This has been a watershed year in fashion. A quarter of the way through the 21st century, 2025 saw the industry hit refresh: in September alone, 15 designers made their debuts as creative directors of fashion’s major houses, ushering in a bold new era in style (and, as with any such change, prompting passionate – and oftentimes divided – online commentary).

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are the 25 fashion moments that defined the zeitgeist in 2025 – from a viral Marty Supreme track jacket and Saint Laurent’s thigh-high wader boots, to big-name buyouts, runway returns and, of course, all those debuts.

Willy Chavarria made his mark in Paris with a powerful duo of shows

In January, CFDA Award-winning designer Willy Chavarria chose to shift his runway show from New York, where he lives and works, to Paris. A striking first show, held at the American Church on Quai d’Orsay, came just a few days after Trump’s inauguration, with Chavarria – whose runway shows have long been a clarion call for the rights of immigrants and the queer community – soundtracking the show with Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon imploring the incoming president to ‘have mercy’ towards marginalised communities. ‘It was so beautiful, and it fell exactly in line with what we were doing,’ he told Wallpaper* of the speech. ‘I wanted to show that everyone is welcome, and to do that in a church seemed like the most pronounced way of showing queer people, trans people, in this environment where they were the saints’. His sophomore Paris show, this summer, was similarly impactful: it opened with 35 kneeling men wearing white T-shirts made in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a reference to those being unlawfully detained by ICE in the United States.

READ: Willy Chavarria: ‘We’re still so stuck in fashion’s old guard’

Faux fur and shearling took over the runway

Not a moment, per se, though the proliferation of faux fur and shearling on the runway – spanning both the men’s and women’s collections – was one of the year’s undeniable style takeaways (so much so, we even spotted it on the spring/summer runways). ‘When worn, it becomes a heady meeting place of signifiers – luxury, wealth, power, but also protection, armour against the elements, an ancient and primal urge to be swaddled in the spoils of the hunt,’ we wrote earlier this year of the renaissance of fur – albeit in imitation fabrics – which seemed to a response to the tumult of contemporary living. Indeed, at Prada, where co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a collection of ‘Raw Glamour’, ‘fur’ coats – constructed from cleverly manipulated shearling – had strange protusions at the collar or were trapped under plastic. ‘We asked ourselves, what is femininity today? It is a constant questioning,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is not my job to be political, but when you open a newspaper – oh my God! Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

READ: Faux fur and shearling dominated the A/W 2025 runways – these pieces capture the material’s ‘raw glamour’

Alessandro Michele entertained with a showstopping haute couture debut for Valentino

Haute couture was always going to be a medium which suited Alessandro Michele, the former Gucci creative director who now heads up Valentino. For his first couture collection for the house – presented this past February – the Italian designer, known for theatrical runway shows and richly imaginative collections, hit new heights, employing the ‘petits mains’ of the Valentino atelier to create a series of showstopping gowns. In a style typical to the deep-thinking designer, they were explained in the book-length collection notes through the language of philosophy and semiotics – Homer, James Joyce and Italo Calvino were all mentioned – with each gown representing a ‘list’ of words and influences (‘[lists] confine the infinite extension of the existing within a meaningful framework… to bring some order to the chaos of the universe,’ Michele wrote, quoting Umberto Eco). These surreal lists scrolled across the show’s set on a series of ticker-tape screens as the dramatic looks wandered across the stage, a millefeuille of satin, lace and tulle – eclectic, intricate and, as fashion sleuths showed after the show, rooted in the Valentino archive. ‘To attempt to describe each look – and its multitude of elements – would require a pages-long list of its own,’ we wrote at the time. ‘It was best to simply let yourself be entertained.’

READ: Inside Alessandro Michele’s showstopping debut haute couture show for Valentino

Martine Rose held her first gallery show – an ode to Bronski Beat’s radical energy

During London Fashion Week in February, Martine Rose hosted her first gallery show at Sadie Coles HQ, revisiting her 2016 film Everything Must Change – a Sharna Osbourne-shot short starring Bronski Beat frontman Jimmy Somerville. ‘Pop charts at the time I was introduced to Jimmy Somerville’s voice were dominated by gay musicians: Erasure, Bronski Beat, Marc Almond,’ Rose told Wallpaper*. ‘Mainstream pop by out and proud gay men making serious, respected pop music – not tokenistic – which can never be replicated. It was a radical time for music, all about individuality, no stylists, all genuine expression.’ It’s a statement that captures the radical, subculture-infused energy of Rose’s own work: later that year, in June, she staged a one-off show in an abandoned west London job centre, adorned for the occasion in boudoir-style ruffled curtains. ‘I was exploring this new shrunken silhouette,’ she said after the show. ‘Everything feels a bit cinched, a bit too tight, slightly awkward, but somehow still sexy, I hope.’ It is this idiosyncratic approach – at once strange, sexy and real – which has made Martine Rose one of London’s defining voices, doing things her own way for close to two decades.

READ: Martine Rose’s first gallery show celebrates the radical queer energy of Bronski Beat

Calvin Klein returned to the runway with a new ‘sexitude’

In February, Calvin Klein hosted its first runway show since the departure of Raf Simons in 2018 (under him, the runway collections went under the moniker Calvin Klein 205W39NYC; now, they are back to being called Calvin Klein Collection). In one of the year’s first notable debuts, it was former The Row designer Veronica Leoni who took the helm, seeking a mood of sensual minimalism she dubbed ‘sexitude’ – a nod to the pulsing undercurrent of eroticism which ran through the brand’s advertising campaigns and collections in the 1990s. ‘When it comes to sexiness, it’s more like an attitude,’ the Italian designer said backstage. ‘You own it in the way you wear the clothes. I think it’s really intimate being sexy – regardless of the silhouette, the amount of skin, it’s about the confidence.’ The collection came with the blessing of Mr Klein himself, who watched on from the front row. ‘He told me he was happy he had found a new coat to buy,’ she said. ‘I’m really proud for him to feel at home again.’

READ: For her Calvin Klein debut, Veronica Leoni stripped it all back

Fendi celebrated its centenary with a blockbuster show in Milan

2025 was a definitive year for Fendi: not only did it mark a century since the fashion house was founded in Rome, but, after the departure of artistic director of womenswear and couture Kim Jones in October 2024, the beginning of its new chapter. As such, in February, Fendi opened the doors to its newly renovated Milanese headquarters for a celebratory runway show, seeing house scion Silvia Venturini Fendi take the reins for the blockbuster spectacle which included a cast of Fendi muses, past and present. The granddaughter of house founders Adele and Edoardo Fendi, Venturini Fendi started at the house in the 1990s under Karl Lagerfeld, and would go on to head up menswear and accessories, though this was just the second time she had also designed the womenswear line (the first was after Lagerfeld’s death in 2019). Talking to Wallpaper*, she said that it was an honour to head up such a definitive show for both her family and the house – but was adamant this was not about living in the past: ‘I tried to avoid any precise reference because, to me, anniversaries are beautiful, but you don’t want it to be a retrospective or nostalgic’. After presenting a second co-ed collecti on in September, she stepped down from the creative role to become ‘honorary president’. Her successor will be former Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri in a much-rumoured move.

READ: Silvia Venturini Fendi on luxury, lineage and looking to the future: ‘If it reminds me of something we’ve already done, we move on’

Prada agreed to purchase Versace for $1.375 billion

The subject of much speculation and rumour after Donatella Versace stepped down from her role as creative director the month prior, in April, it was confirmed that the Prada Group reached an agreement to purchase Versace after the Italian house was put on sale by former owner Capri Holdings earlier in the year. Agreeing to a deal of $1.375 billion for 100 per cent of the company – well below the initial $2 billion asking price – it marked a definitive move from the Prada Group to establish an Italian luxury conglomerate (The Prada Group comprises Miu Miu, Church's and Car Shoe; in 1999, it purchased controlling stakes in Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, though they were later sold). ‘We are delighted to welcome Versace to the Prada Group and to build a new chapter for a brand with which we share a strong commitment to creativity, craftmanship and heritage,’ said Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Group chairman and executive director, at the time (the deal was completed in December). ‘We aim to continue Versace’s legacy, celebrating and re-interpreting its bold and timeless aesthetic; at the same time, we will provide it with a strong platform.’

READ: Donatella Versace is stepping down as creative director

The Met’s Costume Institute explored the figure of the Black Dandy

In a year which was notable for its slew of fashion exhibitions – from the confection-like gowns of ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at London’s V&A to a Rick Owens retrospective featuring a lifelike sculpture of the designer ‘urinating’ water into a trough below – the Metropolitan Museum’s annual Costume Institute exhibition in May still demands the most attention. This is largely because of the accompanying Met Gala – the starry event heralds the exhibition’s opening – though it is also down to the Costume Institute’s head curator Andrew Bolton’s eye for finding intriguing subject matter in the Met’s extensive archive. This year, he drafted Monica L Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, to help curate the exhibition, which traced the sartorial history of the Black Dandy from the 18th century to the present day. Titled ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’, alongside historical garments, it featured the work – or personal wardrobes – of Virgil Abloh, Andre Leon Talley and Grace Wales Bonner, among others, with set design for the arresting exhibition courtesy of artist Torkwase Dyson. ‘I clocked into how people have fashioned themselves as a manipulation of autonomy and ownership in which clothing is a resistance,’ she told Wallpaper* of the design, which riffed on her signature trapezoid sculptures.

READ: Torkwase Dyson’s set design for ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ at The Met meditates on ownership, charisma and histories

Saint Laurent’s viral knee-high boots heralded menswear’s dark, sensual mood

At Cannes film festival, while promoting queer ‘dom-com’ Pillion – a film which explores a dom/sub relationship between a shy parking attendant and a biker – Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård donned a thigh-high leather wader boot by Anthony Vaccarrello for Saint Laurent. Shown at the house’s runway show earlier that year, it became one of the viral accessories of the year, worn by everyone from Pedro Pascal to Marc Jacobs, and ubiquitous in magazine spreads. Inspired by an imagined meeting between two men who designed the aesthetic of the 1980s – Yves Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe – the collection captured a mood of dangerous sensuality which ran throughout the season, from Prada’s patchworked leathers to Maximilian Davis’s S/S 2026 Ferragamo collection, inspired by the languid sensuality of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Vaccarello dubbed it a ‘menacing, seductive elegance’ – classic menswear with an inflection of kink.

