BRICK HOWZE WROTE THE POEM PHARRELL BUILT A WAVE AROUND

The poem came first.

Before a wall of water 8 meters high at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. Before Pharrell Williams sent hundreds of guests to a constructed beach inside one of France's most storied campus grounds. Before a cascading wall of real water from Eau de Paris crashed across 37 meters of runway on June 23, 2026. Before all of it, a creative in Los Angeles was writing a poem about water.

His name is Brick Howze, a music producer and creative director based in Los Angeles. His Instagram handle is @____brick. If you watched the Louis Vuitton SS27 official campaign video, you already heard his words even if you did not know his name.

1957. Silas White Built a Club. Santa Monica Took It Back.

To understand Ebony Beach Club, you need to go back 69 years. In 1957, Black entrepreneur Silas White opened the original Ebony Beach Club in Santa Monica, California. The vision was direct: a sophisticated beachside destination where Black families could gather along a coastline that had historically excluded them. Within a year, the city of Santa Monica seized the property through eminent domain. Urban renewal, they called it. The club was demolished.

Brick Howze, alongside Gage M. Crismond and Tre'lan Tillman, built the modern Ebony Beach Club as both a retelling of that history and a reimagining of what comes next. The organization, which Brick has described as afrofuturism, works to reconnect BIPOC surfers and creatives to beach and ocean spaces that exclusion made inaccessible. The collective hosts large scale beach events, including a 2025 Juneteenth celebration at the Santa Monica Pier attended by thousands, and is developing an app to connect Black surfers while removing financial barriers to participation.

Water is not metaphor for these people. It is a claim.

Brick Wrote the Words. The Wave Was the Answer.

For the Louis Vuitton SS27 campaign, Pharrell brought Brick in to direct the official promotional video. Brick wrote and performed the poem at the project's center: "When you surf, you just become water. Even if just for a little while. Everything eventually is going to find its way to water. Water is where life starts."

The video featured prominent figures in Black surf culture: Mikey February, Cliff Kapono, Julian Williams, Brent Bielmann, and Gage from Ebony Beach Club. These were not models or brand ambassadors in the traditional sense. They were people with real relationships to the ocean, sourced by a creative who has built an entire organization around restoring that access.

That is how a promotional video becomes a thesis statement.

This is the context for understanding what Pharrell staged at the Cité Internationale Universitaire on June 23: not an aesthetic choice about oceans as a backdrop, but a specific argument about who belongs at the beach, who has always belonged, and what it costs when that is taken away.

LV Monogrammed Wetsuits and Surfboards. That Is the Brief.

Louis Vuitton SS27 menswear was titled "A Dandy Experience." The silhouette merged globetrotting luxury codes with the visual language of surf and skate culture: LV monogrammed wetsuits, handwoven checkerboard cardigans, custom surfboards in Monogram print, low top sneakers in a Vans Authentic outline, hybrid reef sandals, chunky skate trainers.

The LV Combi shoe from the preliminary collection already announced the direction in June, a silhouette close enough to the Vans Authentic that Vans posted a one line response and won the day. The full show delivered on the premise: luxury that did not perform exclusivity but borrowed the visual logic of communities built outside it.

Brick Howze, writing following the show, put it simply: "it's inspiring to inspire the person who inspired me the most." That is a specific statement about a creative exchange, not a general acknowledgment. Pharrell has drawn publicly from the communities that shaped him throughout his time at Louis Vuitton. Here the debt runs toward a group of Black surfers and the creative director who has built infrastructure to return those surfers to a coastline they were once pushed off.

Afrofuturism Lands at the Runway's Edge

Brick used one word to describe Ebony Beach Club: afrofuturism. At its most practical, afrofuturism is the act of Black people imagining themselves into futures from which they have been excluded, while grounding that imagination in documented histories of that exclusion. The 1957 club that Santa Monica demolished is exactly that kind of history.

Brick and his collaborators are not referencing beach culture. They are reclaiming it. When Pharrell centers that reclamation inside a Louis Vuitton show, with real water and monogrammed wetsuits and 37 meters of constructed coastline, the afrofuturist argument lands in a register fashion rarely touches.

The design logic compounds it: nothing in the SS27 collection performs inaccessibility. These are clothes built around a body in motion. Clothes that could get wet. That is the point.

Brick Howze did not make an ad. He wrote the brief.