Off-White (Q7292)
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Off-White is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Off-White |
Off-White is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
worker
2013
creative assistant
Off-White is a company launched by an American, based in Milan, with fashion shows in Paris. Its home-is-everywhere-and-nowhere aspect was befitting of its founder, the late Virgil Abloh, who was famously one of the industry’s most peripatetic people. And it’s what enabled his hand-picked successor Ib Kamara to bring the label to New York Fashion Week for a stateside runway show this season, unbelievably the brand’s first-ever.“It feels like coming home for Off-White and for me as well,” said Kamara backstage. Kamara, too, is in constant motion for his work; he’s also a busy stylist. The collection’s spark came from a trip he took to Ghana, the country from which Abloh’s parents emigrated. “I just loved it, so I started the collection there,” Kamara said, “going to the market, gathering fabrics, working with local artisans, really gathering a lot of feeling from it. And I named the collection Duty Free: you’ve come to New York, you’re young, you’re sexy, and you’re confident because you’re a global traveler.”Emphasis on sexy when it came to the women’s pieces. They were based on the building blocks of athletic wear, leotards and leggings, the former souped-up with v-necklines that plunged to below the navel, and the latter split at the hem over spiked sandals. Shrunken track jackets and wispy skirts formed the other major silhouette; they were accessorized with a second track jacket tied around the waist to give the look a more low-key vibe.Kamara has a more natural feel for the men’s side, and his main idea for the guys was adding a zippered panel to the hems of vests and jackets, as well as to the front of trousers. He came out for his bow in a pair of jeans with the treatment, the unzipped panels looking like utility pockets with room for the backstage tools of the trade. There was also a letterman jacket with logo patches and a hoodie featuring the artwork of the Ghanaian artist Nana Danso.We were at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 2, home to basketball and handball courts, a skating rink, and an epic view of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the East River. The front row was just as glittering, with Flavor Flav, Zayn Malik, Mary J Blige, and Camila Cabello among the VIPs. The tennis player Francis Tiafoe, who sat front row and shares a Sierra Leonean background with Kamara, weighed in with a review: he wants everything.
It was too early for Kamara to say if Off-White will stick with NYC, return to Paris, or go elsewhere in 2025, but the excitement about the brand and the goodwill for him does feel global.
8 September 2024
Ib Kamara and Off-White have rolled the dice. After two years as “art and image director” of the brand founded by the late, great Virgil Abloh, Kamara has just signed Off-White’s offer to act as its fully-fledged creative director. Now is the time for Off-White to start building in earnest on the opportunity to become luxury’s first 21st century heritage brand based on the founder’s generational impact on fashion and culture.There was a lot going on here this morning. As Kamara dryly observed: “What I’ve realized working on this collection is that I’m just not a minimalist.” That was all to the good in a coed show that worked to integrate Off-White’s codes, Abloh’s legacy discourse of postmodern streetwear, and Kamara’s own identity both as a long-term collaborator with Abloh and a creative force in his own right.Womenswear came out first. Kamara used the outerwear template of an anorak/parka as the template from which to deconstruct and then rebuild dresses, corseted shirting, waistcoats, and bombers. Fake fur trim in synthetic green lined collars, with strapping meant to reference the brand’s arrow logo. It was wound around outerwear and used as a sort of ribcage over printed eveningwear. One red minidress was composed entirely of strapping. The fringed beading that hemmed bras, deconstructed sports jersey tops, and wrap varsity jacket dresses referenced Kamara’s African identity, as did the specific draping and techniques in some pieces. A counterpoint came from the all-American sportswear ribbing that Kamara transferred from cuff or hem to use as the halter neck in dresses or the straps on sandals.Crossing to menswear, Kamara opened with more Dr. Seuss fur—hats this time—whose green was echoed in the grid of stars that played across jersey full looks in logo check. There were some interestingly regal looks that put brocade coats over monochrome tracksuits with fringed legs in more West African–sourced beading. And there was a new sneaker named The Baller that literally played with the codes of basketball: This, you suspected, will be a love-or-hate product. Kamara said: “Off-White is the brand that is supposed to take risks and be inventive and have a new point of view all the time. I think I’m finding my point of view in Virgil’s universe, but there is me in there too.”
29 February 2024
The plan is for Off-White to return to Paris Fashion Week next February. Meanwhile, Ib Kamara said, this pre-fall offer prefigures that runway restoration by returning to the source of what made the brand Virgil Abloh founded in 2012 such a driver of industry transformation: “Youth luxury. Playfulness. Street. Real clothes you want to wear with a lot of desirable details.”Trenches in technical fabrics with decorative top-stitching, lace-edged leather dresses layered over jersey, washed denim patterned with the foundational house cross and other easter egg Off-White motifs, and evening wear cut with harness lapels were a few of the stories in the studio. Kamara said a research trip to Japan had inflected the collection: pearl or ruffle edged workwear, bra-overstitched hoodies, and pearlescent buttoned Maasai check tweeds and tailoring looked consequently kawaii. Beading, patches, and floral prints layered over pinstripe added to the cacophony. “I know the industry loves minimal, but I want Off-White to be optimistic and fun,” said Kamara: “And it's very Off-White to deliver that twist.”There was a comprehensive complement of core bag and sneaker styles too, and a lot of non-collection rails featuring instantly recognizable seasonal house “basics.” Through continued curation of the rich trove of language and codes laid down by its generationally influential founder, Off-White might, you’d imagine, eventually become the first heritage fashion brand born in the 21st century: a sort of luxury equivalent of Stussy, which since Shawn Stussy’s departure has been riffing on its founder’s equally distinct lexicon for nearly three decades now. As Kamara understands more than anyone, Abloh’s influence was undeniably monumental: Off-White should, in time, become his monument.
12 December 2023
Behind the scenes, both Off-White and its parent group New Guards have been recently subject to a restructuring of their respective executive mastheads. Front of house, meanwhile, the brand that first propelled NGG to such powerhouse status continues to develop under the creative guidance of Ibrahim Kamara. Last season, Kamara took us to the moon (not in a crypto way) via Sierra Leone. In this resort collection, he continued to excavate the cultural spaces created by the shifting 21st century forces of globalization, the digital diaspora, and the gravity of personal identity.The collection was entitled “Homecoming.” Kamara said: “It’s about going back to Off-White fundamentals. And also I wanted to do a collection that has an American sensibility… As an indigenous African, I explored my take on an American perspective, and how we can link that to the first people of America.” Once you get to the moon and look down, astronauts have recounted, you realize we all come from the same place. Kamara said he was looking to express an “indigenous global language.”That intention parsed into a collection that was full of signifiers specific both to Off-White and broader cultural brands. Kamara played both against each other via cowboy tropes in “Western” tailoring with broken “Buffalo” pinstripe whose silhouettes also hinted at a process of Ray Petri-ation via the designer’s Londoner sensibility. Vests in rib-jersey and lace were combined and hybridized into twisted, draped womenswear pieces. We veered into Stevie Nicks meets Don Henley territory in finely draped lace-edged yellow leather dresses. Tattoo reliefs were inked across knits and handkerchiefs, a design Kamara said would become a regular house motif. Here these ran across both men’s and women's, as did a scanning print meant to signify the very Off-White in-between of global travel. Vitamins, gaming devices, a baseball, and an Off-White brand document were amongst the items revealed in it.The number 23 was engineered into pinstripe and print and sporty grosgrain stripes were integrated into tailoring. One menswear look, a jacket and shorts, was tailored from basketball leather while a paisley edged, Gabicci-esque knit button-up featured that key number on its back. Kamara said the brand’s recent collaboration with the Chicago Bulls had fired his identity here (Michael Jordan’s number was 23).
Layered oversized denim and gabardine field jackets featured a newly expressed version of the company’s four-arrow logo, and a side-zipped knit sweater featured a Manhattan skyline intarsia fronted by a hot air balloon. “We’re back on earth,” said Kamara, “exploring beautiful clothes that you want to wear.”
9 June 2023
To the moon! That’s where Ibrahim Kamara delivered us this morning, way more efficiently than any crypto bro. Following last season’s transitional cap-doff in the direction of his irreplaceable multi-hyphenate predecessor Virgil Abloh, this was effectively Kamara’s first fully authored mainline show at Off-White. Kamara has a high hyphen count himself (editor-stylist-and-now-designer): For this one, however, he had to drown out the competing voices and shape a fresh and distinct narrative for the house with which he has been entrusted. This was achieved by deploying a journey metaphor that was simultaneously personal (the West African source material, especially in pattern and fabric), and recognizably Off-White (the industrial hardware, the feminized varsity pieces, the utilitarian strapping). Ingeniously a third element neatly sidestepped all earthbound partisanship: as mentioned at the top, we were in our own orbit.The entry to the Tennis Club de Paris was a Kubrick-esque docking corridor. From it we emerged into an expansive sunlit lunar landscape, all reddish sand and rocks that the models sometimes kicked as they strode through it. The centerpiece was a huge mirrored orb whose fish-eye reflection let fashion’s ragtag regulars—as diverse as any Mos Eisley cantina crowd—see themselves in space-traveled situ. Backstage pre-show, already in the gold net top that he would take his bow in alongside Naomi Campbell, Kamara explained how this collection was a continuation of the pre, this time called Lunar Delivery. “Every look is very considered: I like to work 360,” he said: “But we also discovered new things as we developed the concept.”His own journey’s starting point was obliquely referenced in the red earth of that “moondust” that also mirrored the rich alluvial ochre of unpaved roads across West Africa. This color bled into several looks after the space-black openers cut with constellations of gleaming metal grommets. Later there would be rubberized outerwear in prints based on a photo Kamara had taken of a derelict house in his Sierra Leone birthplace. We shifted into transport via indigo County Cloth inspired dye prints in wheel-reminiscent patterns. The tire-necked dress, tire-topped mini-pannier, tire print shorts, wheeled eyelet earrings, tire bracelets and entertaining indicator light shoes moved that notion forward. Map-print dresses and shoes showed this was a journey from A to B.
You could see quite a lot of London, Kamara’s home, in the many pleated skirted kilts and dresses. This punkish detail was ingeniously meshed with an Off-White on-point sleeveless bomber jacket dress whose vertical pleats were deployable via zipper. There were many beautiful knitwear pieces, loosely strung together and mapped with raggedly open sections that contrasted with the lines of pearlescent beading that hung from them. As we approached our landing point, the looks seemed spacier. An impressive gabardine edged in grommeted black fabric was regally non-traditional. A knee-sliced silver space-esque suit was followed by the tire pannier and then an intricately beaded and hardwared bomber and shorts. We had reached our destination. “Punk, romantic, sexy,” said Kamara: “those are the three words I keep coming back to.” In a season full of 20th-century classicism, Off-White’s furthering of its founder’s 21st century codes gave it a valuable point of difference from which to expand its orbit.
2 March 2023
Ibrahim Kamara is beginning to deliver more of himself as he settles into his role as art and image director at Off-White. Last August he revisited Sierra Leone, the nation of his birth, which he left as an infant due to civil war. “A lot of that research I did back home into colors and textures and fabrics really informed the experiments we did in the studio,” he said. One of the most apparent indicators of that fabric was the Country Cloth-inspired blue rectangular prints—“a celebratory pattern” used on the opening men’s parka and across women’s in this pre-fall collection.That was one fundamental dimension in a collection that simultaneously celebrated another: the codes of its founding designer, Virgil Abloh. The cut-out tailoring, inverted commas sloganeering—this time, “No Offense,”—and zip ties were all part of Kamara’s collage. He said his starting point concept had been “delivery,” that seemingly magical logistical glue that connects us, and added that his swerve had been to play with that concept transported to the moon. This was a subtle, clever device with which to play with those West African codes. As for “No Offense,” he said “it was something we came up with in the studio as we were experimenting in building hybrid things from the traditional.”As well as creating a body of work distinctly his own, Abloh shaped apracticeof working—Afro-centric but not excludingly so, communally elevating, and inherently benevolent—and it’s that practice that allows Kamara and all his Off-White colleagues to seamlessly build on what the founder started. Here Kamara worked to round and soften the harder shoulder lines of men’s outerwear and tailoring, and simultaneously apply strength and security in the “delivery” derived strapping details in the womenswear. There was an evident coming together of the two in variously-hemmed pleated skirts, and a blending in pieces like a varsity minidress. Hardware and prints incorporated tire tread marks and transport, which collided in tire-meets-meteor impact craters in those lunar landscapes that provided Kamara with the distance to work with serenity. Kamara said his personal mantra for this collection was On The Go: Off-White continues to move forward.
