Perhaps you’ve seen Beyoncé soaring over crowds in a floating horseshoe at her Cowboy Carter tour performances, or riding a metallic mechanical bull. If you’ve wondered who came up with those stunts, the answer involves Willo Perron.
“She really is, in my eyes, the last of a type of an entertainer-performer,” Mr. Perron, the tour’s stage designer, said over tea at Corner Bar, a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in April. “Really, I’ve never seen somebody work so diligently.”
He was speaking with the perspective of someone who has also worked with Rihanna (on her Super Bowl LVII halftime show), with Drake (on the Aubrey and the Three Migos tour) and with Florence and the Machine (on the group’s High As Hope tour).
“It makes you have to kind of show up at such a high level all the time,” Mr. Perron said of working with Beyoncé. “And it’s good, it’s like playing a sport with somebody who is much better than you. Hopefully, it makes you a little bit better yourself.”
Mr. Perron, 51, is one of those people who is hard to put a label on professionally — the type of creative mind whose fluency in various mediums has led some to call him a cultural polymath and others a world builder.
“What I do is like planting seeds with no expectations,” he said. “Just constantly planting seeds and planting seeds. And then if something grows, then I give it attention. And then simultaneously, this thing will grow over here and I’ll give that a little bit of attention.”
As he spoke, he used his hands to pretend to scatter invisible seeds and then to prune the leaves of an invisible plant growing above his matcha latte with honey.
“Nothing gets by him, nothing skirts by,” said Brian Roettinger, an art director and Mr. Perron’s creative partner in Perron-Roettinger, their namesake design studio in Los Angeles. “He’ll be like: ‘Why is that? Why? What’s the purpose? What’s the intention and what’s the purpose?’”
“Intention and purpose,” Mr. Roettinger, 48, repeated with emphasis, slowly stretching out each word as he spoke. “If you’re going to put something in the world with intention and purpose,” he added, “it has to be the best of the best and it has to be the most exquisite.”
Mr. Perron’s standards and taste are reflected in his many projects, which include fashion shows for Chanel and albums by the likes of Jay-Z and St. Vincent. (In 2019, he won a Grammy for his work with St. Vincent.) He has developed furniture for Knoll; collaborated on the visual branding for Ghia, a line of nonalcoholic drinks; and designed stores for Skims and the streetwear brand Stüssy — including its flagship on Prince Street in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan, where lines of people have regularly formed outside since it opened in February.
On a warm Sunday in April, a line on the sidewalk stretched the full length of the store and back again, leaving little room for pedestrians to pass. Adolescents dressed in Adidas tracksuits pressed their faces against the glass picture windows of the building’s black brick facade to get a glimpse inside.
C.J. Hernandez, 40, a visual merchandising manager at Stüssy, was sitting nearby on a cement planter. “People have really enjoyed the space and they love the aesthetic of it,” he said of the store, which replaced another on Spring Street that had also been designed by Mr. Perron and closed in 2023. “It’s really clean.”
The light-filled space has oak shelving, poured cement floors and a set of four olive green foam chairs, which look a bit like they’ve been left to melt in the sun. Its interior plays off texture and scale, with large smooth wood panels breaking up walls that have small pebbles pressed into them.
Mr. Perron, who began working with Stüssy in 2008, has overseen the design of about 50 of its stores worldwide. He explained that, as streetwear had become more associated with high fashion, the stores’ looks had also evolved to be less reflective of the laid-back surf and skate culture that shaped the brand’s identity when it was founded in the 1980s.
“We’ve just refined it, refined it, refined it, refined it,” Mr. Perron said. “It’s just like this thing that just kept on getting more and more polished, to where it is now. I think the first iteration of it was kind of us playing, like this is childhood, then it went through this sort of adolescence and now it just wants to kind of mature into something.”
Mr. Perron and his brother, Zebulon, were raised in Montreal by a “hippie” father who played in jazz bands and a “new age-y” mother who worked as a therapist — and, Mr. Perron said, had a penchant for the color beige. He did not finish high school. His formative years were shaped by people who were “creative and scrappy and smart,” he said, and who helped instill in him an appreciation for working with his hands.
As a young adult, Mr. Perron spent much of his time making clothes, putting out records, hosting “club nights” and learning how to use computer software to design fliers with his friends, he said.
His knack for building things is reflected in another project: the Pillo Sofa, his first piece for Knoll, the furniture company known for its catalog of pieces by design superstars like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen. The sofa, which costs $10,095, has a D.I.Y. sheen because its body comprises oversize pillows neatly arranged into the shape of a couch.
“There’s a strong single idea driving the whole sofa, which is just a pillow,” Jonathan Olivares, the senior vice president of design at Knoll, said of the product, which he described as “extremely intuitive” and “not fussed over.”
Mr. Perron did not create the Pillo Sofa with the intention of it ending up on a showroom floor. He made a prototype to use for projects and in his office, which was where Mr. Olivares first encountered it. He came to have a coffee with Mr. Perron, he said, and, after some cajoling, he left with plans to produce the sofa — another idea germinated in Mr. Perron’s metaphorical garden.
“If you’re of curious mind and you want to create things, you’re not limited to what the medium is that you chose at some point in your life,” said Mr. Perron, whose latest piece for Knoll, the Bun lounge chair, was introduced in April at Salone del Mobile, the international furniture fair in Milan.
“You should be able to write music and design a chair,” he continued. “They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s not chair designers that should design chairs. What would we see if non-chair designers were designing chairs? It would be way more interesting.”
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