Willo Perron

EO

You had this incredible run starting around 2013—JAŸ-Z’s Magna Carta… Holy Grail, Drake’s Would You Like a Tour?, Rihanna’s ANTI World Tour, and later your return to JAŸ-Z for 4:44, alongside Gaga’s Monster Ball and Travis Scott’s Astroworld. But what has stayed with me most is Rihanna, especially the VMAs and that four-part staging in 2016. Those moments felt less like performances than fully constructed worlds. Looking back on that period, what were you trying to build?

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, yet 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

They were always making 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?

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

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, and 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, California they had around 40 of those carts that carried everything: lights, audio, and 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

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

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 the whole gesture isn’t contrived. 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

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 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 had been circulating through those first two seasons, but it wasn’t until season four—when they did it on Roosevelt Island 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 Los Angeles in 2008. Before that, we’d done the Glow in the Dark Tour, which was monumental. It changed how rap was perceived within a touring context, and it changed Kanye as a performer.

EO

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

WP

That was the same period as some of the early Rihanna work. At the 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

That was 2007’s Graduation—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 suddenly became. By 2016, he had 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 see 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, they 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, and George Condo. Marco Brambilla’s Power video was part of that. Rap wasn’t respected in the art or fashion world at that point.

EO

Artists like Kanye, Beyoncé, and Rihanna were building not just music but movements. But what really cemented Kanye for me was the Runaway video in 2010. Rap had always been mainstream-adjacent, but that moment made it truly mainstream—and then layered art on top of it that was both popular and high-level. It 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 fuse things that didn’t naturally go together. I remember when Yohji Yamamoto made a sneaker with Adidas—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 happen. Our goal was to merge those worlds and make hybrid babies out of them.

To be honest, I had no sense of how big and lasting it would be—and it still feels dominant. But the intention was always to legitimize what we loved, to mix it with what we were drawn to: 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 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 these conversations—that it made me more introspective. It was a powerful combination: two people aiming at the same thing.

EO

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

WP

We started with the identity. They had a logo that looked like action sports—or maybe aftermarket automotive. It was aggressive, one-note. They didn’t need to change it completely; they just needed to refine the intention. So we brought in great type designers. It was myself, my partner Brian Roettinger, and Deutsche & Japaner from Germany. We softened the hard edge of what already existed and 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 the company—all different modes, but music is the throughline. You’ve basically grown up with these people.

WP

Yes in a way, but I’m a JAY-Z fan first and foremost. It’s a strange thing—it’s not really in the cards for a French Canadian kid from Montreal to end up at the apex of all this. But once the opportunity appeared, everything aligned. I also think there’s a brilliance—and this is probably more to Kanye’s credit than anyone’s—in seeking opinions from outside your immediate world. When we met, I had just left Apple, and he immediately sensed I had information he wanted to explore. That curiosity filtered 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. And then you also designed the American Apparel stores. That’s essentially 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 have been as commercially significant, but it was the label Kanye wanted to be signed to. He was outside our office in ’98/’99, trying to get in. Rawkus put out Mos Def and Talib Kweli—it really defined the counterbalance to the jiggy, basketball-jersey, gold-chain, drug-dealer rap of that era. The reason someone like Kanye—or contemporary rap in general—could exist was because of that moment. He was aware of it. He was torn 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 also mattered because we cared about aesthetics. Nobody in hip hop was prioritizing design then. Rawkus had an overarching visual language—people tried to replicate it. One of the only other places you saw that level 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 incredible to see design and aesthetics treated seriously in rap for the first time.

EO

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

WP

No, it’s such an incredible thing. I give Dov Charney a lot of credit for having the guts to hire kids with no experience—just people he thought were cool. The whole operation needed a bit more backbone, which might be why it doesn’t exist anymore. But so many incredible people—a lot of my friends now who are major creative forces in 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. Those spaces 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 became the blueprint for how I understood color, texture, and these visual ideas I was encountering 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 great club nights in Montreal, and Dov was aware of it. By the time he came back from manufacturing, I had these retail stores he really liked, and we were selling blank American Apparel pieces. That’s where the idea for the stores actually germinated—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 a kind of small town in the ’60s to hosting Expo ’67 and 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.) We were raised in a place filled with promise, innovation, and international attention. Then came the secession movement—very present where I grew up. Everyone with money left for Toronto, and by our early adulthood, Montreal had become a very poor place.

EO

You lived through the making of Montreal.

WP

Yes, but everybody was super cultured, and broke.

EO

Which feels a lot like the 2000s 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. Everyone went out seven nights a week. The best club nights were on Mondays or Tuesdays. Weekends were quiet. Nobody had a job, nobody had a career…

EO

But also—that’s the beauty of it.

WP

You could get a great apartment for $400, but the city was half empty. There was this mass exodus, so we had a playground but not much hope. Nobody really believed we could do what we do now—professionally.

EO

You didn’t know it could scale.

WP

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

EO

I feel so lucky that I caught the tail end of having to connect with people entirely in person, but still reaped the benefits of the early days 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 for two years, then went to New York.

WP

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

EO

Is this 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, did you already know what you wanted to accomplish? Because it doesn’t feel like you formalized the 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 spaces and see what happened. The first one was in Montreal, and it just blew out. People would walk 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 wanted 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’ve always had a theory that people who aren’t from America are sometimes more American, because they see more possibility in it—they treat the country as a space of projection. A kid from Montreal creating a company called American Apparel felt perfectly aligned with the commercial imagination of the U.S.