14 February 2023
Virgil Abloh would have turned 42 tomorrow. After tonight’s show for Off-White, the brand Abloh founded, Ibrahim Kamara said: “It’s about celebrating him and his legacy.” Nobody has succeeded Abloh in his role at Off-White—because who could?—but Kamara was named the Image and Art Director of the brand by CEO Andrea Grilli in April to help pilot it forward. Asked to characterize his role, especially in relation to this collection, Kamara said: “The beauty of Off-White is that you are involved in every single detail of the brand. And although my role is image-based, I was able to investigate with the team as they built this collection. It’s a broader role than I expected when I stepped into it, and it’s a beautiful role, and I am very lucky.”This collection was, at its earliest stages, conceived and started by Abloh before his death in 2021. Kamara said the team had taken the original brief—an exploration of the human body—and built on it. “Virgil was always thinking ahead,” he added. “He was almost in another universe.”The show, of course, was hypey. There were crowds outside and celebrities within. Jonathan Anderson and Maximilian Davis came along for the ride too. The collection was prefaced and accompanied by a group of dancers, mostly from Paris, who were brought together by choreographer Nicolas Huchard and performed to music by Faty Sy Savanet wearing hole-puckered blue body suits on a carpet of the same shade. I’d thought maybe the color was a subtle tribute to Marcelo Burlon’s role in the Off-White story, but it was also a particular contribution of Kamara’s.The collection followed the brief imaginatively, while reemphasizing the founder’s codes. The holes were used to expose the navel on patched leather dresses and workwear, feminized tailoring, shirtdresses, and the knitwear that was a highlight of the collection. Stitching was used to trace a contour map of the muscles and organs beneath on suiting, and later printed X-rays repeated the trick on more suiting and denim: The clothes were wearing an imprint of the body within. On the knitwear, thin braided ropelets were precisely applied on top of fine-gauge shells to create more reefs of contour that mapped out the bodies beneath. There was also a great knit menswear suit, unadorned, that reflected the sartorial expression of form but also allowed for free and elastic movement.
The very Off-White, unfinished, “work in progress” concept was expressed through tailoring with slashed and apparently half-constructed elements, plus puffer jackets and Out Of Office sneakers with trailing lines of stitching at their seams. The most-worn womenswear family of shoes all shared heels based on slinky springs: funny, but also connected to another subject of the show that Kamara shared. All the models were new faces, something Kamara said reflected the doors in the set design. He explained: “The show is a celebration, and it’s also about hope. Hope is opening doors, and that is something Virgil did beautifully until the very end.” Hope springs eternal.This Off-White collection contained easily enough elastic potential energy to convince you that a brand that was also one man’s conceptual body of work remains very much alive, attuned, and engaged with progression. The Jenny Holzer–print staff T-shirts that were also given to guests and that continued an Abloh-initiated 2017 project to support Planned Parenthood only added to that conviction.
29 September 2022
Virgil Abloh was fashion’s most frequent flyer, a multi-hyphenate creative director, DJ, architect, serial collaborator, and amplifier for the voices of the Black community. The man was not earthbound. So it makes a sort of sense that since his sudden passing last November we’ve been visited by a drone kite and runway angels.After two tributes to Abloh at Louis Vuitton—the first in Miami just two days after he died and the second here in Paris last month—this posthumous Off-White show registered more as a celebration. A ride on “Spaceship Earth,” as it was called. Among the passengers: Rihanna and A$AP Rocky, Idris and Sabrina Elba, Pharrell Williams and his family, the CEOs of Louis Vuitton and New Guards Group, and a who’s who of designers including Jonathan Anderson, Olivier Rousteing, Matthew Williams, Guram Gvasalia, and Jerry Lorenzo.The spaceship metaphor worked in more ways than one. This show included not just Off-White’s fall 2022 ready-to-wear collection, but also a new high fashion line (haute couture without the haute couture appellation) “designed by Virgil and completed by the creative teams and collaborators with whom he worked,” the show program explained. Abloh presented his fall 2021 collection during the Paris haute couture shows last July. At the time he said, “I get frustrated if I don’t feel an evolution, and the message becomes monotonous.” In retrospect, he may have been laying the groundwork for this new discipline.But first up was the ready-to-wear. The show opened with snippets from an interview Pharrell Williams did in 2020. “Share the codes… share the cheat codes. A lot of us had to figure it out ourselves… that’s where we go wrong,” he said. “The more of us that learn the codes, the stronger we are.” Arguably, code sharing was what went down on the runway, a sort of lesson in Abloh-isms from elevated hoodies to the mad pockets of his cargo gear to the mid-layer garments that made such waves on the red carpet to letterman jackets to the “quotes” branding he was so famous for. Here he saved his biggest statement for a pair of white flags printed with the phrase, “Question Everything.”And why not launch couture? Abloh wasn’t at a loss for ideas, as the extensive show program reminded us. Each of the 28 high fashion looks was extensively annotated, only not with the number of hours for this embroidery or that handmade veil or train, but with little backstories. Which is far more meaningful.
There was an ode to his friend Sarah Jessica Parker—The Carrie B.—complete with an enormous shopping bag. There was a self-portrait—The Verg—with an oversized jacket, baseball cap, sneakers, and sunglasses. There was a never worn 2020 Met Gala dress for Kylie Jenner. And there was a more serious message, it would seem, about the health struggle Abloh kept so intensely private, in Cindy Crawford’s two handbags: one printed with MORE LIFE and another full of red and white pill capsules. The beats were provided by the DJ Jeff Mills, who, it can’t be any coincidence, is known as The Wizard (bothThe Wizard of OzandThe Wizwere among Alboh’s references at Louis Vuitton).Making good on Pharrell Williams’s point about sharing the codes, Off-White’s parent company New Guards Group streamed tonight’s show in 100 storefronts across Paris installed with TV monitors for the occasion: boutiques, barbershops, pharmacies, etc. At his last show before the pandemic in February 2020 Abloh said, “the ethos of Off-White is it’s not just clothes. My inspiration and motivation is more the humanity level.” Words to live by for whomever takes over the Off-White pilot seat.
28 February 2022
Virgil Abloh was fashion’s most frequent flyer, a multi-hyphenate creative director, DJ, architect, serial collaborator, and amplifier for the voices of the Black community. The man was not earthbound. So it makes a sort of sense that since his sudden passing last November we’ve been visited by a drone kite and runway angels.After two tributes to Abloh at Louis Vuitton—the first in Miami just two days after he died and the second here in Paris last month—this posthumous Off-White show registered more as a celebration. A ride on “Spaceship Earth,” as it was called. Among the passengers: Rihanna and A$AP Rocky, Idris and Sabrina Elba, Pharrell Williams and his family, the CEOs of Louis Vuitton and New Guards Group, and a who’s who of designers including Jonathan Anderson, Olivier Rousteing, Matthew Williams, Guram Gvasalia, and Jerry Lorenzo.The spaceship metaphor worked in more ways than one. This show included not just Off-White’s fall 2022 ready-to-wear collection, but also a new high fashion line (haute couture without the haute couture appellation) “designed by Virgil and completed by the creative teams and collaborators with whom he worked,” the show program explained. Abloh presented his fall 2021 collection during the Paris haute couture shows last July. At the time he said, “I get frustrated if I don’t feel an evolution, and the message becomes monotonous.” In retrospect, he may have been laying the groundwork for this new discipline.But first up was the ready-to-wear. The show opened with snippets from an interview Pharrell Williams did in 2020. “Share the codes… share the cheat codes. A lot of us had to figure it out ourselves… that’s where we go wrong,” he said. “The more of us that learn the codes, the stronger we are.” Arguably, code sharing was what went down on the runway, a sort of lesson in Abloh-isms from elevated hoodies to the mad pockets of his cargo gear to the mid-layer garments that made such waves on the red carpet to letterman jackets to the “quotes” branding he was so famous for. Here he saved his biggest statement for a pair of white flags printed with the phrase, “Question Everything.”And why not launch couture? Abloh wasn’t at a loss for ideas, as the extensive show program reminded us. Each of the 28 high fashion looks was extensively annotated, only not with the number of hours for this embroidery or that handmade veil or train, but with little backstories. Which is far more meaningful.
There was an ode to his friend Sarah Jessica Parker—The Carrie B.—complete with an enormous shopping bag. There was a self-portrait—The Verg—with an oversized jacket, baseball cap, sneakers, and sunglasses. There was a never worn 2020 Met Gala dress for Kylie Jenner. And there was a more serious message, it would seem, about the health struggle Abloh kept so intensely private, in Cindy Crawford’s two handbags: one printed with MORE LIFE and another full of red and white pill capsules. The beats were provided by the DJ Jeff Mills, who, it can’t be any coincidence, is known as The Wizard (bothThe Wizard of OzandThe Wizwere among Alboh’s references at Louis Vuitton).Making good on Pharrell Williams’s point about sharing the codes, Off-White’s parent company New Guards Group streamed tonight’s show in 100 storefronts across Paris installed with TV monitors for the occasion: boutiques, barbershops, pharmacies, etc. At his last show before the pandemic in February 2020 Abloh said, “the ethos of Off-White is it’s not just clothes. My inspiration and motivation is more the humanity level.” Words to live by for whomever takes over the Off-White pilot seat.
28 February 2022
Virgil Abloh presented his fall 2021 Off-White collection at the haute couture shows in Paris last July. At the time the show read as a statement of confidence and ambition. “Off-White should be adult,” he told my colleague. With the designer’s sudden passing in November, that show now acts as a sort of template for subsequent collections, the first of which is spring 2022, appearing here. Off-White, as Abloh put it half a year ago, is “adjacent to streetwear,” but it’s not hemmed in by it. He was a restless spirit, prone to rebel against labels and the constraints of time. “I get frustrated if I don’t feel an evolution, and the message becomes monotonous,” he also said. “I feel the world’s changed.”The world has changed profoundly for the Off-White design studio and the New Guards Group that produces the OW collections. Going forward, their job will be striking a balance between homage and honoring Abloh’s drive for constant forward movement. Designed before his passing, this collection makes good on the “more adult” Off-White, while also celebrating childhood and youthful games. The collection’s name is Sticks & Stones. If it were anybody else, that might sound like a post-mortem tweak of former detractors, but that’s not Abloh’s style. A brand rep described it as a playful endorsement of doing your own thing.The men’s tailoring is sharply done—adult, if you will—but the jackets are distinguished by large circular rings embroidered over the chest pockets. These were apparently inspired by Meccano, the century-old model construction system designed by the English inventor Frank Hornby that might’ve prompted Abloh’s pursuit of architecture later on. Circles have been a recurring motif at Off-White, but these are more orderly than the meteors that bit holes into OW sportswear and accessories in recent seasons. They also appear as closures on men’s jackets made from what looks like bubble wrap, and as cut-outs on women’s knitwear.Workwear is another theme that crosses both collections: pants come with cargo pockets, and jackets, coats have zip pouches on their sleeves, and quilted boots are designed with handles on each side of the shaft, the better to pull them on and off. Utility, though, is only part of the story in the women’s collection, which was lent its on-trend sexy streak by lingerie and activewear touches.
As for roots, the collection’s graffiti prints and embroideries are the result of a collaboration with Neen, a street artist from Abloh’s hometurf in Chicago. A trench makes a particularly good canvas for the graphic, old school tags that combine her name with Off-White’s own signature crossed arrows.Otherwise, and contrary to what might be expected of a posthumous collection, the famous logo makes few appearances, and when it does it’s shrunken, as on the straps of a second-skin leather minidress. Where Off-White goes next—whether it stays streetwear-adjacent, or doesnt; just how large a role that logo will have, and who among Abloh’s wide circle of friends and mentees will get their hands on it—will play out over the next few months. But the near term is clear. The brand will honor Abloh with an “immersive runway experience” on February 28, the first day of Paris Fashion Week. According to a release, the celebration will “embrace the joy and eternal optimism of [Off-White’s] founder” as it “strives to continue [his] work of opening doors and inviting all to the conversation.”
7 February 2022
Virgil Abloh presented his fall 2021 Off-White collection at the haute couture shows in Paris last July. At the time the show read as a statement of confidence and ambition. “Off-White should be adult,” he told my colleague. With the designer’s sudden passing in November, that show now acts as a sort of template for subsequent collections, the first of which is spring 2022, appearing here. Off-White, as Abloh put it half a year ago, is “adjacent to streetwear,” but it’s not hemmed in by it. He was a restless spirit, prone to rebel against labels and the constraints of time. “I get frustrated if I don’t feel an evolution, and the message becomes monotonous,” he also said. “I feel the world’s changed.”The world has changed profoundly for the Off-White design studio and the New Guards Group that produces the OW collections. Going forward, their job will be striking a balance between homage and honoring Abloh’s drive for constant forward movement. Designed before his passing, this collection makes good on the “more adult” Off-White, while also celebrating childhood and youthful games. The collection’s name is Sticks & Stones. If it were anybody else, that might sound like a post-mortem tweak of former detractors, but that’s not Abloh’s style. A brand rep described it as a playful endorsement of doing your own thing.The men’s tailoring is sharply done—adult, if you will—but the jackets are distinguished by large circular rings embroidered over the chest pockets. These were apparently inspired by Meccano, the century-old model construction system designed by the English inventor Frank Hornby that might’ve prompted Abloh’s pursuit of architecture later on. Circles have been a recurring motif at Off-White, but these are more orderly than the meteors that bit holes into OW sportswear and accessories in recent seasons. They also appear as closures on men’s jackets made from what looks like bubble wrap, and as cut-outs on women’s knitwear.Workwear is another theme that crosses both collections: pants come with cargo pockets, and jackets, coats have zip pouches on their sleeves, and quilted boots are designed with handles on each side of the shaft, the better to pull them on and off. Utility, though, is only part of the story in the women’s collection, which was lent its on-trend sexy streak by lingerie and activewear touches.