READ: Inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe, Saint Laurent’s surprise menswear show captured ‘a menacing, seductive elegance’

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake channelled la dolce vita in Florence

It would prove one of the most memorable show locations of the year: unfolding against a painterly Florentine sky at sunset, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake staged its S/S 2026 show at Medicea della Petraia, a former Medici residence on Monte Morello in the rolling Tuscan countryside. A guest of Pitti Uomo menswear fair, the Issey Miyake offshoot used the occasion to introduce a new roving format of runway show: eschewing its usual place on the Paris Fashion Week schedule (its position has been taken by IM Men, another brand in the Issey Miyake family), it will show in a series of locations around the world in the coming seasons. As such, collections will draw inspiration from local landscapes: here, it was done via an evocative use of colour, utilising hues sourced through trips the design team had taken around Italy (from ’Cinque Terre Yellow’ to ‘Zucchini Flower Orange’). The result was a collection which fused Italian charm with Homme Plissé’s pioneering fabrications: played out in the villa’s winding, maze-like gardens, it was impossible not to be seduced.

READ: With an ode to Italy, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake brings its brand of fashion magic to Florence’s Pitti Uomo

Rick Owens spread the love with a Paris retrospective

‘I’m surprised I got so far,’ Rick Owens told Wallpaper* in a wide-ranging conversation to mark the opening of ‘Temple of Love’, a career-spanning retrospective at Paris’ Palais Galliera. A celebration of the American designer’s singular approach – one laced with both subversion and wit – the exhibition took attendees on a trip from his early years on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990s (a recreation of his Los Angeles bedroom of the time appears in the exhibition) towards his blockbuster spectacles at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (indeed, in June, an opening party took place just after his S/S 2026 menswear show, with guests simply having to cross the road from one institution to another). ‘Michèle [Lamy, Owens’ wife] kept telling me, ‘You gotta stop calling it a retrospective!’ She doesn't like the finality – I'm leaning into it,’ he said. ‘A retrospective implies a decline, it makes you think about legacy and mortality and ageing, and how long do you stay relevant, and how important is that? I don't have the answers to any of those things, but I am thinking about them and addressing them publicly.’

READ: ‘I’m surprised that I got this far’: Rick Owens on his bombastic Paris retrospective, ‘Temple of Love’

Jonathan Anderson rebooted his brand – and debuted at Dior

It was a busy June for Jonathan Anderson. Alongside his much-anticipated debut show at Dior – a menswear offering for S/S 2026 presented at Paris’ Hôtel National des Invalides, which astutely reworked formal dress codes – the Northern Irish designer also revealed a rebooted vision for his eponymous, London-based label JW Anderson, which propelled him to renown after it was established in 2008. Doing away with the label’s usual seasonal runway shows, the new vision centres on the idea of the shop: in Paris, during haute couture week, he constructed a simulacrum of a new store concept by architects Sanchez Benton which included not only a fashion collection (a greatest hits of sorts, seeing signature pieces imbued with a greater commitment to craft) but a curation of intriguing objects and curiosities, from ceramics and vintage gardening tools to furniture, art, even honey. 'I like change. I have wanted to change things around for two years now, and finally I feel at one with who I am today and what the brand means,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘It’s things that I either want to wear or want to live with.’

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut: ‘bringing joy to the art of dressing’

Craig Green returned to the runway – and to Paris

After just over a decade in business, Craig Green remains one of British fashion’s definitive voices – a singular creative force whose imaginative collections transform humble menswear archetypes (workwear, uniforms, biker jackets) through imaginative construction and unusual fabrications, oftentimes evoking sculpture. This year, he made his return to Paris Fashion Week, having shown a year prior in his London studio, and elsewhere via lookbook (Green is one of a handful of designers who seem to be flourishing outside of the typical fashion calendar). The show was one of our highlights of the year: a poetic, free-thinking collection inspired by The Beatles, psychedelics and 1960s bed sheets – albeit in his typically inventive style. ‘Creativity how everything moves forward,’ Green told us in the October 2025 ‘Long View’ issue of Wallpaper*, in which we documented the process behind the collection. ‘You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.’

READ: ‘You have to be fearless’: inside the free-thinking world of Craig Green

Glenn Martens unveiled his vision for Maison Margiela

The task was unenviable: as the new creative director of Maison Margiela, Belgian designer Glenn Martens would not only have to follow the house’s namesake – arguably the most influential designer of recent times – but also John Galliano, his predecessor, whose final collection, which conjured a troupe of contorted dolls on the drizzly moonlit banks of the Seine, was a true fashion epic. But Martens, who comes with a pedigree of his own after zeitgeist-defining stints at Y/Project and Diesel, was more than up for a challenge. His own creatures were sheathed in masks (a nod to a Margiela hallmark, that of anonymity) and appeared pulled through the the walls of history – quite literally, with a melange of jacquards, Renaissance motifs and embossed leather (inspired by 16th-century Flemish wallpaper), evoking the faded grandeur of abandoned stately homes (indeed, the show set was a series of ‘palatial interiors’ printed on crumpled and crased paper). We called it a ‘thrilling’ debut, a task of ‘reinvention and reconstruction – a precarious balance of what to take and what to leave behind’.

READ: Glenn Martens’ thrilling Maison Margiela debut was a balancing act between past, present and future

Fashion East celebrated a ‘rowdy and raw’ 25 years of nurturing emerging talent

In September, Fashion East’s S/S 2026 runway show doubled as a celebration: 2025 marked 25 years of the Brick Lane-based talent incubator, which was founded by Lulu Kennedy to help forge the careers of London’s rising stars. The roll call of names which have passed through its doors is proof of its success: Jonathan Anderson, Martine Rose, Kim Jones, Craig Green and Grace Wales Bonner are all alumni of the unique scheme, which has long encapsulated London’s unique brand of young talent – defiantly creative, ‘rowdy and raw’ (as Kennedy herself described in a letter distributed to guests at the show). Taking place at the ICA, this season’s show – comprising collections by Nuba, Jacek Gleba and Mayhew – doubled as a Nike-sponsored exhibition tracing Fashion East’s impressive quarter century through its memorable clothing and ephemera, from Green’s ‘broken-fence’ chestplates to a leopard-print cake by Mowalola. Later in the year, in December, Kennedy and her creative partner Raphaelle Moore collected a Special Recognition Award at the 2025 Fashion Awards. ‘We’re proud to have created a unique space where designers have both the freedom to create fearlessly, and a family unit to uplift them,’ they said.

September’s fashion week saw almost too many debuts to count

2025 was fashion’s big reshuffle, seeing an unprecedented number of designers making their debuts at fashion’s biggest houses – from Dior to Chanel, Gucci to Celine. It was September fashion month, though, that was a true changing of the guard moment, with over 15 designers presenting their first collections as newly installed creative leads. These spanned an energetic and playful debut from Nicholas Aburn at Area in New York (the former Balenciaga designer riffed on the figure of the party girl in irreverent style), Simone Bellotti’s masterful first outing at Jil Sander, which saw him astutely explore ideas of modernity and lightness (staged in the brand’s white-walled Milan headquarters, it was a true clean slate momet), or Pierpaolo Piccioli’s typically heartfelt first collection for Balenciaga (an appearance from the Duchess of Sussex ensured column inches).

Elsewhere, notable debuts included Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe and Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier. And, while these debuts were largely lauded – particularly by critics – fiercer debates broke out online in the depths of Instagram comment sections. ‘I have read some really heinous comments about the work of many designers in these last few days,’ wrote Perfect magazine’s Edward Buchanan, former design director of Bottega Veneta, in a much-shared post. ‘It is not always perfect, and it is not always what you personally imagined it to be. You don’t have to like everything… but why not celebrate and talk about what you love?’

Though in Paris, it was Chanel and Dior which commanded the most attention

There were two debuts, though, which commanded the most attention: Jonathan Anderson’s womenswear debut for Dior (he had previously shown his first menswear collection in June) and Matthieu Blazy’s opening act for Chanel. Shrugging off the weight of expectation, both collections provided an astute and contemporary viewpoint on the future of two of fashion’s most storied houses – Anderson through a fearless ‘recoding’ of the house’s archive in his idosyncratic style (we said it was a collection of ‘bravery, vision and instinct’), Blazy through a collection of unbridled freedom and optimism (a twirling Awar Odhiang in a gown of kaleidoscopic feathers, the model who memorably closed the show, encapsulated the ‘triumphant’ mood). After Chanel, which marked the end of fashion month, we said that after all of the debuts, it finally felt like a ‘weight had been lifted’. ‘There will be no more anticipation or speculation, no more guessing games or gossip. The designers are in place, and a new chapter of fashion has begun – from there, the hard work begins.’

While Demna marked his Gucci debut with a Demi Moore-starring film

In what proved an astute move, the Georgian designer Demna – previously of Balenciaga – got ahead of the season’s other debuts by presenting his first collection as creative director of Gucci on the first day of Milan Fashion Week, allowing him a moment in which he dominated the narrative (and, of course, social media). Revealed first through a lookbook of Gucci ‘archetypes’, rewritten in his typically irreverent and subversive style (he called it a ‘bold, sexy new chapter’ for the house), it was followed up by a Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn-directed short, premiered at Milan’s Palazzo Mezzanotte. Titled The Tiger, it starred Demi Moore as the fictional ’head of Gucci international and chairman of California’ whose world begins to unravel at a family gathering. Even cleverer? Demna will get another ‘debut’ in 2026 when he holds his first runway for the house during Milan Fashion Week, in February.