WP

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

EO

Just the vibes.

WP

I’d go out to shops, restaurants, concerts, clubs—and street-cast the ads. I’d literally point at someone and go: you. People came from everywhere, but we knew what it was. 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 then, but what was it like negotiating that kind of work at the time?

WP

It was madness. I had these really interesting patrons who believed in my work. Your generation is savvier—you have more ownership in what you do. Back then, just the idea that I could design and make a living felt radical. To be paid to come up with ideas all day—that was enough. I wasn’t trying to get rich. If I could live decently and do the thing I loved, I’d won. The idea that it might become lucrative later wasn’t even part of the equation. You don’t start making 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 messy and all over the place because I was a kid out every night, but there was definitely ambition. It just had to consolidate at some point. You plant seeds—some of them grow, some don’t.

EO

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

WP

Honestly, the goal has always been to realize your dreams. You imagine an object, a home, a show—and then you get to make it. That’s the wild part. And when people want to buy it, when it sustains you—that’s even more surreal. 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 tour was very much a fashion procession—we worked with a huge amount of reference material: bondage, Mugler, Claude Montana, early Gaultier. The set itself was simple, a forced-perspective build, and then we layered acts, props, and video. Nick Knight handled the video content. It was super fun, but the show was quite elemental. Glow in the Dark was more theatrical, shaped around what Kanye was drawn to. We’d sit with piles of references—Syd Mead-style futurism, kind of cartoonish, aspirational.

EO

You work with Skims, and their products are singular—the packaging, the identity, it’s sculptural. Yeezy, and the studio you designed in 2017, shared that cohesion. It felt like a direct line from American Apparel. Sometimes the clothes come first and the structure arrives later, but with American Apparel, the stores and the clothes emerged at the same time—the physical experience of the space embodied the garments. And with Yeezy, you could appreciate the clothes but also instantly see the aesthetic world they belonged to.

WP

Exactly—it’s about understanding the energy of the thing. Since the day I met Kanye, there was always a defined color palette. That became Yeezy, then Skims, and I think it influenced Fear of God and that broader ecosystem. My contribution was more philosophical than aesthetic. I don’t own anything with a label on it.

I’ve always felt that branded stuff breeds insecurity. Growing up poor, there was this pressure to justify your place in society by owning things—it’s a submission to insecurity. I wondered: why not do the opposite? Why not create something that’s at the apex of culture and fashion, without being expensive or elitist, and without exterior branding? That became part of the Yeezy ethos: remove the label, remove the insecurity. Why was I telling you this? Fuck. [Laughs.]

EO

The clothes meeting the store.

WP

Those offices were meant to be industrial, utilitarian, raw—even avant-garde. Early on, everything leaned into utilitarianism simply because of constraints—we built with whatever was available. The question was always: how do we make spaces quickly and still give them identity? American Apparel followed the same logic, just expressed in a more pop, more colorful way.

EO

That’s what I always appreciated about American Apparel—it was so simple. Basics as style. And then with Kanye, it became music as lifestyle, or music as art, as fashion…

WP

The thing is, if you give someone who’s genuinely brilliant—brilliant at life—a simple problem to work with, they can turn it into a lifelong pursuit. For Dov, it was the white T-shirt. He made that his life’s work. 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, and paired it with deep convictions around onshore production, immigration policy, fair wages. Most people that smart might think that’s not a worthy use of their brilliance. But that’s what made the company interesting. That’s what made those characters extraordinary—they took something simple and executed it exceptionally well.

EO

There’s a saying that a business doesn’t really take off until at least seven years—it takes time to mature. Do you feel like that applied to you? Because success looks different each time—recognition, collaboration, financial, creative. When did it shift from happening to you to you actively shaping it?

WP

I always sensed that the “me” part of my success would arrive around the age I am now. I’d look at architects and designers I admired and notice—they didn’t really do their defining work until their 40s or 50s. So it never felt like a sprint to the finish line.

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 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 adaptable—but there are brilliant people who are destitute. You could just as easily have been born in a war-torn country. You can manufacture your own luck, and still plant a million seeds and watch none of them grow. So you appreciate that you’re not owed anything.

EO

From the outside, your role can seem ambiguous. It’s obviously difficult and demands so many different skills to collaborate and communicate at your level. But what’s the part people don’t usually consider?

WP

Maybe it’s bigger than my role, but everything is a gray area. People want absolutes—political, religious, moral. They want definitive answers. But the truth is, we exist in gradients: warm gray, beige gray, cool gray. What people used to call “multidisciplinary” was really just me refusing to wear a label. The hardest part of this work is that everyone wants you to take the prize. It’s sitting right there on the table—just take it. But once you do, you become defined by it.

EO

What’s the prize?

WP

I’m just doing whatever I’m doing in the moment, somewhere inside this nebulous blob. I’m not collecting stripes or trophies—I’m just working through the challenges in front of me. Rejecting labels—creative director, interior designer—is really about foresight. It’s about staying slightly outside the argument, outside that impulse toward belonging. People buy into labels because they think it makes them more attractive…

EO

More important.

WP

To a social set. Accepting the label—architect, interior designer, whatever—functions the same way. It’s like the debate around sexuality: instead of liberation, which was the point, we’ve created sub-labels and neat folders. So now the person who refuses discipline-specific work becomes “multi-hyphenate” or “multidisciplinary.” I don’t want to work in a single medium. And I don’t even know if I’ll do this for my whole life—I might do something entirely different.

EO

So 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.