As for roots, the collection’s graffiti prints and embroideries are the result of a collaboration with Neen, a street artist from Abloh’s hometurf in Chicago. A trench makes a particularly good canvas for the graphic, old school tags that combine her name with Off-White’s own signature crossed arrows.Otherwise, and contrary to what might be expected of a posthumous collection, the famous logo makes few appearances, and when it does it’s shrunken, as on the straps of a second-skin leather minidress. Where Off-White goes next—whether it stays streetwear-adjacent, or doesnt; just how large a role that logo will have, and who among Abloh’s wide circle of friends and mentees will get their hands on it—will play out over the next few months. But the near term is clear. The brand will honor Abloh with an “immersive runway experience” on February 28, the first day of Paris Fashion Week. According to a release, the celebration will “embrace the joy and eternal optimism of [Off-White’s] founder” as it “strives to continue [his] work of opening doors and inviting all to the conversation.”
7 February 2022
When it comes down to it, Virgil Abloh’s Off-White show was all elevation, exhilaration, and education. Orchestrated by fashion’s master of simultaneous, multi-channelling action, there was much going on in all directions—not for nothing did he name it “Laboratory of Fun.” Let’s start with the exhilaration, though: As the effective opener to the first IRL Paris haute couture season since the pandemic hit, it was joyful reunion, a fantastic repurposing of the ritual of the catwalk as a measure of change, and a brilliant performance by MIA, all rolled into one.Coming back from the fateful year ‘off’ that was 2020, Abloh declared he had turned around his visualization of what Off-White must grow into. “You know, I take 2020 to heart. When we were sitting at home watching the world get turned upside down, there were very, very clear guidelines on what the fashion industry was like, and what (people were) hoping it would sort of evolve to. So this is like a big deal: Essentially when fashion shows do start, how do we come back and behave? You can’t just glide over that.”Some of the words to capture what he showed might be minimalist, chic, luxuriously constructed. In a backstage walkthrough on the brink of the show, he said, “ If I were to look at my body of work, I think I’ve grown up the most in the shortest amount of time. I think it’s rebelling against the younger version of myself. And that’s the first time I’ve actually said that.” The self-rebellion? All through the time of contemplation since BLM, he said, “I was writing in my journal that Off-White should be adult. What does it mean to be a young brand in its seventh, eighth year? I’ve already said that it’s a youth brand adjacent to streetwear—and I get frustrated if I don’t feel an evolution, and the message becomes monotonous. I feel the world’s changed.”Presenting his show at the head of couture week can have been no accident of timing. Though ready-to-wear—indeed, ready-to-wear immediately online—the elevation Off-White form took shape in takes on tailored skirt suits, elegant slimline coats, and two full-length evening dresses with foam-padded hip construction and sweeping trains. It was women’s and menswear together—not that the gendering of clothes is any issue to Abloh and the generation he leads: “I’ve always believed in diversity on all ends of the spectrum. Age, gender, orientation—when it comes to representing that, you know we’re across that as best we can.”
4 July 2021
A year into the pandemic and its social magnifying glass, Virgil Abloh doesn’t want us to slip back into the slumber that blocked out injustice in the past. “Systemic racism, politics, resources, economic class, the environment: Everything that had been pushed to the side ended up on our doorstep,” he reflected on the phone from Chicago. As the dust settles, “Will people forget? Or how can we actively change the world for the better?” Today, Abloh launchedImaginary TV, a permanent digital station on his Off-White website devoted to the “slow and cumbersome” immersion of the flow TV his generation grew up with. “A runway show is not enough. What the world needs now,” he said, “is TV.”Why? “What I’ve noticed this past year of ‘pausing’ is that it’s very hard to pause. The most viewed content on the internet is within the first zero to 15 seconds of a video. And that’s quantified as ‘good’? Are people even reading anymore? I’m getting off the track of making things that are bite-sized.Imaginary TVis a deluge of content that gives a platform for others.” After hitting that elusive pause button on his Off-White output last season in order to restructure its business model, he used his new platform to present the Off-White spring 2021 collection, which drops in stores starting today.Abloh’s end goal is a society that enables the freedom of identity, whatever you look like. Where his Louis Vuitton men’s collection last month tackled the racial aspect of that ambition, he put his Off-White platform to work in the name of erasing gender-conformist boundaries. Styled by Ibrahim Kamara, his collection threw the codes of the gender-specific wardrobes in the air and pinned them down on whomever they landed. On men, long skirts, knitted dresses and halter-neck tops were wittily layered amongst decidedly corporate tailoring and shirting. The potent yuppie shoulder of that legacy extended into women’s suiting, a perhaps fitting pendant to flou that augmented the body and twisted its way around it, demonstrating a right to fuse the sensual with the serious.All these codes had in common a certain contour of the traditional West African wardrobe that underpins Abloh’s heritage and which he is increasingly expressing in his design across his domains. While bending gender codes isn’t exploring new fashion territory, to the heteronormative part of Off-White’s clientele it’s still virgin soil. “I love the freedom of the Off-White male now,” Abloh said.
“If you look at what the brand is in the streets versus this proposition, I love that there’s dissonance. I love that it’s not congruent. It’s my call to the response of what fashion looks like in 2021 as opposed to what it looked like in 2019, after this great uprising and these great emotional testimonies have been made.”
2 February 2021
The dancer Cartier Williams opened the fall 2020 Off-White men’s show wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “I support young black businesses.” Virgil Abloh is now doubling down on that message. He’s stamped the phrase on a pair of gloves seen in his new pre-spring collection, and more important, last week he announced the Virgil Abloh™“Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund, for students of academic promise of Black, African American, or African descent. “To me,” he says, “that’s just as, if not more important than dropping new clothes. The role of the designer these days should be—and is—different.”Having taken some internet heat for what was deemed a too-small donation to a bail fund amidst the Black Lives Matter protests of early June, Abloh is resolutely forward-looking. “To fundraise a million dollars, it’s harder to do that than a collection. I’m super happy.” He also pointed out that he worked with the young Black British stylist Ib Kamara on both the men’s and women’s Off-White offerings. “I think he’s going to have a generational impact,” Abloh says of the stylist, with whom he’s also collaborating at Louis Vuitton. The designer is hopeful that it becomes a long-running partnership, say, along the lines of Tom Ford and Carine Roitfeld.Off-White’s resort season news is that the men’s and women’s collections are now being developed in one studio. “They used to happen on different paces; now they’re in sync,” Abloh explains. That comes through in the lookbooks. Across genders, there’s an emphasis on sharp tailoring. Some of the women’s pantsuits are boldly colorblocked; a red-and-fuchsia combination looks particularly strong. Abloh cut the formality of the men’s tailoring with playful touches, like the little devils that crawl up trouser legs. Alternately, he’ll layer a photo-print bomber over a jacket or a canvas vest underneath.“I thought of this muse, sort of half businessman, half youthful teenager—and how they can crash together,” Abloh says, reflecting, “I look at Off-White as my diary. It’s a clothing brand that is periodically checking in on what we’re learning and trying to put that in the collection.” Such receptivity will be a critical quality as we move forward in our changed world.
14 July 2020
The dancer Cartier Williams opened the fall 2020 Off-White men’s show wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “I support young black businesses.” Virgil Abloh is now doubling down on that message. He’s stamped the phrase on a pair of gloves seen in his new pre-spring collection, and more important, last week he announced the Virgil Abloh™“Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund, for students of academic promise of Black, African American, or African descent. “To me,” he says, “that’s just as, if not more important than dropping new clothes. The role of the designer these days should be—and is—different.”Having taken some internet heat for what was deemed a too-small donation to a bail fund amidst the Black Lives Matter protests of early June, Abloh is resolutely forward-looking. “To fundraise a million dollars, it’s harder to do that than a collection. I’m super happy.” He also pointed out that he worked with the young Black British stylist Ib Kamara on both the men’s and women’s Off-White offerings. “I think he’s going to have a generational impact,” Abloh says of the stylist, with whom he’s also collaborating at Louis Vuitton. The designer is hopeful that it becomes a long-running partnership, say, along the lines of Tom Ford and Carine Roitfeld.Off-White’s resort season news is that the men’s and women’s collections are now being developed in one studio. “They used to happen on different paces; now they’re in sync,” Abloh explains. That comes through in the lookbooks. Across genders, there’s an emphasis on sharp tailoring. Some of the women’s pantsuits are boldly colorblocked; a red-and-fuchsia combination looks particularly strong. Abloh cut the formality of the men’s tailoring with playful touches, like the little devils that crawl up trouser legs. Alternately, he’ll layer a photo-print bomber over a jacket or a canvas vest underneath.“I thought of this muse, sort of half businessman, half youthful teenager—and how they can crash together,” Abloh says, reflecting, “I look at Off-White as my diary. It’s a clothing brand that is periodically checking in on what we’re learning and trying to put that in the collection.” Such receptivity will be a critical quality as we move forward in our changed world.
14 July 2020
Virgil Abloh, in place at his women’s show after taking time out last season, has returned with an even more solid sense of the leadership position he’s won for a new generation through the medium of Off-White, and the vast new fan base he’s subsequently brought to the doors of Louis Vuitton. “I occupy, clearly, a space that represents my upbringing, my view looking at the climate outside—relating to what happens outside the industry, not inside,” he said in a preview, just hours before he drew a gigantic crowd to a sports stadium on the periphery of Paris. “The ethos of Off-White is it’s not just clothes,” he added. “My inspiration and motivation is more the humanity level.”At a point when people will increasingly choose to buy according to the emotional bonds they feel with brands, Abloh’s conscious use of his power is to prove that there’s no limit to aspirations. The man who first made a name by putting labels on things with quotation marks around them is lately turning out to be the biggest resister against being labeled. Is Off-White a “streetwear” brand? No—famously, Abloh already said that streetwear’s dead. Is Off-White a “youth” brand then? Nope, not that either, as he set out to demonstrate for fall with the full backup of the family Hadid, and a cast which included a range of ’90s supermodels, Carolyn Murphy being only one of them.So the show was bookended by Hadids—both in mirroring hybrid couture-like tulle looks, spliced with Arc’teryx outdoor performance jackets. “They’re a Canadian brand, considered a luxury by everyone in that world,” Abloh noted. “So they’re like the equal of haute couture in fashion.” And then mid-show came Yolanda Hadid, exuding her mom-power confidence in a white leather tailored jacket, black boot pant and upswept shades.The theme of all-inclusive chic worked through to plenty of the season’s pencil skirts, buttery trench coats and a notable section of black-and-white houndstooth checked suiting, the pattern glitched into what Abl“h described as a “psychedelic” warp. Toward the end, there was a selection of more familiar workwear jackets, interspersed with grunge-referencing pieces.Lo and behold, though, a ’90s “slip dress” was made in cornflower blue leather, far more “designer” than any lingerie original Courtney Love ever wore back in the day. That piece stood for a whole other point in the show, too.
Hidden within its trompe l’oeil embroidered lace trim was practically the only branding Abloh deployed, the famous Off-White cross with arrows, scattered in miniature.And then there was what Carolyn Murphy wore: a white jersey dress with a circular hole cut out of one side, cinched with a gold hip-slung chain. To new-gen young eyes, that might appear to be just a sexy body-con dress, possibly referenced in the nostalgic Wisconsin Dairy State “Cheesehead” motif Abloh used last season. But to Yolanda-gen eyes—and definitely to Murphy herself—it was also a knowing reminder of the Tom Ford white dress with a hip cutout which Murphy modeled in his breakthrough collection at Gucci for fall 1996. At the time—if memory also serves—Ford had received more than his fair share of establishment disparagement as an outsider, self-taught American usurper in European fashion. Not that Ford ever let that stop him getting right to the top. In Virgil Abloh—whether snipers like it or not—there’s a big slice of the American fashion dream repeating itself again, with a healthy traditional serving of U.S. supermodels on top.
27 February 2020
After months of health-related rest, Virgil Abloh’s start to 2020 is business as usual with three fashion collections and a furniture exhibition in Paris over the span of three days. Up first: Off-White pre-fall, which took place as a brief one-on-one visit while his team appeared deep in preparation for the Off-White men’s show. Within hours, fans would be lining up outside the Galerie Kreo to post photos of his graffiti-tagged seating.The images that appear here, meanwhile, were taken at the Galerie Patrick Seguin across town (one wonders whether these typically discreet destinations will soon be co-opted as the new hotel lobbies). Increasingly, Abloh is pursuing fashion and design in parallel and sampling as such. Look no further than those Jean Prouvé screens to explain the seemingly random circular holes that puncture his tote bags and concrete benches alike. “Iconic design from a different era but with my young perspective,” he said, pointing out that the suited people who fill some of the photos, shot by Alessio Bolzoni, are transmitting a consequential vibe too. “How does the Off-White girl stand distinct in the crowd?”The fact is that the Off-White girl will always stand out—even in a fashion crowd, even when there are five other girls nearby wearing boots emblazoned with ironic quotes and coats surfaced in street signaling. With this collection, however, Abloh steered the looks further into ladylike territory. Faux sable coats, skirt suits featuring jackets with peaked sleeves, and floaty floral dresses—all were remixed, restyled, or proposed in glossier fabrics so that there was no mistaking them for vintage. True to his “gray area” conceit, Abloh sees no difference between the pieces that daughters might cop from their mothers and vice versa (see the age-inclusive casting of the spring show as proof). These latest leather blazers, shirts, and slightly fuller pants will be coveted by all demographics.For those curious whether Abloh remained actively involved in the making of this collection despite his prolonged absence from the Milan studio, his answer was a resolute yes. The “Free Winona” and “Pays Own Rent” message tees were his contributions, for instance, and their affirmational impact landed somewhere between We Should All Be Feminists and Single Ladies. Naturally, some Off-White collections can register more disruptive, more conceptual than others.
