EO

You had this incredible run starting in 2013: JAY-Z’s Magna Carta… Holy Grail campaign, followed by Drake’s Would You Like a Tour?, Rihanna’s ANTI World Tour in 2016, and then a return to JAY-Z for 4:44 in 2017. But it wasn’t only those—there was also Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball and Travis Scott’s Astroworld. For Rihanna specifically, across the touring years and the four-part staging at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, those felt like genuinely pivotal visual moments in her career. I remember when she took the stage in 2016—the sets felt so distinct and directional. And, to me, it wasn’t about the fact that it was Rihanna; it was about what you, Mel Ottenberg, and the team constructed together.

WP

My job as a director is a lot like leading a horse to water. For me, the work has always been about figuring out the artist’s interests and feeding those interests with what I think are the right sources of information. With Rihanna, with Kanye, it was pretty much the same thing—there were things I thought needed improving and it didn’t happen overnight. So we started moving things around and introducing new people into the mix—Mel Ottenberg being one of them. Before Mel, the styling felt pretty flat, so I worked to find someone who could bring depth. I wanted to inject a sense of humor, irreverence, or unpredictability—qualities she had innately, but wasn’t showing.

EO

Completely. And being a kind of crystal ball for what people want to see—or what artists are looking for—that prediction is always shifting, and it changes even more from artist to artist. Working with them can feel like a strange form of therapy, where you’re asking, What’s on your mind? What are your aspirations? and you’re right there alongside them to figure it out. With Rihanna, for example, I was thinking about her choreography watching the Super Bowl—so playful, so minimal. But if you look back over the last ten years, has that playfulness always been there in how she’s performed?

WP

The funny thing is, what has probably changed the most in the last—well, I started working with her around 2008, so in the last 15 years—has been choreographers. When I first came in, it was still the school of Janet Jackson, then it was Hi-Hat, and now Parris Goebel. Choreography innovates and shifts really quickly; the style of movement changes almost overnight. For me, the challenge was: how do you take someone as mainstream as Rihanna—someone with a massive audience— and keep it from being corny? How do you give her the same level of innovation and ideas you might see from some new act, but scale it to her reach? I feel like people just keep getting more and more…

EO

Predictable.

WP

Yeah. They were always doing the  moves that wouldn’t offend anybody—that were safe. But that’s never really been her. That’s not her personality.

EO

What does it mean to design a tour versus designing for the Super Bowl? I’ve been on this Michael Jackson binge recently, and I’m fascinated by those performances—not just because of the sheer scale and reach, but because of how they can change the course of someone’s career. But it feels like they’ll never be activated in the same way again; even the set architecture back then was choreographed into the performance. You’ve developed a language for this kind of work—so how did you come up with that system?

WP

First: there’s this sort of practical consideration. That’s where my design work begins when designing for a live broadcast like the Superbowl—where’s the show, how much time do we have to do this? I want all the problems on the table first, and then I design into real things. I don’t want to waste time on ideas that can’t actually be built.

EO

You start by identifying all the problems, and then work backwards from there?

WP

Yeah. For me it feels almost irresponsible to just say we’re going to do this, when realistically it’s never going to happen. There are so many moving parts. With Rihanna’s Super Bowl show, the starting point was simple: we have 14 minutes. Then you factor in storage—you only get so much space because there’s also a football game happening. You have to load the entire set in the window between the end of the first half and the commercials. That’s 7 minutes to get everything on the field and working.

And then you have to consider the stadium itself—a lot of them don’t have roofs, or they’re glass. So depending on how long the first half runs, you might still have daylight when the show starts—which is terrible for lighting and broadcast. For that performance, the sun dipped behind the stadium just as she went on. It looked intentional, but really I’d been tracking the sun for weeks. If the first half ended even a little sooner, all the lighting would have been useless.

EO

And in the end, you can’t really know until the day of?

