Tyshawn Jones Is Still Skating the Edge of What’s Possible

He’s still learning about his role, and what it means he can ask for. “Can I go into an LV store and just grab stuff? No, it doesn’t work like that,” he says. “You have to ask for things in advance and they’ll possibly get it to you.

And they’ll say yes or no?

“Uhhhmmm,” he says, with a rare chuckle. “They take care of me.”

Have they ever said no?

“I mean…they haven’t. But they’re a big brand and they have to source things.”

Tank top, his own. Pants by Louis Vuitton Men’s. Sneakers, his own by Adidas.

Before this job, Jones didn’t know Williams personally. But he knew Louis Vuitton, and understood the brand’s reach; his mother and grandmother collected Louis bags. Jones had known Louis Vuitton’s previous creative director, Virgil Abloh.

When Abloh died suddenly in 2021, at 41, he and Jones were in the mock-up stage of a collaborative project between Abloh’s Off-White and Jones’s company Hardies, which makes hardware—literally nuts and bolts—for skateboards.

“He was a cool dude,” Jones says of Abloh. “He was doing stuff with Lucien Clarke.”

Clarke, the Jamaican-born NYC skater, walked in Abloh’s first LV show in 2018. Two years later he and Abloh collaborated on the design for the first-ever Louis Vuitton skate shoe, something of an NBD for both fashion and skateboarding.

Born in Chicago to Ghanaian parents, Abloh had grown up steeped in 1990s street culture—DJ’ing, skating, making T-shirts, and collecting pieces of what was just starting to be called “streetwear.” The street-skating influence Abloh brought to the house lives on through Jones. His first Louis Vuitton ad referenced iconic footage of New York skaters—one in Timberlands—flipping the heavily tagged Jersey barrier at the Brooklyn Banks, a legendary spot at the Brooklyn Bridge’s landing and an epicenter of NYC street culture starting in the ’80s. In the video, Jones flips over a similarly high rail, then lands on a steep bank of cobblestones, and rolls away—in Timbs screened with the LV logo.

“It was pretty gritty, for sure,” Jones says of the scene. “But that was actually [shot] in Paris.”

Jones first skated the Banks when he was 10, in 2008, the year his mom bought him a board at Target. From there it was pretty much on. Obsessed, he asked older kids for their used boards, stole sneakers, and did anything he could “so I could keep pursuing.”

Jacket by Louis Vuitton Men’s. Tank top, shorts, sneakers, durag, and socks, his own.