Aside from the ubiquitous, updated logo tag with its floating face and hands, this one drew largely from the existing playbook. For his part, Abloh noted the value of evolving incrementally, especially if the horizon is measured in decades, not years (to think the brand is only six). “I have this new philosophy about clothing in an anthropological sense—something that happens when you take time off and get heady…” he said, before going off on a tangent on dinosaurs only to arrive at a worthy takeaway: “The endgame is always optimistic.”
16 January 2020
“Look Number Zero,” as Virgil Abloh referred to it, was originally going to be a dress shirt that readNonfictionuntil he decided at the last moment to have a T-shirt printed with the statementI support young black businesses. Wearing it was Cartier Williams, a young tap dancer from Washington, D.C. whose percussive and emotive movements replaced the usual pre-show recording.“Usually my ethos has been to find a quote from someone else to speak for me that gives context,” Abloh explained backstage. “But now, instead of finding someone else’s words, these are my own words—they’re like orchestrated storytelling.” Abloh has spent seasons re-contextualizing words; not only are they as fundamental to Off-White branding as street signage, they’re how he has communicated a specific high/low novelty—from Jenny Holzer toPretty Woman. After Abloh’s few months of rest, he said his challenge was “to offer things that aren’t just surface level.Streetwearis a term that is just used to make things flat.”Indeed, a more developed feeling came through in this collection—not just because it featured attractive trousers with accordion pleating along the sides where athletic stripes might have been. And not just because it included a fantasy for sneaker fans everywhere: Off-White’s reimagining of the Air Jordan 5 with its grayscale scheme, black “shoelaces,” and side medallion, which can be carved out with an X-Acto knife, as Abloh has done to his pair. But because it showed a deeper sensitivity than we have seen from him in the past.There was the music, which sounded vulnerable and contemplative. An emphasis on knits—tubular turtlenecks, heather gray ponchos and hoodies in cashmere, embroidered and fringed crewnecks, and a dynamic graphic sweater coat—along with crushed-velvet tops and micro pleated pants spoke to an unambiguous desire for softness. Even theMona Lisa’s presence on a tie—an extension of his recent collaboration with the Louvre—appeared in soft focus. For a collection titled “Tornado Warning,” this added up to the calm before an unidentified storm.As for the holes that blasted through the Spring ’20 women’s lineup and spread to suiting and accessories here: They are easily Off-White’s most readable symbol since the quotation marks. Those, it turned out, could be placed anywhere, whereas the holes imply workmanship—which seems to be one of the ways that Abloh intends to advance the brand’s positioning.
That brings us back to Williams, whose tap dancing signaled more than just fancy footwork. “It’s more acceptable for him and I to say we’re basketball players than this form of dance,” said Abloh, referring to tap as a lost art. Just as Williams beat against an installation composed of aluminum boxes, Abloh was beating against the boxes that Off-White gets put into.
15 January 2020
Virgil Abloh has dubbed his men’s Pre-Fall collection “Pivot,” and printed the word in a graphic font down the legs of silk pants. “Off-White is now not the new kid on the block,” the designer said on the phone from Chicago. “I was interested in fast-forwarding the menswear up to where the womenswear is at.”What does this mean for Off-White fans? The designer seems keen to insinuate his label into the tailoring conversation that’s dominating men’s fashion at the moment. His Pre-Fall suit is exceedingly slim, the jacket tucked neatly into the waistband of well-fitting trousers. He’s also experimented with pants silhouettes, the most directional being a sturdy leather pair spliced at the ankles so that the hems flare out to the floor. “It’s been quite liberating to feel like I could explore a different guy and evolve,” Abloh said.The evolution extends to the Off-White logo itself, which has received a rebranding. “It kind of breaks the shackles off of doing the same thing.” That said, streetwear hasn’t been shown the door entirely. You can still pick up a hoodie; this season’s comes screenprinted with the Mona Lisa. And there are still plenty of graphic treatments, including the name “Abloh” embroidered in script on a varsity jacket. “Logomania—I’ve been a part of that movement. That’s what streetwear is,” he says. “Since I took these months off all this graphic design I’ve been placing myself, much like the very first days.”Exhaustion forced Abloh to dramatically alter his schedule for about three months this year and refrain from traveling. “It’s all material,” as the saying goes. But if this season marks a “pivot,” Abloh also indulged in a fair bit of nostalgia, with nods not just to Off-White’s foundational codes, but also to his own ’90s youth. The number “99,” for example, turns up throughout. Summing things up, he said, “that’s what Off-White is as a brand: a generational mirror while people are experimenting with style.” As Abloh ages up, so presumably will the label. He turns 40 next year; it’ll be interesting to see where reckoning with that number takes him next.
25 November 2019
While he’s taking time out in Chicago to rest up on doctor’s orders, Virgil Abloh’s Off-White show in Paris made an almost cosmically calm impression—certainly compared to the multi-sensational grandstand-style hysteria of the past few seasons. That turned out to be exactly the intention. The concept Abloh had planned was titled Meteor Strike, a collection about that astral phenomenon in one sense and the strength of women in another.The Hadid sisters walked, as stars of the show, and so did a number of elders of the modeling scene—Georgina Grenville and Audrey Marnay included. Streamlined shapes, essentially honed down to shirtdresses, pants, T-shirts, bias-cut knits, and sheath dresses, synced with the season’s feeling for the paring away of excess, as well as the millennial admiration for ’90s minimalism.The sense of elevation was no coincidence. Abloh’s interest in promoting education and aspiration to young people was manifested right at the beginning of the show with a recording of the voice of Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first black woman to travel in space aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. Her words, about the importance of creativity in science and the arts, were from a question-and-answer session with young girls in 2018.After his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Abloh’s work has been increasingly underscored by his effort to show new generations that anything can be achieved through study. The reason he’s gone all the way to the top is because he was educated at the University of Wisconsin. And there—in a trope that merged conceptualism with humor—was the explanation for the circular holes that riddled T-shirts, bags, and boots. The collection notes Abloh penned referred to meteor craters—the space theme followed through. But the resemblance to Emmentaler cheese was real too—an affectionate nod to the Cheesehead hats and helmets traditionally worn by fans at sports events in Wisconsin, the Dairy State.He goes high and he goes low—all experience is grist for Abloh’s mill, and he’s bringing streetwear fans with him. Lesson of the season accomplished. Fly high, he says.
26 September 2019
While today’s Off-White men’s show took on climbing as a key theme, the Resort collection, titled “Sink or Swim” headed toward the water. You can plunge into its source material by looking up Hyung S. Kim’s photo series of South Korean female free divers known ashaenyeo. For all the stunning expression they register, it’s impossible to ignore how their functional scuba outfits inadvertently pass for fantastic fashion statements. “They put themselves together in a unique way that I thought was super-inspiring,” said Virgil Abloh, who pointed to Off-White looks that were put together as near-identical interpretations—from belt bags mimicking their weighted belts to a misshapen floral tank that now appeared as a trompe l’oeil knit.As fine as it was to see further adaptations of this theme—an aquatic-hued sequin slip dress, watery effect denim, fishnet layers, neoprene sneakers, and Teva-type sandals—it was more interesting to consider how he had rooted out a remote subculture composed of weathered yet active women, and repackaged their recreational pursuit as slick, sexy suiting and graphic sportswear. The combined outcome might seem like perfect bait for his youthful following. But Abloh, who marveled over these “fisherwomen,” said his newish boutique in Soho has proven that a more mature clientele is buying in, as well. Might he have dared to feature their likeness here?Back when Abloh was fixated on inserting conceptual and high-brow art references into his Off-White collections, it felt as though he was flaunting a certain cultural wherewithal; because back then, perhaps, the sink-or-swim stakes were higher. Now, as he continues to ride such a phenomenal wave of success, he can turn out a pre-collection that feels confident, cool, and commercially complete. Yet for all this, you wonder whether he could have dived a little deeper.
19 June 2019
The opening look and most of the closing, women’s included, at this Off-White show were made in collaboration with the New York artist Futura—aka Lenny McGurr. His vivid spray strokes and sleekly alien Pointman figure were incorporated as print or jacquard into suiting, soft trenches, cycling vests, denim, a blanket, and evening dresses. As Virgil Abloh sketched it in his long sentences backstage: “In his lifetime, and in the culture that we come from, which is a segment of hip-hop and graffiti, [his work] started out being seen as a form of vandalism, not art. . . . But as well as painting on the side of subway trains, he was part of the scene and showed with Basquiat and Keith Haring. . . . . He was on what was once thought of as the fringe. . . . but now, through time, we can see that the beauty of Basquiat is also the beauty of Lenny, Futura.”That transition from the counterculture—the fringe—to become both the subject of establishment acclaim and an agent of change within the establishment mirrors Abloh’s own path: In the 10 years since he was photographed by Tommy Ton with Kanye West and crew outside Comme des Garçons, Abloh has completed the full loop. But reflecting on the longer span of Futura’s journey—combined with his own recent project curating his past body of work for the “Figures of Speech” exhibition in Chicago—has made Abloh consider a bigger picture. “When I make things, I look at it on a scale of 30 years. What gives the esteem and the energy . . . I know the work has to mean something now, but I’m also thinking about what it means when you zoom out.”There was certainly a sense of space in time in some of this collection. Its span of reference was broad but as legibly interconnected as the branding on the new Nike Dunk, codesigned with Futura, that made its debut on Abloh’s carnation-field runway. The chain-link fence pattern on bags, jackets, and a semitransparent poncho played nicely against the densely hand-knit sweaters that bore patches declaring membership in the “Off-White climbing club.”Climbing was not only this collection’s second big theme—reflected in the drawstrings worked into suiting, the technical luggage, and the nylon patched knit faux fleeces—but it was also part of the broader metaphor at play.
A sky blue suede trench with detachable front pockets, a double-layered floral-print down jacket and shorts, a chain-link knit off-white shirt and shorts, plus the recut denim template workwear in washed and treated technical fabrics were all highly polished and finished pieces. Conversely, the tie-dyed cargo pants (sometimes crystal set) and denim, the bandana-patched T-shirts, those dense knit sweaters, and bleached flannel shirting were all designed to appear roughened and weathered.In a piece of tape played before the show, Bjork spoke about the “spaced-outness” of perspective, nurtured through the landscape of Iceland, that helped her learn songwriting. Abloh seems to be in search of a similar panoramic point of view—an apex position—and the topography of the clothes he is producing as he makes that ascent is benefiting from it.
19 June 2019
A sharp-eyed observer walked into the sports hall where the Off-White show was being held, blinked at the checkerboard pattern on the floor and exclaimed, “Oh! Is this Virgil’s own take on the Louis Vuitton check?” The famous Vuitton Damier pattern wasn’t on Abloh’s mind at all, at least as far as he told it during a preview at the Off-White studio in Paris. The checked pattern was “crash derby race car culture. One of the things I grew up with in suburban America that’s been on the periphery of my vision. It’s a play on the checkered flag—the goal,” he said.Racing and goals, you can see how they’re completely apt metaphors for the speedy ascent of Abloh himself, without even factoring in any deliberate or subconscious reference to his hailed tenure at Louis Vuitton menswear. This Off-White collection, he said, was “shining a mirror on my friends,” while stepping on the gas as far as moving things on for them design-wise. “The streetcar I rolled in was streetwear. But now it’s commonplace. I’m intrigued by the empowered woman who wants to dress in a feminine but chic way.”In fact, if you scroll back through Off-White womenswear collections, it’s noticeable that one of Abloh’s signatures—besides his labeling of everything in quotation marks—is glamour and sexiness. While those qualities might not have been accepted by the mainstream before, they are very much front and center in everyone’s minds this season, what with all the sweeping volumes and strong-shouldered tailoring that’s surfacing everywhere. So there: When Abloh puts out giant A-line puffer coats and slick leather tailoring, it’s as a now fully acknowledged member of the general trend conversation. A difference being that a quintessentially Off-White version of a classic tuxedo suit is the seasonal serving of his underpants look: a cropped silver satin midriff-baring jacket with matching micro-shorts, accessorized with crystal gloves and a clutch bag.There were a couple of day “suits” which did the same thing: long coats with matching shorts. What was less apparent was Abloh’s use of fabric as an embodiment of change. He said he’s been “leaping forward with taking fleece and jersey and cutting it so it has a very feminine, couture-like shape.” The draped, wrapped, asymmetrical dresses—shapes inspired by twisted car-crash sculptures—were cut from material “that’s native to Off-White, like hoodie and T-shirt fabric,” he said.
The finale, of course, had its now traditional drama, with friends of the house Karlie Kloss, the Hadid sisters, and Adut Akech sweeping to the finish line in super-billowy, leg-baring gowns. It’s the stuff of swathes of young girls’ fantasies to be able to go somewhere looking like that; princess dreams of the 21st century brought to life. “I have views on red carpet,” said Abloh. Who will be maneuvering the yards of that egg-yolk yellow train tethered to the swimsuit up the steps of the Met come May? Never fear: It shall go to the ball.
