What do Bijoy Jain, Pharrell Williams, and the Indian game of Snakes and Ladders have in common? The answer lies in last night’s Louis Vuitton men’s spring-summer 2026 show in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, which broke ground on an exciting new collaboration. The French luxury fashion house partnered with one of the biggest, most elusive visionaries in Indian architecture—Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai—to design the set for the show alongside Louis Vuitton men’s creative director Pharrell Williams.
In the piazza of the museum, the runway took the form of a magnified board of the classic (estimated 2,000-year-old) Snakes and Ladders game. Players are required to get across the board from start to finish by ascending the ladders and avoiding snakes, which, to Williams and Jain, symbolizes the ideas of opportunity, responsibility and enhancement. The life-size set was constructed in wood, colored with a clay slip of burnt umber pigment, and overlaid with five hand-drawn serpents in fluorescent shades of turquoise, orange, and green. The spectators and models were thus transformed into players in this grand game.
“I’m interested in the exploration of all possibilities,” Jain said of the collaboration. “If you look at your best work, it’s a work that you had no idea that that’s what you could do. You have to come back to the point of being in full exposure of not knowing the outcome. Snakes and Ladders was the origin of the thought. It’s the etiquette of how one moves in a space and how one makes things. For me, it’s a cosmic diagram. It’s like a mandala, but set in this idea of a game where everybody has to ascend.”
Williams, who has been to India a few times now (including earlier this year), said of his partnership with the architect: “I’ve admired Bijoy and his work for years, and I was honored when he agreed to collaborate on the set design for the show in Paris. India has always inspired me—it’s where Snakes and Ladders was born, and the game felt like the perfect metaphor for life: the climbs, the falls, the lessons.” He added: “I had imagined the set as a living [game] board—something more than a stage, something symbolic and alive. This collaboration was a meeting of minds—human, intentional, and full of spirit.”
With this collaboration, Jain joins the rarefied guild of international architects who have been part of Louis Vuitton’s creative fabric, including Frank Gehry, Peter Marino, Sou Fujimoto, and Zaha Hadid, who have not only shaped the identities of some of the brand’s most iconic flagships across the globe but have also extended their architectural imprint to limited-edition collections.
In recent years of his three-decade-long career, Jain’s global influence has grown quietly but steadily—not just in architecture (examples include the Lantern Onomichi Garden hotel in Japan and the Château de Beaucastel in France) but also in art and craft. His output is not bound by rigid themes. Instead, what unifies his projects is a singular, meditative magnetism that transcends strict scopes of work and grounds itself in the elemental simplicity of materials. From smaller collaborations like co-curating an exhibition with ceramic brand Mino Soil, tracing the history of Japanese clay, to his solo show at Fondation Cartier in 2023, his practice refuses to be confined to a single discipline.
In a previous interview with AD India, the enigmatic architect summed up this ethos: “My pedagogy is architecture,” he says. “But if I ask myself what that encompasses, at the core, it is about making space. Once you get past the bells and whistles, finally it has to reside in the notion of inhabiting space.”