READ: Gucci reveals its ‘bold, unapologetically sexy’ new era under Demna

The fashion world mourned the death of Giorgio Armani

In early September, the fashion world mourned the death of Giorgio Armani, an arbiter of Italian style who founded his eponymous house half a century ago, in 1975. One of fashion’s great success stories, Mr Armani began the label using funds made from selling his old Volkswagen Beetle; on his death, he left behind a multi-billion dollar empire spanning not only fashion but homeware, hotels, restaurants, fragrances and cosmetics. To mark his death, after a private funeral held earlier in the month, well-wishers gathered at Milan Fashion Week in September for his final Giorgio Armani show. Originally intended to celebrate 50 years in business, it took place at Brera’s Pinacoteca di Brera, where an accompanying exhibition unfolded in the galleries above. As ever, the S/S 2026 collection – modelled on a cast of Armani models past and present and watched on by muses Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton and Cate Blanchett – encapsulated Mr Armani’s brand of soft elegance, culminating with model Agnes Zogla in a glimmering gown adorned with his face. Afterwards, guests milled the galleries, where the designer’s work took its fitting place amid the great Italian masters – from Bellini to Raphael.

READ: In Milan, the fashion world gathers to say goodbye to Giorgio Armani at his final show

A Virgil Abloh exhibition celebrated his landmark legacy

Just over four years since his death, American designer Virgil Abloh leaves behind a towering legacy – one which was celebrated this September in Paris with the opening of an exhibition at the Grand Palais. Open for just a few days (cue a sold out booking system and snaking queues around the block), the exhibition opened the doors to his prolific archive of objects, clothing, ephemera, furniture and art, displayed across sprawling tables and shelves as if stepping into his headquarters. Indeed, one senses the polymathic designer – who made history as the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton – would enjoy the exhibition’s approach, which eshewed the behind-glass formality of the traditional museum (only self-restraint stopped you from picking up the objects on display). Titled ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’, the idea is for it to go on display around the world. ‘This is a true celebration of Virgil's vision and ethos,’ said the late designer’s wife, Shannon Abloh. ‘This offers an invitation to the world to engage and to build upon his ideas.’

READ: Inside the Paris exhibition cataloguing Virgil Abloh’s extraordinary archive

Grace Wales Bonner is appointed at Hermès

In late October, Hermès announced the appointment of Grace Wales Bonner as the house’s head of menswear, replacing Véronique Nichanian who made the choice to step down from the role after a record-breaking 37-year tenure (the longest of any working creative director at a fashion house). It felt long overdue for the British designer. An LVMH Prize-winning designer whose deeply felt collections for her eponymous label Wales Bonner – exploring themes of Black masculinity, migration and luxury – have consistently won plaudits for rich storytelling and meticulous craftsmanship, leading many to question why she hadn’t been chosen for a creative director role sooner (she had been rumoured for roles at both Louis Vuitton and Givenchy which went to Pharrell Williams and Sarah Burton respectively). On social media, there was a rare positive consensus on the decision: in her own post, the designer, who was born in South London to a British mother and Jamaican father, expressed her ‘deep honour’ at being chosen for the role. ‘It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers,’ she wrote.

READ: Lauded British designer Grace Wales Bonner is the new head of menswear at Hermès

1980s ‘architect of glamour’ Antony Price returned to the runway

The fashion critic Alexander Fury – who is an avid collector of his work – has called Antony Price, a British fashion designer who came to prominence in the 1980s, as ‘criminally underrated’. Best known for creating the visual universe of Roxy Music, and staging similarly dramatic runway shows in the decade, the ‘architect of glamour’ made a welcome runway return in November, courtesy of a one-off salon show with London-based label 16Arlington. Staged in the latter’s east London studio, the high-profile cast – from Lily Allen to Adwoa Aboah – prowled the runway in the high-voltage creations, puffing on cigarettes before posing for photographer Felix Cooper. ‘I personally felt Antony never really received his flowers,’ Capaldo told Wallpaper*. ‘To have been able to witness such a legend at work has probably been one of the most incredible and pivotal moments in my career. It's been really magical.’ Sadly, it was announced that Price passed away at the age of 80 on 17 December 2025.

READ: ‘Architect of glamour’ Antony Price makes a high-voltage return to the runway with 16Arlington

Dario Vitale said goodbye to Versace

It was to be one of fashion’s shortest tenures – just a few short months after his debut, in December, it was announced that Italian designer Dario Vitale would be exiting Versace. The former design director of Miu Miu, and the successor to Donatella Versace, the news came as some surprise: Vitale’s debut show at Milan Fashion Week, though divisive, had won over critics and was already being worn by celebrities (Olivia Dean wore custom Versace for a recent SNL appearance, while Addison Rae was also an early adopter). We said that Vitale had ‘stripped back conceptions and ushered in an energetic new vision: sexually charged and ‘reckless’, one that harkened back to the dress codes of Gianni Versace without nostalgia.’ On social media, the announcement came with some disappointment at the way in which designers are given so little time to make their mark: ‘There’s a disturbing pattern across the fashion industry: giant companies, plucking creative directors, placing them on a pedestal, parading them as the future, and then discarding them just as quickly,’ wrote casting director Anita Bitton in a much-shared Instagram post.

In Vienna, there was a chance to see Helmut Lang’s fashion archive for the first time

Though he exited the industry 20 years ago, Helmut Lang’s influence on fashion remains palpable. A definitive figure of the 1990s, he proposed a vision of sensually-charged minimalism and utility which continues to define the way that we dress today. He also changed the way we consume fashion, too: his memorable New York runway shows stripped back the artifice of the 1980s and its elevated runway, drafting friends to walk alongside supermodels, while stripped-back campaigns were captured by a young Juergen Teller. This revolutionary spirit is celebrated in ‘Séance de Travail 1986-2005’, an exhibition which opened in December at MAK in Vienna, which marks the first time Helmut Lang’s fashion archive is on show to the public – from memorable garments to archival film, ephemera, even recreations of elements from his equally definitive stores (Lang donated his archive to the institution in 2011). ‘Looking at Helmut Lang’s store architecture, it became obvious: his stores were all about directing the gaze. This is also what exhibitions need to do, but here it was essential. A photo wouldn’t suffice; you have to experience it,’ curator Marlies Wirth told Wallpaper* of the exhibition, which is designed to immerse you in the Lang universe – all the way down to the floor, which features a seating plan from a runway show.

READ: Inside Helmut Lang’s fashion archive in Vienna, which still defines how we dress today

Marty Supreme birthed the year’s viral garment – thanks to Timothée Chalamet

The Marty Supreme press tour has already come with some memorable sartorial moments – the film’s star Timothée Chalamet and girlfiend Kylie Jenner in matching orange Chrome Hearts for one – though it was more humble track jacket which went viral in December (the Josh Safdie-directed film is out on Christmas Day in the United States). The nylon windbreaker, created by the film’s production company A24 alongside California-based label Nahmias, was part of a merch drop for the film – adorned with ‘Marty Supreme’ and three gold stars, Chalamet has barely taken it off since. Pop-ups in New York and London have seen queues around the block to lay their hands on the $250 jacket – with resale sites selling the garment for up to for up to £4,366 (that’s over 20 times its original price). It speaks not only to A24’s marketing prowess, but also to the rise of movie merch – at the end of 2024, Mary Cleary explored its rise for Wallpaper*. ‘How it will continue to play out is yet to be seen, but one thing is almost certain: movie merch will continue to take over fashion,’ she wrote – and was right.

Virgil Abloh’s story is fabled. From designing T-shirts for a Chicago print shop in the mid-2000s to making history as the first Black creative director at a Parisian house a decade and a half later, the self-taught American designer reached a level of fame that stretched far beyond fashion. Part of a group of designers responsible for shifting the connotations of streetwear at his own brand Off-White and, later, at Louis Vuitton men’s, his work would go on to provide a fantastical vision of contemporary style, bridging the worlds of design, popular culture, music and celebrity in the process.

And, while certain aspects of his approach were scrutinised – such as his three per cent rule, where if you marginally change a design you make it new – these acts of defiance against the status quo helped Abloh redefine the remits of creativity, power and influence in the industry and beyond. The legacy he left after his death in 2021 (following a private battle with cancer) is perhaps best surmised in his widely circulated quote: ‘You can do it too.’

Inside ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’ exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris

This week at the Grand Palais in Paris, a new exhibition opens the doors of Abloh’s archive, telling the story of his singular career through 1,000 objects and designs. Brought to life by Nike and the Virgil Abloh Archive, it assembles many of his most significant works, spanning two decades (as well as posthumous projects, such as a one-off McIntosh amplifier in vivid orange) and the late designer’s prismatic interests (fashion, footwear, architecture, music, industrial design, painting, sculpture, printed matter, and advertising). The display opened on 30 September – the designer’s birthday, when he would have turned 45 – and runs until 9 October 2025.

Many of his most important designs for Nike feature in the exhibition, which is titled ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’, such as the plastic-tagged and quote-mark emblazoned trainers that were highly desirable in the 2010s. Elsewhere, Abloh’s T-shirt ballgowns sit beside treasures designed by others that he accumulated over decades, gathered alongside an archive of sketches and essays he started collecting when he was just a teenager.

In the years after his death, the Virgil Abloh Archive has continued to preserve artefacts more formally, with this display marking the first time its contents have been presented in Europe. Curated by Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan, the exhibition expands on a display shown in Miami in 2022.

‘Since Virgil's passing, we've been privately working to build the Virgil Abloh Archive, a collection of objects that serve as a living record of his work and worldview,’ says the late designer’s wife, Shannon Abloh. ‘I could only imagine debuting this in Paris, Virgil's second home. A city whose creative energy perfectly lends to the spirit of “The Codes” and a true celebration of Virgil's vision and ethos. This offers an invitation to the world to engage and to build upon his ideas.’