28 February 2019
Could high school–aged Virgil Abloh have foreseen the things he’s creating and the life he’s leading today? “The answer is no, but I’m equally not surprised; I was doing the exact same thing I’m doing now, just on a super-small scale,” he explained during a walk-through of Off-White’s women’s pre-collection, which bears the title Do You Cheer?The looks had just been shot in a Paris sports club, where a local team that plays American football flexed their glutes while youthful models portrayed an Off-White melting pot of student style. Abloh said he has been thinking about his own high school experience as he’s begun preparing for his design exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in June. He found old notebooks full of sketches and recalls never feeling boxed into a clique (“I could freely sit at any lunch table”). These days, Off-White is among the industry’s most influential brands: Teens want ladylike bags and boomers are showing their relevance in luxury streetwear. Abloh, who has no shortage of other commitments, stayed within a familiar zone, iterating just enough to maintain a degree of topical interest.Logo pennant sweaters, coordinated sweatsuits, and pleated cheerleader-style skirts corresponded most directly to the story line, whereas dressier suits, embroidered denim, and floral pajamas were among the pieces that could be interpreted as necessary. “It’s DIY, make the look yourself,” said the designer. This was his approach with the new statement bag; its formal shape and swiveling hardware contrasted by graffiti tags and scrawls that put a self-referential (Cash Inside) spin on Stephen Sprouse’s collectible collaboration for Louis Vuitton. Another version, covered in optical cubes, nodded to the monogram of a brand whose name rhymes withtoy card.Still, surface treatments were generally well developed, whether the hand-beaded varsity patches, the quilted logo on the back of down jackets, or the aforementioned cube pattern in faux fur. Would you have guessed the fringed footwear and bags descended from cheerleader pom-poms? Appearing on the runway of the Off-White men’s show, exactly as shown here with floral catsuits or reconstructed shirtdresses, they shouted out their frivolity—even more so than the For Walking boots, which will soon be featured in the Costume Institute’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibition.
Between this collection and his sophomore effort for Louis Vuitton, Abloh is tapping into symbols that are distinctly American. He’s making the country cool again, or something like that.
18 January 2019
People seated around today’s Off-White runway may not have realized that the sharp green staging allowed landscape images to be superimposed on the background of the livestream, almost like a high-concept weather report. In calling this show “Public Television,” Virgil Abloh said he was making the point that, at least for those of us who grew up watching TV, the barrage of ads and images were actually forming our environment and shaping our view of the world. Conceivably, the same remains true whether our screens are handheld or wall-sized. But instead of dwelling on the deleterious effects, Abloh—whose chill-factor is off the charts—channeled this subliminal influence with his own heavily branded programming.This made for a pretty good show, partly because, like all good TV, it was entertaining. From the opening sample of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood to the rhymes of Ghostface Killah, the music calibrated eerie with intimidating. Though mostly meaningless, the use of football helmets—especially on two girls in floral catsuits—made for catchy social media posting. And then there was Offset from the rap group Migos, who shuffled down an earthy path in a full-length, lilac-hued puffer coat like a winterized guru.None of this distracted from a collection that largely reaffirmed the standard Off-White repertoire rather than aiming for reinvention. Looks that paired boxy, deconstructed blazers with pooling denim, or else minimalist jackets with graphic streetwear once again toggled between Abloh’s youth and executive archetypes. A fleece pullover countered with a fur-collared coat; ties appeared under shirt hoodies. “You get better through repetition, more focused,” Abloh said. “I’m finding my voice, which is what happens when you repeat.”Maybe this voice will always bear traces of others (he openly credited JNCO jeans for the baggy pants, while his co-opted shipping logo looked flagrantly familiar). Yet there were details that could win over devotee and doubter alike. The belt bags fused to the fronts of quilted jackets and vests were clever; the embroidered tagging, TV bar motifs, and spray-painted faded knees on pants, creative. And what to make of the large labels sewn onto sleeves—the kind that guys occasionally, embarrassingly, neglect to remove? Obviously, they become another form of broadcasting; medium and message combined.
16 January 2019
There was a big win for women in sports tonight at Off-White. Eight elite athletes—gold medal goddesses of our time—walked alongside the more familiar stars of fashion, Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid. Everyone’s name was flashed on an electronic leaderboard, with their nationalities beside them, as at a games competition, and the runway was painted like a combination of running track and concrete street. To get a sense of the champions that were there, check out the records of sprinter English Gardner (USA), heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson (U.K.), and high jumper Cecilia Yeung (HK). In the audience were members of the French women’s soccer squad—the women’s World Cup will be held in Paris next year. Loads of cheers came from the bleachers as the sports heroines strode by.It was the presence of these legends and the background of Virgil Abloh’s Off-White collection, called Track and Field, which absolved the designer of the accusation of emitting yet another generic athleisure-for-the-sake-of-it collection into the atmosphere. This one had a firm basis in real sport. “Track and field is where you compete. There’s a foundation to it; it’s not just clothes for clothes’ sake,” said Abloh.As he explained in an earlier walk-through at his Paris showroom, it was working with Serena Williams to design the famous tutu-skirted tennis dress she wore for her comeback at the U.S. Open (part of the Serena Williams x Nike Queen collection) that was the basis of how sports T-shirts got related to tulle ball skirts in this collection. “It was really refreshing for me not to be in fashion mode. It was performance,” said Abloh. “With fashion, you can just get into the appearance, but she’s stupendous, such a muse. And when she talked, she said she’s passionate about ballet and dancing.”Abloh defines Off-White as “making a new aesthetic by crashing two things together that are not related.” The idea of a pale blue stretch dress with a diagonally sliced tulle skirt looked in direct continuity from the Williams inspiration. It also happened to showcase another Off-White–Nike development—the sneakers, which added further props to Abloh’s substance as a product innovator. The running shoes—named Waffle Racer—have a collaged, hand-sewn look. “I said to Nike that their shoes always look like someone made them in a microwave. I challenged them to make a shoe that looked like a sample. And they have this function in the soles, so they tell you how far you’ve run.
When the studs start to wear down, it’s 10 miles, 30 to the next layer, 75 to the next.”
27 September 2018
Three. That’s the number of collections to which Virgil Abloh’s name is attached this week—and we’re not even counting his tony art vernissage at Gagosian in collaboration with Takashi Murakami. Sure, fashion is full of master multitaskers; but as the men’s shows get underway, Abloh’s level of output is unmatched by anyone else on the calendar. By Thursday afternoon, his vision for the Louis Vuitton male clientele will have been subject to a first round of snap judgment rippling outward from the Paris establishment through his millions of followers on social media.Facing such high stakes, he could be forgiven for seeming stressed and/or distracted at the photo shoot for the Off-White Resort collection. It’s a wonder he was even there, given the remote location of the Maison du Brésil, a university housing complex built by Le Corbusier in 1959 (emblematic mid-century modern architecture plus young people equals dream Virgil venue). Remarkably, Abloh appeared unflustered, more or less focused, and ready to spiel. As a model shimmied into a skintight coordinating top and leggings covered in cotton buds (apparently his favorite flower), he declared, “Preppiness as a trend is dead,” saying his interest lies in “what fashion looks like when influenced by activewear.”Relevance, he added, is now determined by performance fabrics that allow women to feel dressed for brunch even if they’ve just sweat through a spin class. Abloh was already heading in this direction a few seasons back, and many of the tube dresses, tailored jackets, and nylon shells recalled pieces that can already be spotted on the streets. The “Black Dress” and bag branded “Sculpture” could be called out as “déjà vu.” New but overdue, the soles of his heels now feature the brand’s signature stripe.But as Abloh spun it, this was all deliberate; and the attraction remains undeniable. Past seasons would usually materialize from some esoteric concept, as though the streetwear needed to be legitimized by art or theory; now he no longer has anything to prove. “It’s a different stage,” he confirmed. Rather, all these signs and silhouettes are about “creating an archaeology”—essentially an aesthetic that will endure. Perhaps that’s a tad intense for camo swimwear and highlighter-bright jelly sandals. What matters in the present is that he’s creating clothes with wide reach.
In lieu of Ralph Lauren for a polo or button-down shirt, gals from different socioeconomic groups are converging on Off-White to update their looks with clingy ribbed knits (nicely made from a new supplier) and flocked striped denim. RIP irony; long live clothes for clothes’ sake (just don’t call them preppy). One collection down, two to go.
21 June 2018
Last season’s Off-White review ended with the suggestion that Virgil Abloh was a likely contender to become the menswear maestro at Louis Vuitton (at the risk of sounding smug, it feels good to be right). Fast-forward to today’s Off-White show, which played out persuasively in spite of his new and undoubtedly demanding day job. As the “artistic director” tells it, compartmentalization has been key; all the figuratively grown-up ideas have been assigned to LV, leaving Off-White to revel in its youthfulness. “There is a new freedom; I can embrace graphics again,” he explained backstage as guests amped up the ambiance. “Now it’s about a 17-year-old kid.”Abloh situated this universal teenager in New York on a steamy summer night; shirtless yet flaunting industrial charms, he might be found in a park doing skate tricks with his friends. So convinced was Abloh of this narrative that he completely blacked out the venue windows which normally offer a magnificent view of the Eiffel Tower. His New York state of mind came through artistically, as well; the graffiti motifs nodded to Donald “Dondi” White, who left behind a highly regarded and diverse body of work before dying of AIDS in 1998. Abloh, who learned to draw by studying graffiti instead of studio nudes, could have used the show to cross-promote his collaborations with Takashi Murakami, which will be presented tomorrow night at Gagosian. Instead, a white coat featuring hand-drawn excerpts of Dondi’s best known work stands out as the collection’s pièce de résistance. As for the studded and scripted denims, they were created in collaboration with Ev Bravado, whom Abloh called “the young version of me.” Envy-inducers at first sight, they were Abloh’s way of elevating a collection that, when unpacked to its component parts, consisted of little more than jeans and T-shirts. His explanation for all the warping and torquing? “I’m trying to make you look twice.”So look twice and then marvel how much more messaging he’s packed into these 29 looks—from the invitation’s reference to “Jim Stark,” played by James Dean inRebel Without a Cause, to the guest appearance by Bart Simpson, two powerful albeit fictional young icons linked by a wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans, and a subversive streak. Abloh didn’t go so far as to shoulder the teenage emotional burden—the Rimowa suitcase backpacks were clear and empty for a reason—yet he astutely realizes the young are forever in pursuit of dressing both the same and different.
“I see all these kids,” he said, “And the Marais now looks like the Lower East Side.” And needless to say, all the adults want to dress like the kids, too.
20 June 2018
Virgil Abloh bought his family a horse. As with anything he commits to—and these days, the list is superhumanly long—deep research ensued. This led him down an equestrian wormhole that subsequently permeated this collection. The season’s recurring “Off-White pattern” was a sporting tapestry, quite lovely in pale blue, that he tagged as stealthily as a watermark. When Kaia Gerber appeared in an instantly covetable toile denim version three looks in, it felt as though Abloh had already jumped a high-scoring obstacle. Gutsy riffs on riding boots and dressy tailored jackets added an aristocraticsillageto resolutely sexy jumpsuits and spliced dresses that spanned from après-Spin class to cocktail party. “It’s juxtaposing formality,” Abloh said before the show as two seamstresses tacked more tulle onto a frothy Champagne-hued dress that he decided to add on a whim just a day earlier. Whether consciously or not, his usual echoes of Raf and Margiela were replaced by a faint homage to Alaïa; see the croc-stamped jackets and clingy dresses. Actually, this worked to his favor.But then what of the collection’s title, West Village? The moment Abloh mentionedSex and the City, a contemporary Carrie Bradshaw crystallized as his muse. It would take someone of her stylistic sprezzatura to strut down Greenwich Street in the hybridized blazers-to-boy shorts. But it was interesting to consider how the series has been as formative to Abloh’s feminine vernacular as thePretty Woman,Working Girl, and Princess Diana references of recent collections. And amid such accessible culture, he buried two wonderfully esoteric Easter eggs: The recorded voice that opened the show belonged to Susan Sontag in conversation with John Berger on storytelling mediated by images. All the horse imagery nodded to Sir Alfred Munnings, a master equine and sporting painter who was fiercely opposed to modernism. “To hell with him. He never was a good artist,” Munnings famously wrote of Picasso. “What is the world coming to?” Abloh’s critics might say the irony was all too rich.And yet, he perseveres, ambitiously collaborating on a series of artworks with Takashi Murakami on view at the Gagosian Gallery in London.
Abloh’s template of rewriting familiar codes as fresh ideas is now proving universally successful: He generated yet another sneaker phenomenon for Nike, launched a scent with Byredo, and introduced herbal water in the shade of International Klein Blue (for a pop-up of the Parisian café Wild and the Moon, at Le Bon Marché). Amazingly, none of this seems to be distracting him from achieving a higher level of fashion legitimacy. That said, if the maelstrom outside tonight’s show was any indication, Off-White’s well-earned hype is at risk of turning into a beast. Samantha Jones would never have let that happen; but boy, would she have loved the one-shouldered dress covered in rectangular silver sequins.
