Pharrell Tells Us Why He Turned evian Water Into Humanrace Drip (EXCLUSIVE)
"Have you tasted it?" Pharrell asks, half-incredulously, when I prod him to tell me: Why evian? No fake fans here, to be sure.
That evian and Pharrell's Humanrace imprint are collaborating already makes plenty of sense, but Pharrell being a true believer makes it make, er, even more sense.
Nothing this guy does is inauthentic. The sheer volume of Pharrell-related projects occurring simultaneously — LEGO movies! adidas collabs! Louis Vuitton collections! — are all united by a single throughline: Pharrell himself. And not just because he's an A-lister's A-lister (though there is that, too) but because this guy believes in everything he does.
As such, his primary impetus to partner with evian is due to Pharrell himself being an evian enjoyer. Duh.
"For any category we enter, we’ve got to leave it better than we left it," he explains. "So what better partner to do that with than evian? Nature is providing us with the best thing it has to offer — we don’t need to add anything, we just have to celebrate it."
And celebrate it he does.
evian and Pharrell's Humanrace line collaborated to concoct a compelling capsule of comfort-first clothing. Easy on the eyes, to be sure, but you gotta touch this stuff!
"The whole collection is made from natural fibers in the US — when you pick up the quarter zip, I want you to feel it," Pharrell says. "It’s lightweight, 100% cotton. When you’ve got that on, you don’t want to take it off."
Everything here is, like evian's water, organic.
These are lightly lived-in garments designed with a human touch, not unlike Humanrace's previous apparel offerings. No-brainer T-shirts, sweat shorts and quarter-zip pullovers are rendered effortless with faded dyes and downplayed branding.
The evian-to-Humanrace pipeline may seem tenuous at face value — premium water = wardrobe staples? — but just think about it for a second. evian built a multimillion-dollar water brand by elevating the quotidian to the extraordinary, transforming the most familiar substance on Earth into a luxury.
Pharrell's evian x Humanrace collection follows the same principle. Like, you've seen all this stuff before — frequently worn by P himself, even! — but not this nice nor at this price. Specifically, everything is under $200 and even mostly under $100. You get a lot for a little.
"Look beyond the simplicity, and you’ll notice the design is very considered," says Pharrell. "For example, our Carry-All expandable bag — first of all, it’s huge. It’s all made from one large piece of fabric that’s adaptable so it moves with you and you can use the slide buckles to morph with you as the day goes on."
As with everything Pharrell, it's all tremendously considered. It's also the first crisp taste of things to come. Pharrell tells me that "this collection is really just the start of our collaboration together," though not everything Pharrell and evian may get up in the future will be tennis-inspired.
Oh, yes, did I mention that evian x Humanrace is tennis-inspired?
Pharrell and evian are intentionally angling into the US Open, scheduled mere days after the August 24 evian x Humanrace digital launch. It makes sense because evian is a perpetual tennis booster and Pharrell, well, he's just a big fan.
But Pharrell's intent was to aim higher. This capsule is spiritually imbued with the spirit of tennis, rather than overt stylistic homages. Enough polo shirts and tennis skirts! Pharrell is thinking outside the box. Or glass evian bottle, in this case.
"We wanted to celebrate joy," he explains. "In tennis they use the term 'love' in their scoring — name one other sport that literally says love."
