22 Years Later, Skater Jewelry With Pharrell & NIGO's Touch
22 years after Pharrell and NIGO founded Billionaire Boys Club and ICE CREAM, the latter is only just now dipping into jewelry. What gives?
Is it Pharrell's recent interest in sparkly things? A modest reframing of ICE CREAM?
Either way, this is the most affordable Pharrell-affiliated jewelry you'll likely ever find.
It's true: Billionaire Boys Club sometimes gets lost in the mix. Amidst Supreme's high-profile collaborative grabs and Stüssy's admirable good taste, some of the long-running streetwear OGs exist in a form of quiet solitude.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Like, The Hundreds maintained a direct line to its audience for two decades, mostly indifferent to external attention.
Billionaire Boys Club is a little different, though, in that it's owned by the omnipresent Pharrell Williams, which is quite a feather in the ol' ballcap. Its sub-labels, which include the skate-leaning ICE CREAM, were quite ahead of the curve in their time.
Which makes ICE CREAM jewelry an interesting proposition. In late April, BBC's European branch released a small ICE CREAM jewelry capsule, its first stab at this sort of offering.
The bracelets, necklaces, and rings, formed in the shape of BBC's running dog logo, aren't themselves anything particularly dynamic but they're all priced under $150. If you've ever wanted to own a piece of Pharrell jewelry, this is as affordable as it gets (though, obviously, the line wasn't designed by Pharrell nor NIGO, it merely uses the logo designed by the latter).
As the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, Pharrell has mostly sidestepped jewelry — compared to the accessories and clothes, the LV men's jewelry mostly lacks his distinctive stamp — but his collaborations with Tiffany & Co. are consistent and consistently slick at that.
But the prices are what you'd expect of Tiffany.
Same for the custom Jacob & Co. orders that Pharrell occasionally offloads by way of his Joopiter auction imprint. So, if Pharrell-aligned accessories are all you wish, you could do a lot worse than ICE CREAM's modest offering.