1 March 2018
It should come as no surprise that Virgil Abloh holds Marcel Duchamp in the highest regard; the latter’s paradigm-shifting ready-mades have come to epitomize the notion of “art” versus art. In large part, Abloh recontextualizes the found object as clothing—which, if you think about it, represents the contemporary, commercial inverse of Duchamp appropriating the ready-to-wear label for his work.Shortly into our discussion of his Pre-Fall collection, Abloh described the artist’s iconic urinal,Fountain, as the “legal document I can stand on to execute my ideas.” Gotta love the substance over style. That controversial piece, incidentally, has now been around for exactly a century, yet after all this time, questions about its origins persist. Among the most widely believed: that it was the brainchild of a woman, one Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Abloh dedicated this collection to her—in quotation marks, of course—for aside from reaffirming the “Behind every man . . . ” maxim, Freytag-Loringhoven’s life as an avant-garde artist made her the ideal muse for a lineup that reads as disruptively ladylike.Consider the tailored-with-a-twist looks in houndstooth or blanket checks; interpreting Off-White’s graphic aesthetic with fresh sophistication, they could attract interest from two directions: the younger customer who has never considered dressing this way and the woman who would have never considered Off-White. The slip dresses and lacy tonal layering picked up where the label’s Resort lineup left off; only now, and particularly in a shade of pulp fiction yellow, a complete outfit included athletic striped pants, perhaps as an evolution of Duchamp-era dress. “These are clothes I couldn’t have made before,” said Abloh, as the mind went to the lightly quilted wrap-front jacket and pencil skirt, a leather field jacket, or even some of the new denim. Indeed, the2013stamped on a chic blanket coat reinforced how far he’s come in a short time.Meanwhile, the lookbook’s backdrop might have been the strongest signaling of all. An apartment that surely would have pleased the baroness, it belongs to the talented and effortlessly cool interior designer Joseph Dirand. Here, the Off-White juxtapositions—a polished coat in fleece or workwear suiting—benefit from the higher-brow, collector trappings. Abloh evidently understands the effect of surrounding his text with good taste.
22 January 2018
Virgil Abloh has never had a conventional desk job; the architect-cum-designer often says his workplace consists of his phone and the streets of whatever city he happens to be in. In titling today’s show Business Casual, he seemed eager to explore a world that, for all intents and purposes, is unfamiliar to him.“Maybe I have this weird fascination with it; I guess it was the life I was assuming I would have,” he said, noting how, now that we’ve reached 2018, this notion “feels vintage.” Success looked very different back when he was the age of the kids who now follow Off-White so enthusiastically. The reality is that many of them are working in cubicles or factory floors for large companies far removed from the lifestyle that Abloh has projected for the past four years; simply by repackaging their monotony as the sleek gray striped jacket and roomy Dickies-style pants of the opening look, it was like he was saying in stylistic terms, “It gets better.”A case could be made that Abloh is getting better, too. For one thing, the coats—whether in strangely translucent gray leather or heavy-duty, marked-up Gore-Tex—looked worthy of the high price people can expect to pay for them. The theme played out evenly with design twists (T-shirts torqued in their actual construction) and styling turns (an industrial blue windbreaker worn over a tie as though channeling a mid-level employee dressed for Casual Friday). His ’90s throwbacks had a rose-tinted touch: the airbrushed color effects, tiny strass accents, reprinted Beastie Boys concert T-shirts advertising their price as just $1, and Weezer’s “Only in Dreams” as the soundtrack. After last season’s opus-level Pitti Uomo show in collaboration with Jenny Holzer, he made a solid effort here to tone down the hubris.But as with any performance review containing a section on room for improvement, this one would yet again address the referencing. While mentors might be a key driver to success in any field, you can’t scan the collection without noticing the nods to Margiela, Raf Simons, Balenciaga (Demna edition), and Prada—and that’s not even accounting for the coincidental similarity between Miuccia’s imaginary corporate signage from just a few days ago and his: hands cupping a globe and a Bayer-esque logo. It’s reasonable enough to push for a little less sampling.
That said, his creative and collaborative track record from the past year was pretty much exemplary, such that each collection feels increasingly like the “job application” he’s hinted at in the past. With Kim Jones leaving Louis Vuitton, that post—especially as it consists not just of menswear but a whole lotta merch—seems more within reach than ever. You can’t help but wonder whether he’s ready for a promotion.
17 January 2018
The accepted description of Princess Diana as “the people’s princess” means that we’re still processing her impact on the royal family and beyond. What does this have to do with Off-White? Well, precisely four weeks after the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, Virgil Abloh brought the princess to the people. It may not be obvious at first glance, aside from a resolutely dressed-up direction that seemed to reject streetwear as we know it. Only a close look at the frothy tulle dresses would reveal chunky zippers and ring pulls. And only once Naomi Campbell was midway through her regal strut did it click for many in the audience that she was there to ceremonially close the show, her asymmetrically flounced white jacket and cycle shorts quite the twist on eveningwear (kudos to whoever did her hair).At this point, one thinks of Magritte and his pipe painting; this was not a Diana collection, even while it was. “I’m interested in being literal then figurative,” said the superhumanly productive designer-DJ-collaborator who spent months with his Milan-based team studying Diana’s images, gradually extracting and recasting her fashion canon to arrive at looks that were polished in attitude and execution. “It’s the variance between imagining her living now, with me iterating on what she meant,” he further explained, as we faced a mood board of her both on- and off-duty; a blue velvet gown in one photo, a Philadelphia Eagles football jacket in the next. While much of this didn’t materialize on the runway, Abloh did cover off on the deep-V dress she wore while dancing with John Travolta in the third look. The pink power suit worn with white socks and trainers melded ‘80s working girls and Di in gym attire (don’t be deceived by the sneakers' hand-drawn swoosh, they were actually part of the Jimmy Choos collaboration; and the model carried a pair of heels for extra irreverence). The black-and-white splotched pattern is identical to one of Diana’s blouses; Abloh deliberately claimed it as his own by stamping it with his logo plus “pattern” in quotes. The leather clutches resembling gift boxes can be traced back to a photo of Diana carrying a wrapped present, and the elephant tie and belt come from that same photo. As usual, there were myriad references to Abloh’s fashion idols, but we’ll leave that sleuthing to the anonymous Instagram sensation known as @DietPrada.
Yet Abloh managed to make this collection his own via the pieces wrapped in tulle that revealed his Helvetica signaling underneath; the chic denim, including a jacket embroidered withNatural Womanin a typeface by the artist Devon Turnbull (of the shuttered cult streetwear store Nom de Guerre); and his slightly post-modern take on glass slippers with heels enrobed in clear PVC was once again care of Jimmy Choo. Not shown: a T-shirt featuring the Red Cross logo, which the organization has approved. It will end up in stores as a reminder of Diana’s humanitarian work.These looks in particular reinforced Abloh’s pursuit of high fashion—hoop skirts aside, he’s gotten there. Fans will be trading up from graphic hoodies to the finely finished leather pieces. And those still not convinced might nonetheless get a kick out of the pochettes in saffiano leather replicating theTimeandLifelogos. Leave it to Abloh, with his millions of Instagram followers, to make dead-tree media cool again.
28 September 2017
Not even 48 hours afterVirgil Ablohstaged his men’s collection as a vast nighttime performance enhanced by artist Jenny Holzer projecting queasy, crisis poetry on the exterior of the Pitti Palace, the walk-through of the Resort offering took place at his Milan showroom. This may sound anticlimactic, and yet it was here that the founders of New Guards Group first took a leap of faith on a guy selling T-shirts that profoundly resonated with plugged-in kids (the Kanye connection didn’t hurt) and agreed to produce and distribute his higher-end fashion label. Now Abloh believes he’s arrived atOff-White2.0. “It’s looking like a regular brand, but the ideas are all still underneath,” he explained.And as though tapping into a terra incognita message, he titled the collection “Wilderness,” while nonetheless remaining controlled in his pursuit of well-developed womenswear. This included a blazer in a burlap-type fabric, its stiffness allowing tacked sleeves to appear permanently styled, and the unexpected use of a conventional floral print, which Abloh specially sourced near Como before having it turned into a cropped shirtdress and a workwear jacket, appropriating the Lawn-Boy logo. If the deconstructed and asymmetric men’s shirting came as no surprise, the femininity elsewhere did; then again, Off-White’s increasing presence on the red carpet has not gone unnoticed. Lace, as second-skin sheaths with or as contrast incrustations, was a pleasing sign that Abloh’s idea of pretty is not so different from everyone else’s.But because he’s so hooked on stylized semantics, an “Off-White Pattern” printed on a solid draped dress put a figurative spin on your garden-variety floral. Compared to the grass skirt with its overgrowth of threads, this was clever. After the intensity of the men’s show—both the production and its message—an escape from the street was what everyone needed, surely delivering stuff that allows his brand to further grow.
20 June 2017
In this time of political protest, terrorism, warfare, and the mass displacement of people, what good can mere fashion do?Virgil Abloh, for one, decided that he was going to say something big with hisOff-Whitemenswear show in Florence. “It’s my Trojan horse model,” he said before the presentation began at the Pitti Palace. “I’m a millennial brand. Kids will go and research the messaging they see on Instagram. Are we talking about garments or are we talking about the world at large?” There could be no shadow of a doubt what he meant for those who were there—including many invited members of the public—and those who watched from afar via social media. He had vast projections of searing text describing the sufferings of civilians in war scrolling down the outside of the building, as the models, tiny by comparision, filed beneath.The work was a collaboration withJenny Holzer, whom he said he identifies with because of “our use of wording.” Holzer selected poetry from Anna Swirszcynska, written during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and voices from conflicts that are happening right now in Syria and Palestine—Omid Shams, Ghayath Almadhoun, Osama Alomar, and others. The impact was overwhelming, disturbing, and deliberate. Abloh, the son of an immigrant from Ghana, feels a social and humanitarian responsibility to speak to the plight of refugees. “In this climate, coming off recent elections, I have a voice. In my work, I react,” he explained.Guests had already been sent orange T-shirts printed with graphics. No ordinary show-off branded T-shirt, it carried the visual instructions for putting on a life vest on the front and“I’ll never forgive the ocean,”a line by Shams, on the back. Many hundreds of people have drowned, and continue to do so, in crossing the Mediterranean from Syria and Africa in hopes of a better life. Italy, where Abloh’s fashion has always been manufactured, is one of the first desperate ports of call. That awareness directly affected the design of his collection, he said: “I was zeroing in on a life raft, the colors, the warnings, the plastic.”Utilitarian tropes found in clothing worn by rescue workers and the rescued inspired shapes reminiscent of inflatable vests, mariner’s hoods, and so on. Off-White is a streetwear brand consumed by very young men; that’s why Alboh has the power to speak directly to a young “woke” generation, but, he pointed out, he has aspirations for them in terms of elevating streetwear pieces beyond the generic.
Sport T-shirts came bisected with invisible zippers; the shorts shorter and wider. “It’s about showing a new proportion and crashing it together with tailoring,” he said. “We’re here at Pitti! People often ask me, ‘Why don’t young people wear tailoring?’ Well, it’s because people don’t make tailoring for them!”With this collection, Abloh has had a go at bridging that sartorial generation gap, with high-waisted floral jacquard wide-leg pants (the only nod to the Renaissance surroundings, perhaps) and by readdressing the structure of a white dress shirt, implanting it with zippers so the collar can be worn half on, half off, at will. That Abloh used the Pitti Immagine opportunity to speak to a bigger agenda was a step up in his stature that was good to see. At the end, the visual image of the designer walking with his horde of models along the perimeter of the Pitti Palace square under Holzer’s projection hit home. How many other groups of men exactly their age have we seen in news footage, crossing continents?
15 June 2017
Tonight’s Off-White runway echoed the staging of the recent men’s show: a winding path amidst a blanket of dried leaves. The birch trees returned, too; only now, they had been hung as if levitating, and the room was dark and theatrical. Since Virgil Abloh has never been one to do something for the sake of nothing, it’s tempting to make the leap that things are feeling pretty surreal for him these days. Within the past month, there were published rumors that he could be succeeding Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy; but there was also an unrelatedGQ Styleinterview with one of his industry role models, Raf Simons, that left the impression that professional admiration isn’t mutual.And so Abloh named this collection “Nothing New,” as a rejoinder to a passage in the article, without necessarily holding a grudge. “That critique, I finally heard it out loud, which is great. To me, it was a launchpad to think about what I am doing and why I am doing it—to live with that phrase and recognize what it means,” he explained backstage, affirming his unwavering respect by likening the process to being a student assessed by a professor. “You would sit there and say it over and over to get at the emotion. It was motivating.”As apparent with his invitation—an image of Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa reproduction superimposed with his signature from his famous urinal (incidentally, celebrating its centenary this year)—Abloh concluded that new is rarely, truly new, be it in art or fashion. If the ready-made has endured as original, who’s to deny a pair of Levi’s modified into a seductively flounced bolero or studded with 10,000 white Swarovski micro crystals (total wowzers) a similar legacy?The tricky part here, of course, is the fashion-art debate, which Abloh loves confronting. What seemed like random azure flocking on a grouping mid-lineup traced back to a brushstroke print by his artist pal, Pablo Tomek, that also appeared in his Pre-Fall collection. Meanwhile, the voiceover that introduced the show came from the irreverent British artist David Shrigley, who was recorded saying, “Focus on the work; if you make good work, you will probably be a successful artist.”Swap in “designer” and this is truer and truer of Abloh, who proposed the entire checklist of categories—including well-developed bags, sneakers, and boots “For Walking” as they were cheekily branded. Conspicuously absent were the graphic T-shirts upon which Off-White was built.