The Paris exhibition runs alongside a series of events, workshops, DJ sets and screenings hosted by voices from Abloh’s broader creative community. There will also be a book released that further details the contents of Abloh’s archive, and includes several of the designer’s most significant collaborations and magazine covers, including one he created for Wallpaper in 2020. The limited-edition issue was matt white and featured a ‘cut’ line inviting readers to slice the magazine in two – a typical provocation from the designer.

‘Cutting the physical object makes the magazine come alive and reinforces the concept that the magazine’s media may be physical, but it also occupies a space figuratively and literally,’ he said at time of the design (a number of copies were signed by Abloh, benefitting his “Post Modern” Scholarship Fund).

It feels fitting that the exhibition unfolds over fashion week in Paris, where Abloh showed many of his most influential collections. With the display, Nike and The Virgil Abloh Archive hope to celebrate his legacy in a city where his presence still reverberates, offering others a rare insight into his boundary-collapsing world. ‘Sharing his personal collection, unfinished work and magnum opuses with the world is a powerful way we honour Virgil’s deep belief in access and collaboration,’ says Shannon Abloh. ‘Through the Virgil Abloh Archive, his vision continues to inspire and guide the next generation.’

‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’ in partnership with Nike is on view at the Grand Palais until 9 October 2025.

Virgil Abloh’s cultural legacy continues to burn brightly, nearly four years after his untimely death. His studio continues, with many collaborations only reaching fruition since his passing, such as his Mercedes-Maybach concept. The establishment of the Virgil Abloh Archive, which hosts some 20,000 objects from his genre-spanning career, will keep his name, ideas and legacy in the public memory.

This new collaboration is a case in point. The McIntosh MA8950 x Virgil Abloh Integrated Amplifier was created especially for the new exhibition, ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’, at the Grand Palais in Paris. The amplifier was developed with McIntosh Laboratory, Inc, an all-American audio firm with a stellar reputation for high quality and robust, premium devices. The blue VDU displays, hefty cabinets and sheer sonic power have made the company a force to be reckoned with since it was founded in New York in 1949.

The McIntosh MA8950 x Virgil Abloh amp illustrates the company’s handcrafted process, with a bold orange finish that references many of Abloh’s more experimental pieces. The origins of the collaboration date back to early 2020, when Abloh – who had a long personal association with the audio brand – reached out to McIntosh to discuss a potential artistic proposal.

Now that device has been brought to life in this vivid one-off, an amplifier that stands alone but also acknowledges the importance of music and culture to Abloh’s practice over the years. Revealed to the world on 30 September 2025 – which would have been Abloh’s 45th birthday – the amp can be seen at ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’ (tickets here), which runs throughout Paris Fashion Week and ends on 9 October 2025.

VirgilAbloh.com, @VirgilAblohArchive, @VirgilAbloh

McIntoshLabs.com, @McIntoshLabs

Like so many young people from the Midwest who had big dreams, like so many American fashion designers before him, Virgil Abloh looked east to find his future. He cast his gaze toward Chicago, the city of house music and hip-hop, the Magnificent Mile and the South Side, Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, midcentury and modernist buildings.

Abloh went to Chicago to study architecture – a field that influenced the way he engaged with his own creativity and the imaginings of others. The city introduced Abloh to the buildings of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose work would be an enduring inspiration.

The architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Abloh studied, was one of the most famous in the world, not just because of the quality of the education students received there, which was top-notch, but because of the main building that housed it. S. R. Crown Hall, designed by the widely admired van der Rohe, was built in 1956. It stood as a masterpiece of modernism and has been described as 'the architectural father of open-space buildings.' It was the structure that sent generations of homebuyers and HGTV fanatics on the hunt for open-concept dwellings and turned everyone into an expert on “flow.” In 1982 the U.S. Postal Service issued a twenty-cent stamp featuring Crown Hall, and in 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton declared it a national historic landmark.

Van der Rohe himself helmed the College of Architecture from 1938 to 1958 and oversaw the development of the campus. IIT bore van der Rohe’s imprimatur in its buildings and in the architecture school’s curriculum, which emphasised understanding materials, constructing three-dimensional models, and following the philosophy that 'less is more' and 'God is in the details.' When Virgil Abloh stepped through the doors of Crown Hall for the first time as a graduate student in 2003, he was mesmerised by the building’s design and its clarity of purpose. He didn’t know why he was so captivated; he knew next to nothing about van der Rohe, who’d died in Chicago in 1969. But he knew the building was special, and he was intrigued and energized by its spirit.

Abloh was fresh from his undergraduate graduation at the University of Wisconsin, where he’d earned a degree in civil engineering. Neither of those data points—his alma mater or his major—had been something about which he was passionate. His parents encouraged him, told him, to study engineering. Like so many children of African immigrants, he was expected to enter one of three fields: law, medicine, or engineering. They were careers that immediately commanded respect. To practice law was to be presumed a success. A doctor was heroic. Engineers built things. There was nothing fuzzy or scattershot about these professions.

The decision to become a University of Wisconsin badger was a matter of geography and timing. The school was just over an hour’s drive north from Rockford, and since Abloh had missed the deadline to apply to the engineering school at the University of Illinois, he turned to Wisconsin, which had a later deadline. While in Wisconsin, Abloh divided his time between deejaying—something that had captured his imagination in high school and had given his mother Eunice heartburn—and schoolwork. His mother literally cried when she realized something so whimsical was getting a significant share of his attention. She worried even more when he installed a turntable in his dorm room. But he was a good student, suffering through advanced mathematics and all, so she couldn’t really complain. Music and skateboarding were his creative outlets.

Then, just before graduating, he discovered a new one. He took his first art history class. It focused on the Renaissance, a period in European painting stretching from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and including artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci—an early multihyphenate. He also discovered Caravaggio and his manipulation of light and shadow known as chiaroscuro. He was excited to learn that the artist, who had begun working at the end of the Renaissance period, had helped to usher in a completely new style of painting. An artist changed the way people thought.

Abloh made his way to architecture because it was both a creative pursuit and a practical one. It was a method of problemsolving within an aesthetic context, and it was a natural extension of his undergraduate education. 'Architecture would be my bridge between the rational world of engineering and these emotive forms I was always drawn to,' Abloh said.

At the Illinois Institute of Technology, Abloh enrolled in a course of study designed for those who were coming to architecture as fully formed professionals working in a different field or as graduates who’d received their bachelor’s degree in another subject. The rigorous three-year program was intended to give students the tools and education they needed to become a licensed architect, or to at least think like one.

'The interesting part about architecture training, in my opinion, is you learn to present. You learn to present the work for design reviews,' said Frank Flury, an associate professor at the college of architecture who had Abloh as a student. 'It doesn’t make a big difference if you’re a painter, an architect, or a salesman. The important part is that you learn to present. This is a very important part of our discipline and why some people study architecture.

'They learn to dress properly, go out to talk to people, to be self-confident—because if you need to sell your idea or your design project, you need to be convincing to people.'

[Flury] had worked with hundreds of students. Yet he remembered Abloh. In part, this was because Abloh was a visual curiosity. To an architecture professor who was a study in unremarkable neutrals, Abloh’s clothes were offbeat concoctions, like a hoodie with fur stitched around its edges. Abloh, who’d become more attuned to fashion as a college student freed from the formality of Boylan High School, conjured his clothes from his imagination, and his mother realized them with her sewing expertise. But his building models also stood apart from those of his peers.

'I wouldn’t say he was necessarily the top architect or designer, but he was always very, very much interested in graphic design. So his drawings were all always compositionally very, very interesting,' Flury said. 'The scale was different. . . . He designed and made things a little different than other students.'

Abloh never intended to work as an architect, something he never explicitly confided to his parents. But he expressed a kinship with its method of problem-solving and its creativity. He enjoyed intellectualising, theorising, and hypothesising. He could expound on anything. He had a compulsion to explain. He was fond of the word practice, as both a noun and a verb. He used it as a way of describing his work in fashion: he was applying ideas and theories to real-world situations. With fashion he took disconnected notions on a mood board or laptop and turned them into garments. 'I liked the idea of taking a program, thinking of a solution and being able to defend it,' he said. 'I think I always had a sense of how to internalize that method and apply it somewhere else.'

Unlike many of his peers in the fashion industry, Abloh was at peace with the fact that everything he produced was not in its perfect form. It was, after all, a practice. Everything was a work in progress.

Excerpted from MAKE IT OURS: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh by Robin Givhan. Copyright 2025 by Robin Givhan. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Robin Givhan's biography of Virgil Abloh, will be released 24 June.

In celebration of Design Miami and Art Basel Miami, American Express has commissioned four young artists and designers - Eny Lee Parker, Surin Kim, Serban Ionescu, and Kumkum Fernando - to reinterpret childhood toys into iconic limited edition collectibles. The ‘toys’ - available to purchase online in limited numbers - will be on display as part of Play by American Express Platinum - an interactive gallery space (open to Centurion and Amex Platinum card holders and their guests). 

American Express explores the meaning of play

The exhibition space itself - located on the Miami Edition beachfront is imagined as a grown up playground -  designed in collaboration with toy masters Mattel Creations and PlayLab, Inc. (a multidisciplinary Los Angeles-based creative studio which collaborated with Virgil Abloh on the Louis Vuitton Men’s Fashion Shows) - equipped with oversized playground installations. 

Growing up in Sao Paulo, Eny Lee Parker’s childhood was filled with imagination, rather than physical toys. 'My playtime revolved around coloured pencils, gel pens, fabrics, and magazines,' says the designer, known for her lighting and ceramic furniture. For the Play initiative, she crafted a soft fabric bunny named Benny.  'I have a strong affinity for fabrics, being resourceful and reusing materials, techniques, tools, and more,' she says. Leftover upholstery fabric provided by the French wallpaper and fabrics company Elitis forms his body, which measures 28 inches 'when the ears are perked up.' Through creating Benny, Parker hopes to express 'that play is a universal experience, accessible to people of all backgrounds, ages, and social classes. It's an essential part of life that can manifest in countless forms, reminding us of the importance of playfulness and creativity in our daily lives.'

