After nailing the luxury segment for luggage, handbags, apparel, and accessories, Louis Vuitton is now giving the world a teaser of surf gear. There is no official launch or over-the-top declaration yet, but the 150-year-old maison may already be the reason your surf fins suddenly look sassy. The glorification of the surf kit continues with a wetsuit that features LV embroidery. For now, the only ones who get to experience the grandeur are the team at Metsa, a design studio embedded in surf culture that revealed a Louis Vuitton-branded surf kit on its social media, thanking Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton for the luxury goods. The fins are undoubtedly good-looking, with a Damier pattern on the side panels and a small metal LV plaque near the base. A neoprene wetsuit comes with LV-style embroidery on the chest.
Whether all this is truly going to shake up the surfing world is yet to be seen. Pharrell himself was only recently spotted surfing the pool for the first time at Atlantic Surf Park in his hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia, during the park’s opening back in August. At the time, he was not sporting Louis Vuitton surf gear and was seen in an Adidas wetsuit. Metsa is also no stranger to imagining surf collaborations with other mainstream labels and giving them pride of place on its feed.
Louis Vuitton is also not new to the realm of surfing and has offered enthusiasts a $15,000 Louis Vuitton Surfboard with Monogram Tiles, made with a fiberglass body over a wooden spine and a resin finish. Then there is the $2,070 Louis Vuitton Escale skimboard, which measures 19.29 by 41.73 by 0.39 inches and is made of wood. If the fins and wetsuit ever become a proper SKU on the Louis Vuitton website, they will almost certainly follow the same playbook, with a fin set likely priced in the high hundreds of dollars and a wetsuit running into the low thousands, more collectible fashion armor than everyday surf gear.
LV is joined in this “surf lifestyle” chapter by other luxury brands like Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Saint Laurent, and even Hermès, all of whom have jumped on the wagon. These offerings help amp up the segment for collectible lifestyle equipment, and LV cannot be left behind. The brand has, in the past, offered “Monogram Surfin’” wallets and Surfing Monogram bum bags, limited surfboards, and wave-themed runway collections. It looks like a natural progression, but one that will likely stay limited to a lucky few.