WP

Yeah, but you mitigate these things. From the very first conversations with the NFL, it was all about venue, logistics, transportation. As a starting point, there are these rolling carts—about 24 feet long and 8 feet wide—that get wheeled onto the field by humans. The year before, when Dre, Snoop, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Kendrick performed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, they had around 40 of those carts that carried everything: lights, audio, the entire set. You could see them all lined up in the parking lot behind the Sofi arena waiting to roll in. But at State Farm Arena in Arizona, where Rihanna performed, I was told I’d only get 20, maybe 24 carts at most—so my starting point was already on my heels, because like it or not, you’re working to outdo the person that was there before you.

EO

You’re competing against anyone that’s ever existed.

WP

Exactly. But it’s not a very designer or artist thing to admit you’re in competition—but you are. Right from the start we got half the set carts, which means half the resources of the person before you, so already we’re starting at a deficit. Then one of the NFL production guys tells me that something that plays to our advantage is that because of how the stadium is built, we’re going to fly all the audio because the roof has these two Brunel trusses—it’s basically built like a bridge. You could fly a freight train from them. And I was like…

EO

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

WP

Exactly. I was like, an actual freight train? He said probably. Now this is where the idea of flying became an option. I thought—okay, I have no storage space on the ground, so why can't we go vertical? And then we started studying the space and trying to engineer these flying platforms. Actually, the opening of the Anti Tour had her on a bridge, so that was like the beginning of the same engineered system as the Super Bowl.

EO

Right. Because the thing that was amazing about that wasn’t just how high up she was. I remember Kanye at Coachella in 2011—he walked this long stage that hovered above the crowd, and then he’s just singing at the top. But the mystery is lost when you see someone make that climb, strap in, and then try to present it as if it wasn’t constructed. You’re like, “I just watched you walk up there, bro—I’m not as excited to hear you sing now.” With Rihanna’s Anti tour, you could actually see underneath her as she floated.

WP

Yeah. But going back to the early part of this conversation—it’s about reverence for the artist, and figuring out who the person really is and what they’ll do. Kanye is a really good example. You could build a giant stage and he’ll stand there by himself, and he’s fine. That’s his happy place. But not a lot of people can do that. That’s a lot of space to command.

EO

I know. And to feel. I was really taken with his SNL 40 performance, when he lay on the ground in a cruciform position. You were really part of these people’s careers as they grew older and formed their visual language. Yeezy was buzzing around for years in the first two seasons, but it wasn’t until season four—when they did it in New York during Fashion Week with Vanessa Beecroft—that I feel like the project cemented itself in the public eye.

WP

It’s funny—I actually introduced Kanye to Vanessa Beecroft. The first show we did with her was the 808s & Heartbreak album release party, in a parking garage in LA in 2008. Before that, we had done the Glow in the Dark Tour, which was monumental. It changed the way rap was perceived within a touring context, and it also changed Kanye as a performer.

EO

It goes back to Michael Jackson as the foundation. But with Kanye, it’s the waffle glasses.

WP

Exactly. That’s the same period as some of the early Rihanna work. At the same time, I was also working with Gaga on her first world tour. All three of those things were happening simultaneously.

EO

I remember the Kanye moment, and connecting it so much to Thriller. When did the album with Daft Punk come out?

WP

Yeah. That was the first thing I ever worked on with Kanye.

EO

I feel like that was when he really broke into commercial success. He hadn’t yet been respected as a figure or an institution in the way he became almost overnight. By 2016, he changed the standard for visual consumption. The music felt different, the world felt different—it transcended music. It bled into something else.

WP

I think that was a very intentional shift, though people didn’t fully recognize it at the time. Musicians used to just make music. The rest was dictated by record labels and video commissioners. You had the rare artist who was deeply involved in their output, but for the most part, musicians just made records. And we were always trying to figure out: what’s their plus one as a musician? If they care about visual art, how do we fold that in? That’s when we started bringing in people like Murakami, Vanessa Beecroft, George Condo. Marco Brambilla’s Power video was part of that. Rap wasn’t really respected in the art or fashion world at that point.

EO

Artists like Kanye, Beyoncé, and Rihanna were building out not just music but entire movements. But what really cemented Kanye for me was the Runaway video in 2010. Rap always had a mainstream appeal, but it really did become mainstream in this way, and then putting art on top of it that was mainstream and high level. It just broke people because they didn’t expect it.