'Play is always in my work as an element of reverie, chance and adventure,' says the Romanian multidisciplinary artist and designer Serban Ionescu who has created a chess set he named City of Canals. 'I was always fascinated with chess as a recognizable singular object made of many parts and I played it in high school,' he says. Some of the pieces resemble previous works and potential future works: 'a smorgasbord of my works, many parts coming together as one, like a City.' 

He adds, 'When creating “City of Canals” for Play by American Express Platinum, I wanted the imagination to roam between scales and function. Scale for instance between the smaller individual chess pieces playing with each other to the large slide which will also be brought to life as an oversized playground installation that guests can enjoy in Miami.'

Ionescu adds, 'Play should always be there and we should hold on to it as long as we can dream.'

Select toys from the 'Play by American Express Platinum' collection will be available to purchase online. Shop via playbyplatinum.com

americanexpress.com

Since its founding in the 1940s, Ikea has made it its mission to create accessible furniture and design that reflect the needs of its time. For this reason, vintage Ikea finds are often an exciting window into the history of contemporary interiors and how we lived over the past eight decades. Ikea recently celebrated its 80th anniversary with the Nytillverkad collection, a new line that revisits some of the most beloved pieces from its archives, but vintage Ikea furniture is still going strong with iconic objects by the likes of Verner Panton and Niels Gammelgaard, rare designs that can be found second-hand on platforms such as 1stDibs.

We scoured the web to find some of the most exciting vintage Ikea finds available to buy now, from furniture to lighting, and including rugs and children’s furniture.

Shop our vintage Ikea picks

Tiger rug by Walter Van Beirendonck

Launched in 2016, the ‘Glödande’ collection by Walter Van Beirendonck featured the Belgian fashion designer's signature bold prints across furniture and accessories. The limited-edition rug features his signature superhero ‘Kwade Tijger’ in bold colours.

Buy now

Sälen Armchair by Knut & Marianne Hagberg 

Available in its original packaging and instructions, this 1982 chair by Knut & Marianne Hagberg was never assembled and is an incredibly rare find (having originally been in production for just 2 years). The Sälen chair is made of Scandinavian pinewood with a red lacquered steel seat and back and white pillow.  

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‘Guide’ shelving system by Niels Gammelgaard

The ‘Guide’ shelving system by Niels Gammelgaard was designed in the 1980s, and features a powder-coated metal frame with four black shelves with profiles in bold colours, making it a classic of industrial design with a twist.

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‘Markerad’ daybed by Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh's 2019 ‘Markerad’ collection for Ikea featured a limited-edition range of furniture and accessories featuring recurring elements of the designer's work, from fluorescent tags to sentences in quotation marks. A highlight of the collection, this daybed is perhaps the most conservative among the designs, featuring a classic midcentury silhouette with grey textile upholstery and an orange label. 

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‘Storvik’ lounge chair by Carl Öjerstam

Made of a light bamboo frame and a woven rattan seat, the ‘Storvik’ lounge chair by Carl Öjerstam was awarded the Red Dot Award in 2002. The lounge chair's inviting forms are ideal for both indoor and outdoor, and feature a touch of that whimsical approach that has defined Ikea ever since its beginning.

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‘Vilbert’ chairs by Verner Panton

Verner Panton created furniture for Ikea in the 1990s, and the ‘Vilbert’ chairs are among the collaboration's most distinctive designs. The chairs (here available as a set of two) were originally produced by Kellco Switzerland and were distributed by Ikea.

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Rug by Louise Treschow

The output of artist Louise Treschow included tapestries and jewellery, and her brief stint at Ikea resulted in linear furniture and this woven-motif rug. A rarity for Ikea at the time, the hand-tufted rug was produced in a limited edition of only 1,000, this being number 100 in the series.

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‘Peggy’ highchair by Karin Mobring

This vintage Ikea highchair was designed by Karin Mobring in 1959 and became part of the company's catalogue in 1966. Mobring's work was spotted by Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad at Stockholm Furniture Fair, and she became part of the company's in-house team, creating over 100 designs over four decades.

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Peanut wicker bench

This rare wicker bench features a slim frame and a whimsical peanut-shaped seat. Made in the 1980s, the bench combines a refined craft construction with the sense of humour that has always defined the Swedish company's designs

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Skye Chaise Lounge by Tord Björklund

One of Ikea's most prolific and iconic creators, Tord Björklund's pieces would be at home in a James Bond-esque interior. Originally produced in the 1980s, the Skye Chaise Lounge is a postmodern design featurng a steel frame and seat with leather upholstery. 

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Back in 2017, A1043 – a contemporary gallery in Paris founded by artist Didier Courbot and landscape architect Stéphanie Courbot – hosted an exhibition of works by Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. While the radical Japanese fashion designer is best known for her sculptural, avant-garde clothing collections, the exhibition instead focused on her lesser-known furniture, created in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ‘It doesn’t have a classic definition; it’s outside the codes,’ Stéphanie told Wallpaper* at the time. ‘What's interesting is that design can often evolve from people who do not work in design.’

The latter statement provides the impetus for a new exhibition, ‘Fashion to Furniture’ (1 April – May 6, 2023), which opens at A1043 this week. Expanding on the works from Kawakubo – which feature once again here – the exhibition looks more widely at furniture created by fashion designers, from a slew of seminal names including Virgil Abloh, Ann Demeulemeester, Jean Paul Gaultier and Martin Margiela. The Courbots say that they were particularly drawn to the idea of creators working outside of the medium for which they are known: ‘Although it is not unusual for creators to go beyond the scope of their field, it is fair to say that these experiments often result in things that make an impression,’ they say. 

‘Fashion to Furniture’ at Paris’ A1043 gallery

The exhibition begins in the 1980s with the works of Kawakubo, who first created furniture in order to populate her Comme des Garçons fashion stores. The oftentimes brutalist objects, featuring sharp corners and industrial elements, provided an interplay with both her clothing and the architecture of the unconventional retail spaces. ‘[It is] a technique to create an overall and coherent whole... the boutiques she creates in conjunction with architects are meticulously constructed and reflect very precise ideas,’ say the Courbots. ‘The shapes, materials, textures and dimensions are carefully considered with a particular purpose and meaning.’

Later works include forays into furniture by Paris’ enfant terrible Jean Paul Gaultier, who was first commissioned by French furniture maker Via in the 1990s. In the exhibition, one of these pieces features – a stack of trunks on a metal-wheeled stand, which was his take on a traditional dresser (titled the ‘House Mode’ dresser, each of the trunks is actually a pull-out draw). ’At the time this dynamic designer was constantly travelling and on the move which is perhaps why the entire series is a reinterpretation of travel trunks,’ say the Courbots. ‘This is the world of travel, as well as of appearances, light, the moment and the ephemeral.’

Other pieces include an all-white couch by Margiela – his label’s headquarters were famously rendered entirely in the colour, from walls to furniture and the atelier’s laboratory coats – and Demeulemeester’s mid-1990s ’Table Blanche’ set. Also painted white, its surface is designed to wear off in time to reveal the wood below. ‘The furniture becomes a canvas on which the signs of use are etched... the bearer of wear and tear and the passing of time.’

The most contemporary work in the exhibition is by late multi-hyphenate designer Virgil Abloh, who transcended his work at fashion houses Off-White and Louis Vuitton to expand into numerous fields – including product design, art and music, alongside a number of collaborations with a diverse array of brands from Nike and Levi’s to Cassina and Victorinox. Here, his ‘Efflorescence Chair 3’ features, a spray-painted concrete block that is part of a wider ‘Efflorescence’ collection first designed for Paris’ Galerie Kreo in 2019. ‘[The] handful of pieces of furniture bring the noisy, hectic but rich world of cities into the interior space of the gallery,’ say the Courbots. ‘It is no longer just a question of design but of creating objects with significant evocative power, thus verging on the field of sculpture.’

‘“Fashion to Furniture” is an opportunity to exhibit under a unifying theme a range of works that can be grouped together using the term furniture, but which are created in a radically different way and stand out from mainstream design,’ the Courbots continue. 

‘Indeed, is it really design at all? The designs originate in very different ways and without questioning the use, production or comfort. But what can be noted is that, without any obvious intention, this furniture adds to the field of design by questioning its limits.’

‘Fashion to Furniture’ runs from 1 April – May 6, 2023 at A1043, Paris.

a1043.com

Menswear fashion month concluded with Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2023, a packed six-day schedule that encompassed the city’s storied names – among them Hermès, Dior and Givenchy – in a glimpse of the menswear’s season ahead. Highlights include Anthony Vaccarello’s return to the Paris menswear schedule at Saint Laurent having shown in Morocco and Los Angeles in recent seasons, KidSuper ‘co-creating’ Louis Vuitton’s latest menswear collection alongside the house’s design team (a full-time successor to Virgil Abloh is yet to be announced), and an appearance from Grace Wales Bonner, marking the British designer’s Paris Fashion Week debut. Emerging names – from Bianca Saunders to Botter – showed alongside. 

Here’s the best of Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2023, as selected by Wallpaper*.

The best of Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2023

Kiko Kostadinov

Bulgarian designer Kiko Kostadinov said that he wanted to look outside the ‘restrictive frame of menswear’ this season; to do so, he referenced little-known, but nonetheless influential, avant-garde women designers Anne-Marie Beretta, Irene Lentz and Sorelle Fontana – ‘the quiet superstars of the Italian canon’. He also noted the influence of his ‘closest collaborators’ Laura and Deanna Fanning, the designers who helm the womenswear arm of his label, and their Central Saint Martins graduate collection. As such, he noted a ‘geometric rigour’ and expansive use of colour across the vivid collection, featuring the off-kilter approach to cut and silhouettes – blouson-style jackets with V-shaped hems, caped sleeveless overcoats, wide-leg trousers puckered at the waistband – which has defined Kostadinov’s work so far. Figurative illustrations by London-based Estonian artist Mariann Metsis also featured, while other ‘decorative anomalies’, like découpage, paid hommage to Kostadinov’s maternal grandmother.