Their replacements—delicate, logo-free lace tees and striped furs—were clever, elevated, ripostes to those who continue to label him street. Meanwhile, the tailoring of the houndstooth suiting showed finesse, while softness of the raised waistline dresses felt less referential. Confident and without gimmick, the collection confirmed the maturity of his youth culture, “hotel lobby” positioning in attitude and appearance. “I have this issue with thinking that you’re going to invent a garment in 2017,” said Abloh. “The future isn’t so important to me as the now—and the past.” Cynics might call that spin; but more likely, Abloh has revealed himself to be a realist who aims high.
2 March 2017
Not even 24 hours after Virgil Abloh explained how theOff-WhitePre-Fall collection relates to climate change, scientists reported that the Earth hit its highest temperature on record in 2016, marking three years of marked increases. How’s that for fashion being relevant? “Bringing up societal things that are talking points; I love it because it’s the opposite of chill time,” he said, presumably referring to his belief that fashion should not be a form of escapism. Yet seeing as we were previewing the collection outdoors as the temperature in Paris hovered around zero, this felt like freezing-cold time. Wearing last season’s red-hot Balenciaga down jacket from the women’s collection (the largest size fit his frame), he added that a collection called Global Warming was his “tongue-in-cheek, Off-White way to crash together summer clothes and winter clothes.” And these clothes were about to be photographed on location in front of an exterior wall of the Palais de Tokyo, where artist Pablo Tomek, who was responsible for this season’s graphic print, had painted a giant mural.Of the select looks to brave the weather, a down jacket in sky blue crushed velvet with oversize hardware was the clear hero piece; aside from being high impact, it encapsulatedAbloh’s ideas about advancing streetwear. But then so did the parka boasting Tomek’s signature motif based on the practice of whitewashing windows during construction. When he described the branches of fluorescent orange embroidery on a classic black-and-white check as “toxic leaves on old ladylike fabric,” it was hard not to feel bad for the fabric. And by the time he showed off the blue tinselly top featuring hisOFFlettering, this reviewer’s fingers were too frozen to write.Thankfully, several additional looks appeared the next day as part of the Off-White men’s show. True to his words, the ruffled pieces weren’t germane to climate change, however they hinted at how Abloh continues to contemplate what it means to be a designer showing in Paris. If, as he indicated during the first visit, these proposals function as his “warm-ups” for being appointed to an established house, thinking seriously matters as much as thinking cool.
20 January 2017
From his initial collection, presented to editors in a small gallery a few years ago, to today’s show, where he staged fallen leaves and spindly birch trees within the Maison de l’UNESCO’s modernist setting, Virgil Abloh has shown that streetwear, the cornerstone of the Off-White identity, is a moving target. With Seeing Things, the title of his latest brainstorm, the designer wanted us to see that he can move from the skate-kid trope to the novel archetype of “art dad.” “The ethos was not to be preoccupied with youth,” he explained. “It was to put something wearable at the forefront but from an elder generation, using the exploratory idea that youth is ageless.” To translate: As his brand grows up, the source material does, too.So here’s an abridged list of what we saw: denim laser-etched with doves, a surrealist scene on an extra-long mohair sweater, widened pants more often than not, and a noticeable focus on coats. Some of these were adorned with gold leaves created by the London jeweler Duffy. “I have this memory from when I was a kid of lying in the forest; when you wear a sweater, they stick on you,” Abloh explained, casting a certain sensitivity over what had otherwise seemed like a random element.When he noted backstage, “I’m not trying to be fashionable; fashion is now a styling conversation,” this crystallized, to some extent, what Off-White has represented all along, while also raising the type of existential fashion question that classically trained designers may rush to refute. Yet Abloh was wise enough not to extend the surrealist theme beyond imagery (and customized invitation cards) into silhouettes, which remained ’90s-inspired and indeed, not achingly young.To hear the late John Berger’s voice opening the show followed by a new track by rapper Quavo (“not yet released,” Abloh confirmed) underscored once again how he is not just seeing but also sensing ways to process diverse culture cues in real time. This has helped him earn validation from the street, which he aims to parlay into validation from a major fashion house. It’s the textbook definition of aspirational, whether a collectible jean jacket or a coveted job: You want what might not be yours yet.
19 January 2017
A fictional business card bearing the name Katharine Parker accompanied Virgil Abloh’sOff-White“Invitation” (quotation marks around nouns has become the label’s branding quirk). But who is she? Apparently, she’s the scheming boss played by Sigourney Weaver in the 1988 Mike Nichols filmWorking Girl. On the heels of Abloh'sPretty Womanshout-outs last season, this homage supports the idea that his cultural referencing is all encompassing. Yet before he could collaborate with Levi’s Made & Crafted in San Francisco to graft classic pinstripe jeans, he needed to establish how his female peers wear the label of “businesswoman.” His conclusion: Regardless of what they do or how they shop, all rules have been thrown out the corner office window. “My generation, I don’t even know what my friends do. But we’re all eating at Nobu and traveling to Paris,” he said backstage—painting a portrait of the kind of cool girl who has profited from self-promotion and social media, sluggish economy be damned.In any case, dressing the part still applies, which explains why Abloh began his lineup with blue striped shirts that featured unambiguously feminine alterations, followed by a group of jet-set looks in flaming red. Beyond that, a leather field jacket boasting “Woman” across the back; a well-tailored, double-breasted evening jacket paired with Italian dip-dyed pants; and a black-and-white check tiered ruffle gown all but indicated that Off-White had no intention of conforming to white-collar conventions. But Abloh cleverly borrowed from the signaling: Shirts were monogrammed with O.F.F. in red embroidery. The structured bags a girlboss might be inclined to carry were tagged with the brand’s diagonal striping. Even the heraldic crest on Ms. Parker’s card revealed the Off-White arrows. The fact that many pieces weren’t branded—those sophisticated ruffle dresses, the graphic intarsia sweater, or even flat bag belts—suggested that Abloh is able to distinguish street criteria from serious-caliber clothes. “It feels elevated, more luxurious, and with an attention to taste,” he explained. “I’ve made an effort to be more concise.”Abloh has made no secret of striving towards a standard of fashion proficiency that puts him on par with established designers. That delta is still large. Measured, however, against his own short but steady ascent. And judging by the palpable buzz among the crowd (whether or not you count the Kardashian-West clan), this collection was a career best.
29 September 2016
For all the scaling up that Virgil Abloh has achieved in three short years—his men’s collection was granted the penultimate spot on the official calendar, and stores in Soho, Tokyo, and Toronto are forthcoming—Off-Whitedoesn’t yet qualify as established. For now, this works in Abloh’s favor; he can take bigger risks, fine-tune the brand identity, and exist as an outsider-insider. Titled Mirror Mirror, his Spring collection was represented by an imposing image of Parisian architecture—except this wasn’t the actual building, but rather the trompe l’oeil scenography that often conceals construction projects around the city. “A brand can be 100 years old; but the outward facade versus what’s behind it can be totally different,” he explained.So what’s behind Off-White? Essentially, Abloh’s random access theories on representation and authenticity, which speak to a perspective far broader than fashion. And they percolate outward more clearly with his menswear than his women’s, either because he relates better or because it’s ultimately a stricter realm. The screen-printed concert T-shirts and sweatpants that form his brand’s genetic code have evolved to knitwear with openwork holes and organza sheer enough to look sweat-drenched. The imagery mixed macabre with symbolic: A W-shaped serpent nailed to a cross that opened the show, followed by a ghoulish hand puncturing a trio of Fs as if someone had just yelled the only expletive that requires “off.” The scorpions seemed significant; as sequin appliques handcrafted in India and patched onto trousers, they were equally gratuitous and glamorous. The ample, high-waisted pants, along with the long coats, suggested liberal sampling; but then Abloh’s strength as a designer still largely comes from the fact that he is an unapologetic fan. Hence a collection rife with riffs on memorabilia: a knitted portrait of Liam and Noel Gallagher, an appropriated WWII A-2 flight jacket in pliant leather, and soccer scarves heralding his brand. Abloh gave certain guests disposable “cameras" (like all things Off-White, they were packaged and branded in quotation marks) to document the moment from multiple perspectives. These “photographers” were then asked to return the cameras. As a clever mirror-mirror twist, Abloh conceived his own crowd-sourced souvenir.
26 June 2016
The vintage Ferrari parked behind Virgil Abloh’s Resort looks is not undercover for no reason. “Mystery and imagination are where I can push my concept—but in a real way,” offered the multi-hyphenate creator, while finalizing his collection lineup. Which is an oblique way of saying that his accessible, street-facing image doesn’t always reveal the full extent of his elevated ambitions. Here, however, Abloh offered up a range of charismatic pieces that better calibrated his art direction expertise and continued pursuit of building a fashion label. He juxtaposed two generic motifs—camouflage and roses—as his collection theme, Roses of War, which he expressed theatrically as a utility jacket and tiered, ruffled skirt in ripstop fabric. Elsewhere the camo repeated as a stylized pajama top and lamé plissé skirt, while the roses wept rhinestone tears from the back of a striped robe. If he didn’t fully resolve last season’s lack of consistency, he made a stronger case for serving up wearable showpieces—each resolutely styled to minimize any confusion about challenging proportions or terms of use. Turns out you can make monstrously cuffed jeans look cute if you pair them with a men’s shirt worn backwards to reveal a feminine flounce. You can also convince people that your organza concert T-shirt is cocktail-appropriate. Abloh scored a counterintuitive coup last week when Céline Dion was photographed wearing the luxe leather coat from his Fall collection. This, he believes, is proof positive of his concept: that the same fashion brand can be equally embraced by a kid in Detroit and an adult contemporary music diva. The Resort offering includes two new iterations of the coat in coated organza and luxe black leather. They are the Ferrari, revealed.
25 June 2016
Guests arrived at Virgil Abloh’sOff-Whiteshow to find a custom-made neon sign that flashed, “You’re obviously in the wrong place.” The line quotes the nasty saleswoman who snubbed Julia Roberts’s character inPretty Woman. The legitimacy of streetwear, thanks in part to Abloh’s influence, has fully discredited that type of snap judgment; heck, Vivian’s memorable O-ring dress could almost be considered on-trend. But the collection’s opening look—a slinky white turtleneck marked “OFF,” well-tailored red trousers, and a reflective silver belt bag—signaled that Abloh wouldn’t be mining the film beyond the verbal exchange; this was about semantics, not aesthetics.So then what were the clothes telling us? Abloh’s ambitions, for starters. “It’s locked in my brain to do more than a T-shirt,” he admitted backstage. Except that a metal jacket featuring one sleeve tacked to the torso, and a bias-cut dress punctuated with a pleated panel, revealed growing pains. By comparison, the double-paneled leather coat with detachable cuffs and denim jumpsuits conveyed complex construction while coolly communicating the Off-White ethos. The off-shoulder conceit, meanwhile, read like a clever stylistic pun, whether or not wearing a jacket this way coaxes fashion forward. Mostly, it played into Abloh’s desire to define a look with irreverence—a literal shrug resulting in a gestural silhouette.Abloh’s cultural processing power enables him to recast life moments as a “design atmosphere”; to wit, a T-shirt boasting an illustration of the Chateau Marmont accompanied by the text, “Do you have a table tho?” Wearing one might prove as fun as being there. But the fact that the less conceptual clothing remains Abloh’s strength puts the brand at a crossroads: The issue is not whether Off-White can eventually master a deconstructed dress, but whether pursuing higher level design works against it. For now, the final two looks function as goalposts. Formed from the printed toile of a Giorgio de Chirico painting, complete with copyright info, they continued the Caravaggio “studies” Abloh proposed in Off-White’s early days. “This is my quintessential piece,” he said, before likening it to a readymade. Obviously.
8 March 2016
If the streetwear label proves impossible for Virgil Abloh to shake, at least he can ensure it isn’t destined for fashion ignominy. “Not on my watch will I allow streetwear to become like disco,” he said, while deciding whether to superimpose two camel coats, one sleeveless. “It was so in vogue and jazzy at the time, and then 10 years on, everyone is ashamed of it.”The meeting for Abloh’s first Off-White Pre-Fall offering took place at the same time as last-minute prep for his first men’s runway show, and the heightened volume—from the size of his support team to the racks upon racks of clothes—attested to how quickly he’s scaled up in two years. On first impression, it actually read like a greatest-hits compilation: Patchwork jeans (this time encrusted with velvet); a cross-backed strap sweatshirt; belled inverted khaki cargos with matching harness; and reworked, overprinted vintage tees have all found a place in Off-White’s permanent rotation. But there were several indications that Abloh is nudging his needle: His signature diagonal striping now appeared as stitched leather strips down the sleeves of a distressed motorcycle jacket. Custom yellow winch straps cut through men’s trousers where the detail may previously have been printed. (Those same straps complete his suede Birkin-terpretation—safely stripped of all trademark identifiers.) The basque bust of a dressy look was well fitted. “Each time you push yourself, you find you can do twice as much,” he insisted. That calculation pretty much correlated to the confidence of the looks, which by no means are for everyone. But behind each one was Abloh’s so-called rhetoric on today’s youth culture. Also there, behind the model, was a scrap of Jean Prouvé.