WP

When Kanye and I met, we had the same intentions. We wanted to hyphenate culture—to wedge things together that didn’t necessarily make sense. I remember when Yohji Yamamoto made a sneaker with Adidas, this was before Y-3; the fact that legitimate fashion and street culture touched each other was mind-blowing. It felt like the most exciting thing that could possibly happen. Our goal was to mix these worlds together and make hybrid babies out of them.

To be honest, I had no premonition for how big and lasting it would be, and it still feels like the dominant thing. But the intention was always to legitimize what we loved, to blend it with what we were interested in—art and fashion, which we were outsiders to. It was about cracking those doors open for ourselves. And it really was for ourselves—we weren’t doing it for the greater good. We just thought: we should be able to sit in the front row, or be in museums, whatever it is. Kanye is so strong-willed, such a lightning rod for all of these conversations, that it made me more introspective. It was a great combination—two people aiming for the same goal.

EO

You designed JAY-Z’s Roc Nation offices. Obviously that alone isn’t the company’s identity, but it speaks to how integral you were in building out their brand and image. And it’s interesting—you’re so different from everyone there, but you all share the same creative drive. Both parties are essentially artist-run businesses. What was the process of developing that brand?

WP

We started with the identity. They had this logo that looked kind of like action-sports or maybe some aftermarket car sort of thing. It was aggressive, one-note. They didn’t need to change it completely; they just needed to finesse their intention. So we brought in some great type designers. It was myself, my partner Brian Roettinger, along with Deutsche & Japaner from Germany. We took the hard edge off what already existed, then developed a full type program and layout system. It was more of a renovation than a reinvention. We didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater—it was about finessing what they had, making it usable and functional.

EO

You worked with him on album covers, tours, and then working on his company—all different things, but music is the thing that touches everything. You’ve basically grown up with these people.

WP

Yeah. But also, I’m a JAY-Z fan first and foremost. It’s a weird thing—it’s not really in the cards for a French Canadian kid from Montreal to be in the sort of apex of all this. Given the opportunity all these things sort of fell into place. I also think there’s a brilliance—and this is probably mostly a Kanye credit than anything else—in taking opinions from someone outside your immediate world. When we met, I had just left Apple, and right away he had this sense that I had information he wanted to explore. That trickled down to Gaga, to Rihanna, to Jay-Z.

EO

I’m interested in these artists as commercial entities. It’s the brand of Rihanna, the brand of JAY-Z, the brand of Kanye—and before that, the brand of Apple. Then you also did the American Apparel stores. That’s basically the last 15 years of culture.

WP

Twenty years. American Apparel was around 2000. But before American Apparel, there was Rawkus Records. Rawkus might not be as commercially significant, but that was the label Kanye wanted to be signed to. He was in front of our office in ’98/’99, trying to get signed. Rawkus was the label that put out Mos Def and Talib Kweli, and it really defined the counterbalance to the jiggy, basketball jersey, gold-chain, drug-dealer rap of that era. The reason why someone like Kanye, or contemporary rap in general, could exist was because of that moment, and he was very aware of it. He was vacillating between whether he could land at Roc-A-Fella or Rawkus. At that time, I was the art director at Rawkus, but we never met.

Rawkus was also important because we valued aesthetics. Nobody in hip hop was prioritizing design at that point. Rawkus had an overarching visual language—people were trying to mimic it. One of the only other places you saw that kind of attention to design was ego trip, the independent hip hop magazine founded by Sacha Jenkins and Brent Rollins, which ran from ’94 to ’98. It was amazing to see the beginning of design and aesthetics being taken seriously in rap.

EO

You’ve defined culture in such a specific way. I even worked at American Apparel for a bit—at the Malibu store on PCH—and felt how much of an environment it was, not just a job.

WP

No, it’s such an incredible thing. I give so much credit to Dov Charney for having the guts to hire a bunch of kids with no experience—just people he thought were cool. The whole thing needed a bit of backbone, and maybe the reason it doesn’t exist anymore. But so many amazing people—a lot of my friends now who are incredible creatives and productive creators of art, design, and music—had their first job at American Apparel..

EO

It’s what taught me architecture, too. The Robertson store, the Montana store, the Promenade. Even before I had my license, I’d go to the one in—was it Koreatown? No, Chinatown, right?

