Kendrick Lamar’s Chanel Eyewear Campaign Is Perfect

Kendrick Lamar has had a busy year. Not only did he parlay his beef with Drake into five Grammys and a historic Super Bowl halftime performance, the rapper is now an official ambassador of Chanel. The spring 2025 eyewear campaign, which was shot by Karim Sadli, also includes actresses Lupita Nyong’o, Margaret Qualley, and Nana Komatsu. According to Chanel, the project exemplifies a generation of courageous artistry and marks a bold new momentum for the brand. As for the artist and Pulitzer Prize winner, “Lamar is a performer at the top of his game,” said the house in a statement.

Lamar has always possessed a deep understanding of fashion and the powerful messaging that it can add to any visual art form—from hidden metaphors built into custom Martine Rose in the “Not Like Us” music video to a lowercase “a” necklace at his Super Bowl halftime performance. Since 2020, Lamar has worked with celebrity stylist Taylor McNeill, who helped usher in a new era of the performer’s style. McNeill also counts longtime Chanel ambassador Qualley as a client, and is responsible for Timothée Chalamet’s recent style renaissance, decking him out in everything from custom Chrome Hearts to archive Prada while on his Oscars press tour for A Complete Unknown.

Kendrick Lamar outside the Chanel Haute Couture fall 2023 runway show.

For Lamar, McNeill has been there since the beginning of his Chanel journey. In 2023, the rapper attended the Met Gala honoring Karl Lagerfeld in a quilted bomber designed by the house’s former creative director Virginie Viard. Soon after, he popped up at the brand’s fall 2023 haute couture show sporting a white tweed jacket from the womenswear collection, pearl necklace, logo-printed silk scarf wrapped around a baseball cap, and of course, sunglasses—the perfect genderless subversion of womenswear into menswear. And the perfect distillation of this moment, where female designers like Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner, and Bianca Saunders have been dominating menswear by channeling ’80s expressionism, and women’s runways such as Saint Laurent and Fendi are playing host to a power-suiting renaissance.

Last year, the two titans officially collaborated; Lamar not only had a hand in building Chanel’s spring 2024 haute couture set, but he also released a short film titled “The Button” for the occasion.

Kendrick Lamar performing at the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX halftime show.

“Chanel has a timeless legacy, and that is always something I can get behind. Since they don’t make clothes for men, I knew it would have to be glasses,” Lamar said in the press release. Fashion historian and theorist Rian Phin thinks that eyewear is the perfect launch point for the partnership. “[Lamar] can help broaden Chanel’s audience,” she tells ELLE.com. “I think he can pluralize menswear in general and expand the idea of what men can be drawn to, like he did with the [Celine] kick-flared jeans at the Super Bowl. Accessories are an easy entry point to include his fans in his storytelling.”

Although the house has tapped male ambassadors like Chalamet for fragrance campaigns in the past, it has historically never produced a menswear line. Meanwhile, former Bottega Veneta creative director Matthieu Blazy is set to make his runway debut during Paris Fashion Week this October. Blazy’s skill at Bottega was effectively genderless. Beyond his beloved runways, the Andiamo shoulder bag has become a street-style favorite of male celebrities from Jacob Elordi (who sometimes sports up to three at once) to Omar Apollo. Perhaps the ambassadorship is another fashion Easter Egg after all.