Willo Perron takes centre stage
Willo Perron turns hip-hop dreams into reality
“Ugh, I just have an aversion to that word!” Willo Perron squirms on the sofa in his office. “It’s been prostituted. Everybody’s a ‘creative director’ now and everything’s ‘creative’!”
We’re in Perron’s studio complex in Silver Lake, aka Los Angeles’ Shoreditch, the part of town where everyone says they’re a creative and then complains that everyone says they’re a creative. But Perron is a creative. If he’s not, no one is.
A French-Canadian from Montreal in his forties (a guess, he won’t say), Perron is the designer of choice for the biggest musicians in the world. Best known for creating spectacular stage shows for Drake, Kanye West, Jay Z, Rihanna, Florence and the Machine — it’s quite a list — it was Perron who floated the yellow inflatable Ferrari above the crowd for Drake’s “Aubrey and the Three Migos” tour. But shows are just part of his résumé. He’s designed offices and retail stores, shot music videos for St Vincent, and even won a Grammy for her “Masseducation” album packaging (yes, there’s a Grammy for packaging). He’s multidisciplinary, prolific, and not afraid to say so.
“‘Creative director’ sounds like someone who didn’t learn any skills,” he says. “But I was a graphic designer, an interior designer, I put on shows, I built retail…” This LA studio complex is proof that business is booming: three buildings, just off Sunset Boulevard. He moved in six weeks ago, and he now has 15 people at work.
In one building, there’s Perron’s office, and the print and video operation, with interiors and furniture next door and event design across the street. At the time of Esquire’s visit, they were prepping for shows at April’s Coachella, engineering a gyroscopic DJ booth for Zedd, and designing the Roc Nation offices in Los Angeles — a project that grew out of Perron’s work on Jay Z’s “4.44” tour. Kanye West similarly hired him to create the Yeezy offices in Calabasas.
“It’s all extensions of myself,” Perron says, indicating the back wall of floor-to-ceiling mood boards in his office. “I think up things and have people at least get the ball rolling. I need to exorcise these ideas. They come out of this weird subconscious state and then I have to translate that to people. That’s what religion is — and music.”
He’s a pragmatist who speaks of design as “problem solving”, and yet he sees idea creation as a mystical thing, involving dreams and the subconscious.
“It’s like the Florence ‘How Big, How Blue’ tour. The music was flowy, like wind,” he says, waving his arms. “But big show automation is linear.” So he slept on it, and woke up thinking of all these things: a wall on London’s Regent Street “up the road from Selfridges” that “kind of leans out”; the Maison Margiela boutique in Beverly Hills with its wall of shimmering chips; and Australia’s Brisbane Airport car park building with its artful facade that moves kinetically with the wind… “And I thought: ‘That’s it! That’s the show!’” So he used 20,000 antique, reflective copper chips to emulate wind, water reflections, firelight, the sun and the moon.
With so many plates in the air, Perron has become adept at shifting gears, or “tweaking dials”, as he puts it. “From the idiosyncraticness [sic] of Florence, to the beautiful madness of Kanye, to the new ostentatiousness of Drake. With Drake, I gotta connect with my bravado. It’s like the ‘sensitive-wounded’ dial goes down and bravado goes way up!”
Truth is, Perron’s never been short of bravado. The son of a jazz pianist and a psychologist, he dropped out of school and taught himself graphic design and video production. And as he started working, he categorically refused to pitch: “You’re just giving ideas away for free.” By his twenties, he owned a Montreal hip-hop record store named Science, and was hired to design hundreds of retail stores worldwide for American Apparel. A little burned out, Perron moved to LA, where he did a stint at Apple. Then in 2006, he met Kanye West in Kuala Lumpur and the connection was instant. His first job was to edit the rap mogul’s wardrobe: “He said, ‘Take everything that you don’t like out!’”
West led to Rihanna, Florence, Kendrick and everyone else — and he remains the most consequential relationship of Perron’s career. And it begs the question: how does one “creatively direct” an artist like Kanye West?
“Think of a music producer,” Perron says. “Maybe he drives the vision, or maybe the artist does. With Kanye, he usually drives the vision,
that’s true. But we influence and inspire each other, it’s very conversational. We debate everything and disagree a lot. It’s like comedy writing. You have to be able to bounce the most crass joke off somebody without them getting offended. If you’re surrounded by PC people, you end up with pasteurised material. You need the space to be fallible. The more genius, the more fallible, right? A lot of geniuses are fucked!”
With brands, Perron says, the goal is predictability, but artists are the opposite. “Levi’s always need to fit like Levi’s, but what we love about artists is the permissions to just fucking change course. David Bowie. John Lennon. They’re like, ‘This is what I’m doing now and you can check it out if you want. I’m not trying to sell you more widgets.’”
Like West, Perron is drawn to multiple media. What he’s created is a 360° design studio that can do print, video, retail space, events, office design and furniture. “I love those film directors who do everything, like Xavier Dolan — they make the costumes, write the scripts, do the editing. That’s real world-building.”
The worlds Perron is building are set in the future. He has to be ahead of the curve at all times. It’s not a matter of keeping up with trends or fashion. “That stuff is already old, it’s already happened,” he says. “And fashion talks a lot in absolutes — like ‘trend!’ And suddenly, everything’s over-size or purple or flowers. How can so many creative people all agree on the same thing at the same time? It’s a bit absurdist.”
So magazines aren’t much help. Media in general, for that matter. In fact, he’s recently cut back on his morning newspapers. “I didn’t feel like it was giving me the right energy,” he says.
The way Perron considers the future is more like a historian. “These are dark times,” he says. “But we had this before, in the Eighties with Reaganomics and Aids and The Cold War. What came after that? Rave and happy drugs and dancing.” He shrugs. “So maybe that’s where we’re going. After this nihilism, people are going to need a sense of spirituality and connection. And with our lives online now, our public spaces are going to change….”
He goes quiet and looks out of the window. There are always fresh dreams to harvest.
○