WP

I can’t remember. [Laughs.] I think there was one in Chinatown.

EO

It was Chinatown, and then of course the Melrose store—obviously iconic. These places had a distinct visual language. And so much was happening simultaneously: the Kanye moment, the Rihanna moment, Tumblr, 2000—all of that was germinating at the same time. American Apparel was the blueprint for how I understood color and texture, and all these visual ideas I was seeing elsewhere.

WP

Just to give you context, Dov’s also from Montreal and we knew each other through friends. I had a bunch of small businesses and was promoting the good club nights in Montreal, and Dov was aware of it. By the time he came back from manufacturing, I had these retail stores that he thought were great, and we were selling blank American Apparel clothes. That’s where the idea for the stores really germinated—by just walking around my shops in Montreal.

But the larger thing is Montreal itself, and the era we grew up in. Montreal went from being this kind of small town in the ’60s, to hosting Expo ‘67, to the Summer Olympics in ’76. Suddenly there was an influx of international art and design—the metro was built, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 went up. It all felt very futuristic. (Moshe is actually Dov’s uncle.) So we were born into a place filled with promise, innovation, and international attention. There was a secession movement, which was very present where I grew up. Everyone with money left for Toronto, and in our young adulthood, Montreal became a very poor place.

EO

You survived the makings of Montreal.

WP

Yeah. But everybody was super cultured—and broke.

EO

It sounds like the 2000s, like the culture.

WP

No, it was more like early Berlin. The Berlin you guys know now—that’s what Montreal felt like. Or Athens, or Mexico City. Everybody went out seven nights a week. The best club nights were on Mondays or Tuesdays. We’d chill on the weekends. Nobody had a job, nobody had a career…

EO

But also—that’s the beauty of it.

WP

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could get a great apartment for $400, but the city was half empty. Therewas this mass exodus, so we had this playground but not really any hope. Nobody really thought we could do what we do now professionally.

EO

You didn’t know these things could scale.

WP

Exactly. And access to the world was so different then.

EO

I can’t stress enough—I was born at the right moment. I feel so lucky because I caught the tail end of having to connect with people entirely in person, but I also reaped the benefits of email and DMs.

WP

Yeah, I just did that shit physically. I would spend my days going through magazines, looking at things and thinking, that seems like the thing—I need to get there.

EO

You moved to LA in ’98, stayed there for two years, and then you went to New York.

WP

Yeah. I went to LA because I grew up skateboarding, which is  not a very Montreal thing. I was designing for a couple of local skate brands and was asked to run the creative department for a snow and skate brand—Dub and Droors, which was really important in the mid-to-late ’90s. That’s what brought me to LA at first.

EO

Is this the same time when the Dov [Charney] connection started to cohere?

WP

No, no. After that I went to New York and did Rawkus, and then after Rawkus we started working on American Apparel.

EO

When you were conceptualizing those stores, were you already aware of what you wanted to accomplish? Because it doesn’t seem like you formalized your business until much later.

WP

I already had stores, so we knew what sold well. Dov had all this stock, so really all we needed to do was open stores and see what happened. The first one we did was in Montreal, and it just blew out. People would come in and buy everything, and we thought okay, I guess we have to do a lot of these.

EO

I remember the bags—the trippy font.

WP

Right, right, right. [Laughs.] That’s why I felt compelled to tell you about Montreal: those were graphic tropes from our childhood. The metro, the Olympics, the world’s fair, all the city’s graphics. That’s the DNA of American Apparel. It was just a bunch of Montreal kids.

EO

But it had this warmth, this familiarity. I have a theory that people from America are more “American” because a kid from Montreal created a company called American Apparel. It feels so aligned with the commercial imagination of the U.S.

WP

Yeah, it was super fun. I’d go to cities, just drive around and think oh, this neighborhood looks cool—there’s a record shop, a nice café, a couple restaurants, some thrift stores. And for no reason other than that, that’s where we’d open a store.

EO

Just the vibes.

WP

Just vibes. I’d go out to shops, restaurants, concerts, clubs, and street-cast the ads. I’d literally just point to someone and be like you. People came from all sorts of places, but it was fun—we knew exactly what it was meant to be. It wasn’t reliant on a committee signing things off.