Ludovic de Saint Sernin

Sunday morning opened with another high-octane outing from Belgian designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin, who next month will show his debut collection for Ann Demeulemeester having been announced as the house’s new creative director late last year. Titled ‘Private Show’, the eponymous collection drew from De Saint Sernin’s childhood obsession with Fashion TV (clips from the show played over the soundtrack). As such, the collection mined the tropes of Y2K style – which has become something of a hallmark of the designer’s approach – with mini handkerchief dresses in gleaming chain mail (for men and women), lace-up leather mini dresses (with matching chokers), and slinky unravelling knitwear. De Saint Sernin has always drawn inspiration from the figure of the supermodel, and a real one walked today here – Irina Shayk, who strode the runway in an LDSS denim two-set, trailed by a male model in nothing but a pair of denim underpants.

Sacai

Chitose Abe said that the inspiration for her A/W 2023 collection was Christopher Nolan’s 2014 science-fiction film Interstellar, which charts a group of explorers as they seek to travel through a time-compressing wormhole in space. As such, she noted a play on the ‘relationship between past, present and future’ in the designer’s typically hybrid forms, like a prim tweed twin-set with flared puffer jacket back. Other pieces were able to shape-shift, with zip fastenings which changed the silhouette of a dress, or a coat which merged into a backpack. The collection also featured collaborations with outerwear brand Moncler (with whom Sacai had first worked over a decade earlier) alongside Abe’s take on Carhartt’s signature workwear and a new sneaker created alongside Nike in a continuing partnership. ‘The importance of learning from the past and a future informed with what’s gone before’, the accompanying notes elucidated of the cinematic inspiration, quoting one of Interstellar’s memorable lines to capture the collection’s sense of curiosity and experimentation: ‘We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars.’

Namacheko

‘Middle Age Grunge’ was the title of Namacheko’s latest collection, the Sweden-based label of former civil engineering and art history student Dilan Lurr which draws on the designer’s Kurdish heritage (Namacheko first began as a 2017 photography project documenting quotidian life in Kirkuk, Kurdistan, where he was born). The brief collection notes comprised simply a list of words – among them ‘knights’, ‘punk’, ‘jousting’, ‘grunge’ – suggesting inspiration from both contemporary counterculture and medieval dress. As such, a profusion of studs seemed to evoke chainmail, while lace-up elements and top-heavy silhouettes recalled historic menswear attire. Zips, acid-wash denim, and elements of leather, meanwhile, lent the energetic collection its rebellious undercurrent. 

Bode

Introducing womenswear to her offering for the first time this season, Emily Adams Bode Aujla looked towards her family history for a transporting show which took place on the stage of the 19th-century Théâtre du Châtelet. Drawing inspiration from the Rice sisters – the designer’s mother and aunts – the show’s setting was the Crane Estate, a Massachusetts residence where her aunt Janet worked while in college (its exterior was recreated as the collection’s backdrop). There, in the 1970s, she was introduced to 90-year-old Ms Long, its eccentric resident who would descend each evening for dinner wearing intricately constructed gowns from a century prior. This feeling of dishevelled glamour, and the idea of dressing across American eras, informed Bode Aujla’s approach this season – from elongated flapper gowns, edged with tassels, and heavily embroidered velvet dresses, to Western-style shirting and a take on the tuxedo. Menswear continued Bode Aujla’s homespun approach, with tasselled suede overcoats, collarless jackets and a selection of eveningwear featuring the brand’s signature embroidered motifs and quilting. Together, the expansive collection marked a step forward for the designer, who is cleverly fleshing out the Bode world with her distinct vision of American style. 

Hermès

An elegance permeated Véronique Nichanian’s latest menswear collection for Hermès, shown in the curved ground-floor hallway of the modernist Maison de l’Unesco building. ‘An attention to the sensuality of the clothes,’ said the house of the A/W 2023 offering, which was rooted in the sense of intimacy which defines Nichanian’s work – a pocket hidden at first glance, an unexpected flash of leather on a pea coat, or the feeling of being enveloped in shearling (of the last, a series of wide-shouldered shearling overcoats were some of the collection’s standout pieces). Sensuality came too in the array of other fabrics Nichanian used this season – an obsession with the materiality of clothing is at the heart of her approach – from the ‘caress of cashmere and flannels’ to the mix of leather grains, or the silk foulards which were in-set into roll-neck sweaters and cardigans. Flashes of satin and the shimmer of jewellery lent the latter section of the collection a dressed-up mood, a sensual proposition for Hermès eveningwear with all of Nichanian’s lightness of touch. 

Loewe

Jonathan Anderson called his latest menswear collection for Loewe ‘a reductionist act’ in a continued line of thinking from his recent JW Anderson show during Milan Fashion Week S/S 2023, whereby the designer noted a desire for clarity (‘I think we’re going to head into a season of reduction and stripping things back,’ he said at the time). Set in a vast white cube – the space interrupted only by two towering artworks by Washington-born Julien Nguyen of his muse Nikos – the A/W 2023 collection drew back the surrealism of recent collections towards a stress on singular garments and sharply defined silhouettes. The designer said he had been interested in the work of the Old Masters, here figured in the materials used throughout the collection: oversized jackets hammered from pewter and copper, spiked metal angel wings, shirts that appeared to have been moulded from paper and parchment. ‘Capturing a moment and a movement in real time, using traditional means in non-traditional ways – shapes are moulded, bended, frozen, tailored,’ said Anderson via the collection notes. Of the last, a series of elongated overcoats – some of which pulled over the head – or a rigorous single-breasted suit, grounded the collection in the reality of the everyday. As ever, Anderson said it was his visceral response to what he sees in the world around him. ‘Fashion has never felt more exciting,’ he said post-show. ‘As a designer, you have to look at the culture and respond to it. Hopefully, we are entering a period in design where it is about feeling uncomfortable. It’s good to be able to reinvent yourself.’

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus

Rei Kawakubo said that the theme of her latest Comme des Garçons Homme Plus collection was ‘tailoring of the avant-garde’. Riffing on hallmarks of the designer’s most memorable works – padded elements across the back of a jacket, for example, recalled her seminal S/S 1997 ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’ collection – the concise outing provided a distinct take on the traditions of tailoring, whether elongated blazers which opened along the front with undulating zips, elements of fur, or jackets with sleeve-like appendages emerging from the body. A series of cage headpieces by Gary Card and Valériane Venance featured alongside, while the collection also featured a number of prints by Canadian artist Edward Goss, who is self-taught and works with found objects like newspaper, tape and photographs. Here, scrawled motifs by the artist vividly appeared across tailoring and T-shirts.

Dior

A monolithic grey box on the Place de la Concorde – surrounded by hordes of screaming fans for the phalanx of celebrity attendees, including K-pop star Jimin – provided the setting for Kim Jones’ latest menswear collection for Dior. Inside, vast screens ran across its outer walls, flickering to life to show a dramatic reading of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land by British actors Robert Pattinson and Gwendoline Christie (both were also in attendance), which provided the show’s backdrop. It lent the collection a contemplative air, which Jones said was drawn from the ‘great rivers of London and Paris’, the ‘eddies and flows of the water… in which flux, movement, ease and fluidity are central’. Jones also noted the inspiration of Yves Saint Laurent, who took over from Christian Dior at the house aged just 21, and the ‘dynamism’ of his work, which saw historical couture silhouettes reinterpreted in a time of change (Saint Laurent was head of the house only briefly, from 1958-1960). Such has been Jones’ own aim at the house so far, to transpose the intricacies of Dior couture onto a contemporary menswear offering, here figured in a collection of extraordinary detail – delicate three-dimensional blossom-like motifs across tailoring and sweaters, a ‘CD’ monogram in lace on a neat pearl-buttoned cardigan, or juxtaposed technical elements, like the toggle fastenings on the sleeves of tailored jackets and shirts. Silhouettes were voluminous and poetic – billowing, wide-cut trousers, pleated kilts, sweaters pulled up on one side to reveal a shirt sleeve beneath – while others drew directly from the Dior archive, like an elongated smock which found inspiration in a marine ensemble created during Saint Laurent’s tenure at the house, here ‘transposed and transformed’.

Paul Smith

The vast American Church in Paris’ 7th arrondissement provided the backdrop for Paul Smith’s latest menswear collection, which the British designer said was inspired by the modernist movement (particularly those working in the field of architecture and design). As such, the collection featured sharply drawn silhouettes – like the top-stitch single-breasted suit which opened the collection – which morphed into softer, more amorphous styles, like cocooning puffer jackets (opening at the sides with popper fastenings) or colourful poncho-like knits. The brand called it a ‘more erudite’ outing for the designer this season, giving particular focus to his expertise in print; across the collection, bold graphic designs featured, inspired by modernist interiors (one was called the ‘rug print’, comprising a melange of floral and textural motifs). A re-examination of the three-piece suit, which began last season, continued with a crewneck vest serving as Smith’s reimagining of the waistcoat, worn beneath a matching jacket or over colourful shirting. 

Junya Watanabe

The brief notes for Junya Watanabe’s A/W 2023 collection noted that the Japanese designer had ‘no particular theme this season’; rather, he had become fascinated with Innerraum, the Berlin-based accessory label of Livio Graziottin and Sergio Eusebi. Their futuristic forms – created using polymer plating and the protective elements of motorsports gear – appeared across the collection, morphing with the looks like armour (‘Every single object is experienced as an extension of the body and is a metaphor of the body itself,’ Graziottin and Eusebi say of their designs). ‘They create new things by assembling materials such as protective gear parts used in different fields,’ the notes continued. ‘Some of Watanabe’s past clothes were designed with a similar logic. This is a reproduction of those archives.’ The collection itself – nearly all black, and moving from narrow tailoring towards signature street- and workwear-inspired silhouettes – also featured a slew of other collaborations, including Palace, Levi’s, Karrimor, Carhartt and North Face, reinterpreted in Watanabe’s recognisable style. 