22 January 2016
For all the big statements projected in Virgil Abloh’sfirst men’s runway show—the orange staging the biggest of all—the most significant was too small for anyone in the audience to notice. Clear buttons had been etched with“button”(quotation marks included), and the oversize brushed metal zipper pulls with“ring.”The irony of these self-referential details is that from day one, people have labeledOff-Whiteas streetwear, and that meta branding was conspicuously absent. But with good reason. Two years on, Off-White has proven that Abloh’s approach to clothing doesn’t fit any taxonomy, even by fashion’s shifting standards. He is as inclined to propose something universally accessible as something oddly proportioned and avant-garde. He’s the type of porous polymath who will hit the art fair circuit to seek conceptual theories instead of taking selfies. John Baldessari is his current idol.But a new obsession with Lucio Fontana, after a visit to Fondazione Prada, was what prompted Abloh to personally slash the backs of stiff canvas coats in a subtractive color palette of yellow, cyan, and magenta. He first described this exercise—done the night before the show—by saying, “This is confidence, to make that gesture, to know it’s going to be better.” Of Fontana’s signature “spatialism,” Abloh astutely observed, “All of [Fontana’s] works have the same value off of just one distilled idea, and that’s the goal—one premise, one execution.”Abloh, in contrast, operates in idea overdrive. In addition to his final Fontana grouping, he once again partnered with Levi’s to improve upon his patchwork denim; spliced up vintage T-shirts with Shane Gonzales of Midnight Studios; folded in some Pre-Fall womenswear looks; developed sneakers with Italian footwear brand Golden Goose; and took a successful stab at slimmer suiting. While Abloh’s focus could have been tighter, there would be no sense docking points for an overzealous desire to create. Indeed, embroidered bands tacked to coats and windbreakers suggested as much by restating the collection’s title: Don’t Cut Me Off.
20 January 2016
For someone who has orchestrated theatrically imposing and occasionally improvised stage environments forKanye West, adéfiléof 20 looks within a compact, contemporary art gallery would seem like no big deal. But as this wasVirgil Abloh’s first runway show for his label,Off-White—as well as his 35th birthday—the occasion felt, well, special.Abloh titled his collection Off-Day, although not out of some reverse-karmic pre-emptive strike. As he explained, the latest Off-White undertaking emerged from several streams of thought, but principally how cool girls today have figured out that the most relevant dress code has nothing to do with dressing up. Abloh (who earned a master’s in architecture) used a white tee and blue jeans as his building blocks, which he subsequently broke down to arrive at a draped crepe tuxedo top, an open-sided gilet, tiered maxi sack skirt, and flocked grid-pattered pajamas, among other transformations.Some combination of cropping, lengthening, offsetting, patchworking, bias cutting, and hand-pleating went into each look. And that’s not even accounting for the time Abloh spent at the Levi Strauss & Co. archives (six pairs of jeans were reworked from the company’s denim), or going through the necessary legal channels to redesign an old Grateful Dead crew shirt (via illustrator Othelo Gervacio). All told, a lot of effort. And yet, for Abloh, this wasn’t enough. “I want to push the concept of showing in front of an audience in Paris,” he declared backstage. “I want it to be a reminder that this is still an art form—not just the clothing but making people gather in a room and creating a moment that opens their minds.”Hence the clear plastic coats donned by a handful of models as they took their final walk—Abloh plans to produce these for his Off-White staff in the spirit ofMargiela–meets–Steve Jobs: that is, “A corporate culture statement coming from someone who’s so chill.” In the spirit of performance art, a local graffiti artist closed the show by defacing the coats with a dramatic flourish.Guests may have been too ensconced in the rapid-fire tagging to notice a line of lettering placed high on one of the clerestory walls. Positioned upside down, it spelled out “Why are you looking at,” which Abloh attributed to the ongoing refrain among those who binge on fashion shows so heavily that nothing ultimately registers. So was this show any different? To the extent that it came across as a multilayered exercise in self-expression, yes.
But often a single look—those jeans spliced with organza windowpanes, for example—is all it takes.
30 September 2015
Virgil Abloh delivers messages through his clothes, whether you pick up on them or not. With Blue Collar, the title of his latest men's collection, you immediately know what you're in for. Or do you? "I call it Blue Collar, but I actually want to make white-collar clothes," he said from a central Paris studio space, where regular collaborator Fabien Montique was preparing to shoot looks on models barely old enough to enter the workforce. Abloh, who likened being shortlisted for the LVMH Prize to losing his training wheels, expressed how he is committed to shifting Off-White from streetwear to menswear. Getting to that position while remaining an anti-establishment designer allows him the latitude to be impulsive at times, hence the last-minute decision to produce custom lapel pins that read "Working Class," the latter word dangling from the former like a forsaken charm.There were larger, long-planned statements, too: Abloh sourced vintage Royal Mail uniforms and tacked panels of their blue oxford cloth to matte black tailored coats and shirts, often exactly where they would have appeared had the uniforms remained intact. For every demotion of formality, he promoted the ordinary, securing patches of paint-scuffed denim with monogrammed gold studs, for instance. The pants began as classic chinos yet underwent enough modifications—such as a dropped stitch giving way to an inverted pleat—that they broke through the realm of basic.While some cool white-collar guy may end up purchasing the fantastically distressed leather bomber, Abloh didn't abandon the entry-level tees that once served as his foundation. Misaligned at the seams like a sartorial glitch, they feature a toll-free number for a fictional excavation service. Abloh purchased that number (1-855-OFF-WHTE, naturally). Dial it and you very well might find a message from him on the other end. Add the antics to the semantics and you have a very clever collection. However, a blue-collar theme must inevitably address construction. And Abloh understands this, even if he's still figuring out his stance on silhouette (occasionally, he overcompensated his slim-fit fatigue by exceeding flattering proportions). But then that's what building a brand—and a business—is all about.
27 June 2015
Virgil Abloh was in the early stages of planning the women's collection for his label, Off-White, when theCharlie Hebdoattacks occurred. The ensuing solidarity via social media—whether as hashtags or illustrations—got him thinking about the space shared by activism and design. By the time he arrived in Paris to present his menswear, the swell of expression and emotion had all but dissipated. "I felt it needed to be documented in art," he said, surprised that the fashion community had seemingly compartmentalized the moment.So he processed it for himself with sweats and a shearling bomber featuring drippy, hand-painted lettering in which "Dazed still confused," "War is not over," and a distorted peace sign revived the unease felt across college campuses back when hippies were revolutionaries and Hendrix was their voice. Abloh makes no pretensions about being an artist; further, his clothes are not intended as the sartorial equivalent of satire. But from the moment his first Pyrex Vision T-shirts cracked the street-style mold three years ago to his inclusion on the LVMH Prize short list last week, his steady ascent has largely been the result of an exceptional sixth sense for graphic imagery.More and more, though, he's hitting his stride in design. Here he relied on flares for continuity; for differentiation, they got their girth from a deep front vent rather than a classic bell-bottom. This detail also happened to dovetail with his Fall collection's title, Split Ends. While Abloh recognizes the commercial imperative (hence the ripstop paisleys, bleach-blocked denim, and pitched-toe mountain boots), he's more seduced by statement (a fox-fur coat pimped with athletic cuffs) and craft (a collaboration with Paris-based leather atelier LaContrie, which customized box-framed bags with openwork straps echoing Off-White's diagonally striped logo). For now, Abloh remains dedicated to an achingly cool long and layered silhouette that, based on any standard tailoring primer, shouldn't deserve praise. But he's two steps ahead of the zeitgeist, and the medium is his message.
6 March 2015
Three seasons into his label, Off-White, Virgil Abloh believes there's now enough distance between him and his Pyrex Vision chapter that he can begin to express an aesthetic he's been harboring all along. And what better way, at least conceptually, to veer away from those streetwear vibes than with a collection inspired by trips to Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Not that Abloh had downhill skiing in mind. Rather, he found himself compelled by the "impossible human task" of ascending a mountain, and how that corresponded with the less adventurous, though still ambitious, goal of climbing the corporate ladder on Wall Street. Hence the collection's title: Don't Look Down. "Don't waste time being nervous" is what Guru Abloh is preaching this season.The designer translated all these ideas, plus more, into looks that combined patchwork blanket coats sourced from Arpin, a 200-year-old French fabric mill, with shock-value T-shirts and tent-fabric wraps illustrated by the New York-based artist Othelo Gervacio (sample image: a skull imposed on the Florida State Seminoles logo with the words "War is hell"). Between the looser layering, boiled wool sport shorts, flat-brimmed Stetsons, and mountain-ready Ice Pick boots (Off-White's Italian-made take on Timberlands, with hinged spikes), Abloh conjured up a dude who aspires to the functionalwabi-sabiof contemporary Japanese dressing, while keeping the essence rugged and outdoorsy. You could tell he was working hard to claim some part of the gray area between high fashion and street. Climbing rope tied everything together, quite literally: It cinched hoods from behind or replaced hardware on reworked tailored coats (not shown: the back panel sliced out to better expose graphic printing and embroidery down pant legs).To hear Abloh casually drop references—Hiroshi Fujiwara, Stefano Pilati, Richard Prince, the Marlboro Man—was to wish for real-time Genius annotation. But even when a sturdy parka topped a letterman jacket topped a fishnet jersey topped a flannel, it was tough to dock points for maximalism because the looks weirdly worked. Abloh did, however, acknowledge the inherent risk in aiming high: "Am I going too far making the things I love?" he mused. If enthusiasm is any indication, he hasn't peaked just yet.
21 January 2015
Two weeks ago, Virgil Abloh posted an image on his Instagram feed that teased at the Spring women's collection for his label, Off-White: Set within a motif of Beverly Hills Hotel-inspired banana leaves, we find the wordNebraskarendered in red collegiate typeface. Framing a prairie state in tropical vibes pretty much fits the definition of counterintuitive. But for Abloh, whose reference spectrum spans everything from Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye to the defunct clothing chain Steve & Barry's, this juxtaposition contained a bounty of bonus layers. By decontextualizing Nebraska, a purposely generic state selection, he imbued it with newfound cachet. With the banana leaves, he provided insider-y subtext. And finally, isn't a college sweatshirt essentially an exercise in branding, albeit one broader yet more nostalgic than a monogram handbag?As it happens, this is Abloh's sophomore women's collection, and with it, he's determined to transcend his streetwear reputation—not that he now rejects the genre. (The unexpected success of his Pyrex Vision clothing remains a point of pride.) To be taken seriously as a designer, he realizes he needs to step up his fashion game. And he's succeeded insofar as working with his Milan-based studio to solve the obvious challenge of making elongated pleated crepe skirts—"an abstracted cheerleader story"—look sexy over pants. Seemingly challenging proportions (bibs atop reworked sweatshirts and slacks that puddle at the floor) somehow exceeded objection. As the longtime creative director for Kanye West, Abloh is familiar with pushing past the stylistic status quo, but in detecting a hint of Saint Laurent here or Céline there, you sensed him squaring his retail aspirations with the editorial zeitgeist. Either way, the dimensional innovations of his Off-White diagonal graphic impressed, whether appearing flocked into a mesh bomber or extended as fringe. And the hand-painted denim suggested the art influence still has legs. Abloh's debut women's collection, cheekily titled "I Only Smoke When I Drink," borrowed heavily from his guy gear. This time around, the introduction of French lace—strategically see-through like the negative space between the banana leaves—served as his feminine volte-face. Straying too far from streetwear (for instance, with a wraparound draped top that fell short of the fluidity exemplified by Madame Grès) was the most noticeable misstep. Otherwise, Abloh's enthusiasm and intuition remained persuasive.
Nebraska as code for cool: That's original.
23 September 2014
Virgil Abloh, the multitalented ambassador of youth culture, has finally infiltrated the world of fashion. His brand Off-White started as a step in the evolution of his vision for elevated streetwear, and is now a fully developed collection with an atelier up and running in Milan. Abloh is, in his mind, a shepherd. His mission: To "carry kids down the path of more informed streetwear, a streetwear that is more sophisticated but still has the signifying details of classic."That is exactly what Abloh offered up for the Spring/Summer 2015 collection. The range is overflowing with ideas, mostly centered around the world of a street-savvy beach bum. Layering is key to the Off-White look: The collection's high notes involve T-shirts and shorts as top layers; elongated mesh skirts; ponchos; and striking red, black, and white monochrome ensembles. The thicker plastisol screen-printing techniques that have been popular for the last few years—used for Abloh's old Pyrex wears as well as previous Off-White collections—have been swapped out for softer, less perfect graphics, often appearing near hems on shirts and pants. Jeans were cut long and tapered, a fit reminiscent of Hedi Slimane's coveted Dior Homme denim circa 2005. Rider jackets in black and red leather and neoprene were cool enough to be must-haves for the season.With this effort, Abloh has proven that he has an eye for color and a keen sense of how a full collection is put together, but he's limited by his adherence to familiar ideas, relying on a few streetwear tropes that are ready to be retired—crotch prints, sweatpants, military patches. Paint splatters and fringe distressing aren't quite convincing enough to portray the Baja-surf culture vibe Abloh's attempting to capture.Surely Abloh's is a very active mind, with the potential to have influence greater than some of the very large, old fashion houses he now resides with in Milan. He made his name pushing the boundaries for what T-shirts and hoodies can be, but now that he's in Milan bumping elbows with Prada and Gucci, he'll have to start taking even bigger risks to stand out.
29 June 2014