EO

Did you understand that you were a creative director? I know you’ve said the term didn’t exist for you, but what was it like negotiating that kind of work at the time?

WP

It was madness. I had these really interesting patrons who liked my work. Your generation is savvier—you have more ownership in what you do. But at that time, just the idea that I could design and make a living was crazy. To be paid to come up with ideas all day, that was enough. I wasn’t trying to get rich. If I could live a decent life and do this thing I’m passionate about, I’d won. For it to become lucrative later wasn’t even in the cards. You don’t start playing music because you want to be famous. I guess some people do, but not many.

EO

But how long into your career did it take to make real money?

WP

I was always motivated to make money—that’s why I had so many businesses. I had a record shop, a label, multiple stores, threw club nights. It was a bit messy and all over the place because I was a kid out partying every night, but there was definitely an aspiration to be financially successful—it just had to coagulate at some point.  It’s just planting seeds and some stuff grows and some stuff doesn’t.

EO

After having these experiences, what did you want? Not necessarily what you were chasing, but what compelled you?

WP

Honestly, the goal is always to exercise your dreams. You dream of making an object, a home, a show—and then you get to make it— that shit is crazy. And then people want to buy it, and you make money off it—that’s even crazier. That’s really my life path: I make things I want to see and I work with people I want to see succeed.

EO

When you’re doing these tours, what are you referencing? Is it Michael Jackson? Art? Where does it come from?

WP

The first world tours I did were Gaga’s Monster Ball and Kanye’s Glow in the Dark. Gaga’s was very much a fashion procession. We had a ton of reference material: bondage, Mugler, Claude Montana, early Gaultier. The set was simple—a forced-perspective build—and then we added acts, props, video. Nick Knight did all the video content. It was super fun. But the show itself was fairly elemental.

Glow in the Dark was much more theatrical, driven by what Kanye was into. We’d sit around with thousands of piles of references—like Syd Mead futuristic designs, very kind of cartoonish.

EO

You work with Skims, and their products are so singular. The packaging, the identity—it’s sculptural. Yeezy, and the studio you did in 2017, had a similar cohesion of identity. That felt like a direct line from American Apparel. Sometimes clothes are born first and the structure follows later. But with American Apparel, the stores and the clothes arrived as one. The physical experience of the store embodied the clothes. And with Yeezy, you could appreciate the clothes, but you could also see the aesthetics—the world they belonged to.

WP

Again, it’s about understanding the energy of the thing. And since the day I met Kanye, there was always a very defined color palette. That became Yeezy, then Skims, and it probably influenced Fear of God and that world, too. My contribution was more philosophical. I don’t own anything with a label on it.

EO

Yeah, I don’t do labels either.

WP

I feel like branded stuff breeds insecurity in our society. Growing up poor, you felt pressure to justify your position in society by owning things—it’s just succumbing to insecurity. I always wondered: why not do the opposite? Why not create something that’s the apex of culture and fashion, but without being expensive or elitist, and without exterior branding? That thinking became part of the Yeezy philosophy: take off the label, strip away the insecurity. Why was I telling you this? Fuck. [Laughs].

EO

The clothes meeting the store.

WP

Yeah. Those offices were meant to be industrial, utilitarian, raw, even avant-garde. In the beginning, everything leaned into utilitarianism because of a lack of means—we built with whatever was available. The question was always: how do we make stores quickly but still give them identity? American Apparel was designed in the same way, just expressed in a more pop, more colorful way.

EO

That’s what I liked about American Apparel. It was so simple—basics as style. Then Kanye was music as lifestyle, or music as art, as fashion…

WP

But here’s the interesting thing: if you give someone who’s really a genius—just at life—a simple thing to figure out, they can turn it into a lifelong pursuit. In Dov’s case, it was the white T-shirt. He made that his life’s journey. And I say this having known a lot of brilliant people—Dov is one of the most intelligent I’ve ever met. He brought together knowledge of art, design, manufacturing, finance, all of it, and combined it with a deep integrity about onshore production, immigration policy, fair wages. Now, most people who are brilliant might feel like that isn’t a good use of their brilliance, but that’s exactly what made the company special. That’s what made those characters incredible. They took something simple and did it exceptionally well.