Acne Studios

‘When I work, it’s sort of like therapy. I’ve been thinking a lot about the masculine baggage that we drag along as guys, boys, men and I wanted to explore it for fall,’ said Acne Studios’ Jonny Johansson of the brand’s A/W 2023 collection, which imagined a ‘modern caveman’. ‘I felt inspired by the new man, the new way of looking at things, and by men who can show vulnerability aesthetically. I was intrigued by the thought of a caveman being the most masculine thing and I used that as a contrast.’ As such, Johansson combined fabrics and cuts which ‘traditionally skew feminine’ – whether ‘second-skin’ miniature cropped T-shirts, lace trims emerging from the waistband of trousers, or crochet knitwear – with tough leather, shearling and elements of retro sportswear. ‘The contrast I built the collection on is simple: ultra-masculine versus ultra-feminine.’ 

Louis Vuitton

A colourful imagining of a house provided the set for Louis Vuitton’s latest menswear collection, which this season was co-created by the house’s design team – many of whom worked under Virgil Abloh – and American designer and artist KidSuper, aka Colm Dillane. Known for an approach that attempts to recapture the wonderment and curiosity of being a child, Dillane brought a similar sense of levity to this collection, which began with one of his short films and was accompanied by a rousing live performance from Rosalía. In the collection notes, the house said this latest outing was about a feeling of collectivity; as such, the set had been created by cult filmmakers Michel and Olivier Gondry, while longtime Abloh collaborator Ibrahim Kamara styled the collection. It lent the spectacle an eclectic, in-it-together quality, which continued to find influence from Abloh – the various looks seemed to capture the late designer’s desire for imaginative flights in his collections, seeing garments emblazoned with faces, or playful, idiosyncratic elements, like a suit and hat stitched with pages of paper – while new ideas emerged, like the hand-drawn motifs by Dillane which decorated the latter looks. Much of the collection hinged on tailoring: broad across the shoulder with wide pointed lapels, often featuring elements of embellishment – whether a ruffled trim, or zip fastenings that sliced diagonally across the body of a tailored jacket evoking the shape of a doublet. The show ended with a collective bow from Dillane and the entire menswear design team. What comes next is yet to be announced, though the search for a permanent menswear artistic director – a position unfilled since Abloh’s death in 2021 – continues.

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake

The latest Homme Plissé Issey Miyake was directed by Adrien M & Claire B, a French visual and performing arts company that, for the occasion, created an immersive video installation that stretched across the walls of the Palais de Tokyo space. A series of projections also featured on the runway itself, seeing flitting lights – ‘like an imaginary river of myriad particles’ – undulating across the runway, and across pieces of sheer fabric, brandished by a group of dancers. As ever, the presence of such choreography was symbolic of the brand’s desire to create clothing primed for movement, the spectacle this season evoking ‘a world that blurs our perception of space and gravity’, as the notes described. The collection itself was titled ‘Upon a Simplex’, an exploration of triangles and other simple geometric shapes, which when put together can develop into increasingly complex forms. As such, the ‘Edge’ coat was one of this season’s new introductions, a cocooning style in high-density polyester pleats, which draws inspiration from the composition of triangles, while grid-like and triangle prints referenced the work of American architect and philosopher R Buckminster Fuller. Other pieces – like a skirt and pullover parka – were cleverly constructed from overlaid triangles of fabric. Such experimentations are the heart of Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s  approach, an ever-evolving vision for the brand which continues to transform the way clothing is made and worn.

Givenchy

There was a feeling of reset to the stark optic-white show space erected in the École Militaire for Matthew M Williams’ latest menswear collection for Givenchy, a mood reflected in the pin-sharp black tailoring of the opening looks – a nod to what Williams called ’a new formality’ that could be traced in origin to house founder Hubert de Givenchy. As the show went on, these codes loosened up – a nod, Williams said, to the multiplicities of contemporary masculinity – from cleverly hyper-layered garments in a melange of colour and print (camo, cheetah and tartan among them) to unhemmed tailoring, a literal undoing of the formality of the opening looks. Part of the inspiration was a photograph of Hubert de Givenchy in the 1960s, wearing a jumper around his waist like a skirt: ‘[It is about] how you wear things... self-expression through the imbuement of personal gestures into clothes.’ It led to  Williams’ most expansive menswear offering yet – at least in terms of the breadth of the collection – and a clear declaration of his vision for Givenchy as he enters his third year at the house. 

Hed Mayner

Tel Aviv-based designer Hed Mayner’s previous collection was an exploration of proportion, magnifying garments in size in an attempt to ‘destigmatise [them] from class, gender and formality’. This season, he continued this exploration, though with a shift in focus, beginning the collection by imagining how a child’s tuxedo jacket might look on an adult body. Mayner – who spent much of this season commuting from his Tel Aviv home to the Tuscan factory which makes his clothing – said the closeness to the production process had offered a ‘more objective’ approach to shape, moving from the expansive towards something ‘more direct, more urgent, a little bit bent’. As such, pieces were distorted in shape, pulling and twisting around the body, while purposefully awkward fitting trousers were designed to give the impression that garments had been borrowed or passed between generations ‘of fathers, grandfathers and younger brothers’. A new collaboration with Reebok followed a similar rationale, with a version of the sportswear brand’s ’Classic Leather‘ sneaker washed and bent into shape, as if well loved.  

Bianca Saunders

Andam Award-winning British designer Bianca Saunders continued her exploration of archetypal menswear garments with an A/W 2023 collection titled ‘Playwork’. Saunders said she had drawn inspiration from Jamaican comedian Oliver Samuels, whose show ‘Oliver at Large’ saw sketches played out in quotidian settings – ’stripped-back set-up bars, bedrooms, corner shops’ – transformed into the extraordinary by what Saunders called the ‘amplitude’ of his performance. ’[He] tricks the eye into seeing a world far greater than what modest first impressions may imply,’ she said via the collection notes. Set against the backdrop of a back-room bar – Saunders’ own imagining of Samuels’ humble sets – this same line of thinking informed the clothing itself, whereby classic tailoring, overcoats and denim were manipulated with Saunders’ subversive approach to cut and silhouette, seeing garments hold structure as if scrunched or folded. The collection also featured pieces from Saunders’ second capsule collection for At.Kollective – a collaborative project led by Ecco Leather – which saw the designer hone her burgeoning accessories offering with square-toed shoes and a series of slouchy handbags inspired by the shape of a tent. 

Saint Laurent

In the vast central rotunda of the 18th-century Bourse de Commerce – formerly a place of trade for wheat and other commodities, now home to the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection art gallery – Anthony Vaccarello made a return to Paris Fashion Week Men’s, having shown his menswear collections for Saint Laurent outside of the house’s native city in past seasons (most recently, in Morocco’s Agafay Desert). Inside the space, black-leather seating lined the concrete walls of Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s circular ‘structure-within-a-structure’, its shape providing a visual link to the glowing disk by Es Devlin that rose from the desert floor at the end of Vaccarello’s Moroccan show. ‘Almost inadvertently, the O shape, a symbol of perfection and purity of execution, becomes a recurring, pertinent thread at Saint Laurent,’ said the house. 

The collection itself was described as a ‘sequel’ to the designer’s recent menswear collections, which have been defined by an aesthetic rigour and sharply drawn silhouettes – notably in severe, wide-shouldered tailoring – tempered by moments of fluidity and romance. Here, Vaccarello noted a desire for ‘ample volume’, figured in vast overcoats and wide-legged trousers inspired by the cut of sweat pants. A riff on the pussy bow ran throughout, while Vaccarello also talked of a ‘reciprocity’ between the masculine and feminine, including through a series of hooded pieces, reminiscent of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘capuche’ dresses of the mid-1980s. 

While Vaccarello’s womenswear collections typically end with the Eiffel Tower’s shimmering light show as a backdrop, this finished with an altogether more restrained, but no less impactful, gesture: a single light hovering on Charlotte Gainsbourg, who provided the show’s live piano soundtrack, the models fading into shadows as the composition reached its crescendo. 

Wales Bonner

Following a triumphant show at Florence’s Pitti Uomo in June 2022, Grace Wales Bonner continued her European tour with a stop in Paris, which marked her debut collection in the city. For the occasion, she selected a historic salon on the Place Vendôme, a place synonymous with Parisian luxury – having housed couture and jewellery houses, international banks and hotels, including The Ritz – to show a collection that looked towards those who have chosen Paris as creative refuge over the decades, from James Baldwin to Josephine Baker (‘the rebel sojourners, arriving like a stream of stars, coming together in their uniqueness as if a constellation’). ‘What I found most interesting about these international artists and writers being in Paris was what it opened up for them in terms of freedom of expression,’ she said after the show. This sense of creative liberation came through in a rich amalgam typical of Wales Bonner’s work: diaphanous silk shirting and scarves which featured works by British artist Lubaina Himid (an ode to ‘the Black flâneur’), silk eveningwear created in collaboration with Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard (conjuring Parisian nightlife of the early 20th century), and swathes of handcraft and embellishment (baroque pearls, Ghanaian beads and Swarovski crystals were inspired by the ‘ceremonial wardrobe’). The collection also featured a preview of Wales Bonner’s kit for the Jamaican national football team – in collaboration with Adidas – while the show’s soundtrack featured ‘original commissions’ by Duval Timothy, Sampha and Kendrick Lamar.

Alessi unveils a new project by Virgil Abloh, offering a new take on traditional cutlery, in collaboration with his London-based design studio Alaska Alaska. Presented for the first time at Fuorisalone 2022, through a special installation designed by Studio Temp, the project also marks a new era for the Italian company, which celebrated its centenary in 2021 and is now beginning a new chapter of its design history.  

