What do Bijoy Jain, Pharrell Williams, and the Indian sport of Snakes and Ladders have in frequent? The reply lies in final night time’s Louis Vuitton males’s spring-summer 2026 present in Paris on the Centre Pompidou, which broke floor on an thrilling new collaboration. The French luxurious vogue home partnered with one of many largest, most elusive visionaries in Indian structure—Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai—to design the set for the present alongside Louis Vuitton males’s artistic director Pharrell Williams.
Within the piazza of the museum, the runway took the type of a magnified board of the basic (estimated 2,000-year-old) Snakes and Ladders sport. Gamers are required to get throughout the board from begin to end by ascending the ladders and avoiding snakes, which, to Williams and Jain, symbolizes the concepts of alternative, duty and enhancement. The life-size set was constructed in wooden, coloured with a clay slip of burnt umber pigment, and overlaid with 5 hand-drawn serpents in fluorescent shades of turquoise, orange, and inexperienced. The spectators and fashions have been thus remodeled into gamers on this grand sport.
Photograph: Louis Vuitton
Photograph: Louis Vuitton
“I’m within the exploration of all prospects,” Jain stated of the collaboration. “Should you have a look at your finest work, it’s a piece that you simply had no concept that that’s what you may do. It’s a must to come again to the purpose of being in full publicity of not understanding the result. Snakes and Ladders was the origin of the thought. It’s the etiquette of how one strikes in an area and the way one makes issues. For me, it’s a cosmic diagram. It’s like a mandala, however set on this concept of a sport the place everyone has to ascend.”
Williams, who has been to India a couple of instances now (together with earlier this yr), stated of his partnership with the architect: “I’ve admired Bijoy and his work for years, and I used to be honored when he agreed to collaborate on the set design for the present in Paris. India has at all times impressed me—it’s the place Snakes and Ladders was born, and the sport felt like the right metaphor for all times: the climbs, the falls, the teachings.” He added: “I had imagined the set as a residing [game] board—one thing greater than a stage, one thing symbolic and alive. This collaboration was a gathering of minds—human, intentional, and filled with spirit.”
