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Behind Brisbane's Cosmetic Injectables Boom — And the New Rules Reshaping It
The Urbanite—14 September 2026·2 min read
Brisbane's inner-city voice since 2014
Brisbane's inner-city voice since 2014
Twenty years ago, a pair of Louis Vuitton sunglasses treated streetwear as a novelty act. Two decades on, the men who designed them are both running major fashion houses.
In 2004, under Marc Jacobs' restless run as creative director of Louis Vuitton, the house put its name behind an unlikely pair of sunglasses. The 'Millionaires' were big, rectangular, and finished with gold S-lock hinges lifted straight off Vuitton's own nineteenth-century steamer trunks — heritage hardware welded onto a shape built for hip-hop, not haute couture. They weren't designed by a Vuitton house tailor. They were designed by Pharrell Williams and a Tokyo streetwear figure most of Europe had never heard of: Tomoaki Nagao, known to everyone as Nigo.
At the time, it read as a novelty — a luxury house borrowing a bit of street credibility for a season. Twenty years on, it looks more like the opening move of a takeover. Pharrell is now Louis Vuitton's Men's Creative Director. Nigo runs Kenzo, another house under the same LVMH roof. The outsiders didn't just get invited in — they ended up in charge.
Pharrell Williams at Web Summit, 2024. Photo: Web Summit / Ramsey Cardy / Sportsfile (CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Pharrell and Nigo were introduced by Jacob Arabo, the jeweller better known as Jacob the Jeweler, who'd spent years telling Pharrell about "a guy in Japan with a crazy brand" before finally putting the two in a room together. Nigo, it turned out, had been coming to Jacob for years too, bringing photos of Pharrell's custom jewellery and commissioning his own versions. The two turned out to share the same specific obsessions — Americana, vintage workwear, comic books, bespoke jewellery — and the friendship moved fast. By 2003 they'd co-founded Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream, building a genuinely new visual language out of Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku scene and Pharrell's own Virginia Beach influences. The Millionaires sunglasses, the following year, were the first time that language got a Vuitton budget behind it.
The thread never really broke after that. When the late Virgil Abloh staged his debut show for Louis Vuitton menswear in 2018, he brought the Millionaires back — a direct nod to the two people he'd later credit as having cleared the path for him. Abloh brought Nigo in properly not long after, co-designing the LV² capsule collection in 2020. The following year, Nigo was appointed Artistic Director of Kenzo, becoming the first Japanese designer to run the house since its founder retired in 1999. In February 2023, Pharrell was named Louis Vuitton's Men's Creative Director outright — the role Abloh had held until his death in 2021.
The two have kept working together since, and the results have only gotten more ambitious. Their Fall/Winter 2025 menswear collection for Louis Vuitton, titled Remember the Future, showed at the Louvre in January that year — workwear silhouettes threaded with Japanese motifs and reworked damier check, with a rotating archive of artefacts from both men's personal collections built into the set. The collection's stand-out pieces were a run of trunks printed with both designers' profiles side by side, nicknamed the "Damier Phriendship" trunks, wheeled down the runway by models. Two decades after a pair of sunglasses, it's now a full house collaboration between friends who happen to run two divisions of the same company.
It's a story with a genuine, if smaller-scale, echo here. Brisbane's own relationship with high fashion is still being written. Louis Vuitton's current Brisbane flagship — a three-level redevelopment of the old National Australia Bank heritage building on Queen Street — only opened in March 2023, itself a fairly recent bet on the city's appetite for a bigger presence. Queen's Wharf was meant to bring a wider spread of global luxury retail to the city on a staged rollout from late 2022 — the kind of infrastructure a city points to when it wants to be taken seriously on the world stage ahead of 2032. That target has since slipped well past its original mark: the broader precinct itself only began opening in August 2024, and its dedicated luxury retail component hasn't opened at all yet. Brisbane's version of this story, in other words, is still mid-chapter — reaching for a bigger seat at the table, the same way Pharrell and Nigo once were, long before anyone in Paris was paying attention.
Sources
Kgbo (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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