EO

There’s a saying that a business doesn’t really take off until at least seven years. It takes time. Do you feel like that applies to you? Because success has different faces—recognition, collaboration, financial, creative. When did you feel like it wasn’t just happening to you, but you were making it happen?

WP

I always had a sense that the me portion of my success would come at about the age I’m at now. I looked at architects and designers I admired and realized—oh, they didn’t really do anything until their 40s or 50s. It was never a sprint to the finish line for me.

EO

You’re just busy.

WP

And it’s fucking great. It’s hard work, it’s tough, you have to deal with really difficult people, but I also believe in difficult people. It’s a wild adventure, and you’re lucky to even be in the room.. You can be strategic, work hard, make yourself more adaptable—but there are brilliant people who are destitute. We could have been born in a war-torn country. You manufacture your luck, but even then you could plant a million seeds and none of them grow. So you appreciate that you’re not owed anything.

EO

From the public eye, your job can seem unclear. Obviously it’s incredibly difficult and requires so many different skills to collaborate and communicate at your level. But what is it about your job that people might not think about?

WP

Maybe this is bigger than just my job, but everything is a gray area. People want absolutes—political absolutes, religious absolutes, moral absolutes. They want clear answers. But the reality is we’re floating in a spectrum of grays: warm gray, beige gray, cool gray.. What people used to call “multidisciplinary” was really just me refusing to wear a label.

The hardest part about this career is that everyone wants you to take the prize. The prize is there on the table, just take it. But if you take it, then you’re defined by it.

EO

What’s the prize?

WP

I’m just doing whatever I’m doing in the moment, which is somewhere in this nebulous blob. I’m not collecting stripes or trophies. I’m just working through the challenges in front of me. Not wanting to be labeled [as a creative director, an interior designer…] is about foresight, about staying a little outside the argument, outside this sort of sense of belonging. People buy into labels because they believe it makes them more attractive…

EO

More important.

WP

To a social set. Accepting a label—architect, interior designer, whatever—is no different. It’s the same as the debate around sexuality. Instead of liberation, which was the point, we’ve created sub-labels and neat folders. Oh, so the non-discipline-specific designer now has to be a multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary… I don’t want to work in a single medium. And I don’t even know if I’ll do this my whole life—I might just do something completely different.

EO

But when did you know to reject the label? Why were you suspicious?

WP

I think that was innate. Before music, fashion, and culture blended together, everything was cliquey and segregated. Skaters were skaters. Punks were punks. Gay clubs were gay clubs. Hip hop was hugely homophobic. I liked going to all of it. Most of the time I’d just connect the dots myself, because the friends I skated with would never go to the gay clubs. These hybrid spaces didn’t exist, so I would just move between them—as the most generic version of the person that fit there.

EO

So you gave yourself rules. No labels, no fixed style. Staying fluid.

WP

Belonging to one thing cuts you off from others. The minute you invest completely in a lifestyle, a look, a rule—you’re alienating yourself from other worlds. At my core, what motivates me is curiosity: learning, seeing new things, trying new things. If you’re curious, you want to make yourself approachable. If you’re dressed head-to-toe in expensive shit, you become elitist, and some poor kid is only going to feel intimidated by you. But if you’re able to be kind of disarming and able to go anywhere, those keys can open all the doors.

EO

There’s no map. Is there?

WP

There’s no map. The more you sacrifice, the less of the good stuff is left.

EO

What do you mean by that?

WP

You get known for what you do and if you make compromises, you get known for your compromises—and  you can’t find a way back from that. People say to me, “Oh, you have such a great career path.” And I think, “Yeah, but it took a lot of hard decisions to avoid ending up doing work I don’t like, in a place I don’t like.”

EO

And that just varies depending on the project?

WP

Yeah. Or the people you work with, the company you work with, or the output. [Laughs.] One of our unwritten company policies is: we try to get fired. Because if you’re always agreeable, you’ve compromised too far. People aren’t meant to agree all the time. There has to be integrity. Nothing great has ever been done by bending completely to other people’s wills.