to reconnecting Black and Brown communities to the beach. The founding in 2020 drew directly from the stolen legacy of Silas White's 1957 original, channeling that history into a living institution. The pandemic had forced a reckoning with public space and who felt free inside it. The ocean had long functioned as a site of both freedom and exclusion for Black Americans, from the documented segregation of Santa Monica and Los Angeles beaches in the 1950s through the cultural absence that persisted for decades afterward. EBC approached that legacy through presence. Community surf days, creative events, visual documentation of Black surfers and creatives near the water. Brick's music network and his capacity to build crowds gave EBC reach far beyond a local surf scene from the beginning. That audience and that institutional credibility became the cultural argument Pharrell needed a body to hold. ## Pharrell Needed Someone With the Receipts Already Filed Brick directed and wrote the campaign video for LV SS27 and provided the poetic narration that ran through the show. He, Gage Crismond, and surfer Mikey February were credited collaborators in the production, not decorative guests invited to add visual diversity. The [LV SS27 Combi release](/quick/lv-ss27-combi-pharrell-skate-shoe-vans-b4m7k2nx) had already tested surf and skate visual language. The full show needed something the Combi could not provide: a historical argument. Pharrell's own connection to ocean infrastructure runs deep. He has backed the $350 million Atlantic Surf Park in Virginia Beach, designed to bring professional grade surf waves inland. He was not discovering surf culture through a mood board. He was connecting his show to people who had already spent years reclaiming it. ## Paris Got the Wave. Silas White's Family Got $350,000. The show sent models down a sandy runway in front of a pumping wave 37 meters wide, dressed in tailored blazers, board short trousers, handwoven checkerboard cardigans, and carrying LV branded surfboards. The production ran a sustainable loop: water from Eaux de Paris returned to the sewer system through a closed circuit, sand donated to the venue's beach volleyball courts, and Louis Vuitton committed support to Coral Gardeners for reef restoration. Missy Elliott, Victor Wembanyama, and Jeremy Allen White were in the front row. Brick's words played over all of it. The original Ebony Beach Club opened in May 1957. Pharrell built a wave in its name in June 2026. The gap is 69 years, a Santa Monica city council vote, and one Long Beach creative who spent a decade building the cultural infrastructure that made the Paris moment legible. The writing credit in the LV SS27 campaign is not a collaboration fee. It is the source code for what Pharrell was trying to say.