Virgil Abloh cutlery: an ‘almost brutalist’ take on a classic tool

When we spoke with Alberto Alessi on the occasion of the company's 100-year anniversary, he told us about his family's factory in the 1970s, specialising in metal manufacturing. When Abloh visited the Alessi manufacturing facilities, that's what caught his eye. 'I found that Virgil had a completely different way to look at things and objects,’ recalls Alberto Alessi.

‘So when he looked at our world, the world of Alessi, it was through the eyes of one who loved the idea of a mechanical workshop – I remember that the first reference he showed me was a wrench – very far from the elegance of what we habitually think of as good design. It was almost brutalist. I found this very interesting, as for us it was a new approach. Alas, we had very little time to make our collaboration with Virgil, but I am so glad we did.’

The set – essentially comprising a stainless steel spoon, fork and knife, held together by a carabiner – features geometric forms and an aesthetic closer to that of work tools than of table settings. It's the first of a series of ‘Occasional Objects’, which will be joined by more pieces, including ceramics, tableware and a new interpretation by Abloh of an Alessi classic. 

Despite his disruptive approach, Abloh was a fan of Alessi's work and the calibre of designers the company has worked with over the years (in the world of cutlery alone, the company has worked with more than 20 designers and practices, including Achille Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Marcel Wanders and Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas).

‘Virgil thought of Alessi because as a brand it’s best in class, not only in terms of its design history, but also because of the calibre of the artists and designers it has worked with in the past. He wanted his name to be among such great company,’ says Tawanda Chiweshe, creative director of Alaska Alaska.

Concludes Alessi: 'Alessi today is the result of the collaborations we have done with so many design minds, like Sottsass, Starck and Castiglioni. Each of them has left an important mark on the Alessi practice and contributed to what the company has become. Virgil Abloh is the latest name to add to that list, and I cannot think of anyone better to express our desire to remain relevant and contemporary for today’s and future generations.’

The ‘Occasional Objects’ collection by Virgil Abloh was presented as part of ’Alessi 100-001’, a special exhibition celebrating the company’s past and future, held at Galleria Manzoni from 7 – 12 June 2022

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Virgil Abloh Securities and Alessi released a new product under their partnership, following on from the launch of the Alessi Occasional Objects cutlery set during Fuorisalone 2022. Now working together on an update of Michael Graves’ ‘9093’ kettle from 1985, Alessi and Abloh’s creative studio Alaska Alaska offer a new interpretation of the postmodern design. 

Featuring an instantly recognisable bird whistle, the original kettle has become one of Alessi’s most iconic products. In its new version, released as a limited and numbered edition of 9,999 pieces and with a rejigged name, the new ‘3909’ kettle features a distinctive purple handle and the stylised figure of a basketball player, immortalised mid-dunk, to replace the original bird whistle.

‘Taking cues from Michael Graves’ original approach to the “9093” kettle by mixing and introducing various influences into the design process, the “3909” kettle references basketball and introduces an iconic silhouette with global resonance into the design outcome,’ reads a statement by Alaska Alaska. ‘This design gesture follows aspects of Virgil's approach specific to referencing different frames of reference often overlooked within the established design culture.’

The newly reissued kettle is the latest step in Alessi’s evolution as a brand that both represents the history of contemporary design while at the same time conversing with a young generation of design consumers. The ‘3909’ merges these worlds, the iconic silhouette by Graves reinterpreted with contemporary icons combining culture, sport and design history.

It is a trajectory that is explained well by Alberto Alessi, who worked closely with Abloh in his final years to bring this collaboration to life: ‘After discussions with Virgil Abloh about how we could work together, we understood that his wish to reinterpret some of Alessi’s icons was a challenging idea, and appropriate to the times – and that to start with the Graves kettle would be the best way,’ he explains ‘This was because Virgil’s desire to create “popular” products was similar to the dream Michael Graves had when he told me in the 1980s that his aim was “to create a new American design”.

‘Virgil had a completely different way to look at things and objects. So when he looked at the world of Alessi, it was through the eyes of one who loved the idea of a mechanical workshop, very far from the elegance of what we habitually think of as good design. I found this very interesting, as for us it was a new approach.’

alessi.com

Miami Art and Design Week – the colloquial name for the combination of Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami – begins today (29 November 2022), seeing international artists, designers, gallerists and collectors arrive en masse in the beachside city for the various art and design happenings taking place over the coming days. The fashion industry is present too; in recent years, brands have chosen the week to unveil collaborations, stage exhibitions, or undertake runway shows (memorably, last year included a Louis Vuitton menswear show, an homage to artistic director Virgil Abloh who had died just days prior). 

The 2022 edition is no exception – among others, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent and Fendi will all be present this week in Miami, showcasing various projects spanning art, design and fashion. Here, Wallpaper* selects the best crossover moments at Miami Art and Design Week 2022. 

The best fashion crossovers at Miami Art and Design Week 2022

Bottega Veneta and Gaetano Pesce: ‘Come Stai?’ at Design Miami

Matthieu Blazy’s acclaimed sophomore outing at Bottega Veneta, held in Milan this past September, featured a set designed in collaboration with 83-year-old Italian designer Gaetano Pesce. The space, called ‘the world in a small room’ by Blazy, comprised a swirled resin floor in Pesce’s signature saturated palette, alongside 400 equally colourful chairs crafted from cotton canvas dipped in resin (it marked the first original chair in some years from Pesce). Each one was entirely unique, some featuring naive motifs by the designer – from handbags and smiley faces to question marks – in an attempt to capture the diversity of human life. ‘It is about the human being; we are all different,’ he said at the time. ‘We are all different and this is our defining quality – otherwise, we are just a copy. We are all originals, and this is one of the themes of my design.’

The various chairs will go on display as part of the Design Miami 2022 fair, where a selection will also be available to purchase. An accompanying book – titled Come Stai?, the name given to the original project – will also be released, exploring ‘the ideation, approach, and process of the collaboration’ in a conversation between Pesce and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Like the chairs, each cover of the limited-edition book will be entirely unique, its publication celebrated with a book-signing by Pesce which takes place 30 November 2022 from 4pm to 6pm at the fair.

Come Stai?, the exhibition, runs at 153 NE 40th St, Miami, FL 3313 from 30 November 2022 to 4 December 2022

Saint Laurent Rive Droite: Sex by Madonna, curated by Anthony Vaccarello

One of contemporary photography’s most controversial tomes, Madonna’s Sex book, a collaboration with image-maker Steven Meisel, was banned by the Vatican and caused waves of conservative protest across America on its 1992 release. Its legacy is celebrated in a new exhibition by Saint Laurent curated by the house’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello alongside the musician herself. The show coincides with the re-release of the book as part of Saint Laurent Rive Droite (the house’s ‘creative and cultural destination’, which has stores in Paris and Los Angeles), and features large-format versions of the book’s now-iconic images. It’s an exploration of the ‘once-shocking now timeless’ volume and its ‘liberated views of sexual self-expression’, which have inspired countless artists in its wake. The ephemeral gallery is found on Miami’s beachfront, where a limited-edition number of copies, signed by Madonna and benefitting her Raising Malawi fund, will be sold via auction, alongside limited-edition T-shirts and tote bags. 

The Saint Laurent beachfront gallery will be free to visit for anyone over the age of 18 from 29 November 2022, to 4 December 2022.

Louis Vuitton at Art Basel Miami Beach

Louis Vuitton takes part in Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 with a special exhibit featuring works by some of the world’s best-known artists (many of which have previously collaborated with the house). Titled the ‘Louis Vuitton lounge’, the space displays pieces including two wax figures of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (created by the artist herself), a panda figure by Takashi Murakami balancing on a vintage Vuitton trunk, paintings by Richard Prince and Alex Katz, a photograph by Jean Larivière, and the new Artycapucines collection, whereby various artists leave their unique imprint on the house’s Capucines handbag. Elsewhere, a celebration of Vuitton’s relationship with Kusama takes place – marking ten years since she first united with the house – revealing a teaser of a new upcoming collaboration. 

Louis Vuitton will present at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139 from 29 November – 4 December 2022.

Fendi presents Lukas Gschwandtner’s Triclinium at Design Miami

Fendi has invited Austrian artist Lukas Gschwandtner to display a new work as part of Design Miami, a continuation of his fascination with imagery of women reclining on chaise longues. ‘I have always noticed depictions of reclining female figures, carved into building façades and friezes,’ he told Wallpaper* earlier this year. Titled Triclinium, it is a continuation of his Pillow Portraits series – ’wearable canvas sculptures referencing historical portraits of women’ – with the new furniture-inspired works on display in Miami drawing particular inspiration from Fendi’s history of leather work and use of calico in the atelier. ‘The moment the sculpture is worn, it immediately directs the body to impersonate the corresponding painting or artwork,’ says Gschwandtner.

The artist’s reimagining of Fendi’s ‘Peekaboo’ handbag, created by filling each compartment with plaster before cutting away the original material, accompanies the exhibit. 

Triclinium is on show from 29 November – 4 December 2022 at Design Miami.

Stone Island’s 40th birthday celebrations

Stone Island was founded by Massimo Osti in 1982; 40 years on, it is one of the world’s most recognised clothing brands, now synonymous with subcultural movements and the underground music scene. To celebrate, the Italian brand is hosting a party in Miami on 29 November 2022, promising performances and sets from Jamie XX, O.BEE, Tomas Station and Jonny Rock. An accompanying collection – titled 82/22 – celebrates four decades of technical innovation, reinventing archival pieces in the cutting-edge fabrications long linked with the brand. 

The Codes c/o Architecture by Virgil Abloh for Nike

28 November 2022 marked the one-year anniversary of Virgil Abloh’s death – a designer whose resonance continues to be keenly felt. A new exhibition, debuting in Miami, celebrates his fruitful partnership with Nike, a label he collaborated with throughout his career. Titled ‘The Codes c/o Architecture by Virgil Abloh for Nike’ and held alongside Virgil Abloh Securities, the four-day happening will revisit the agenda-setting collaboration through an exploration of Abloh’s approach to design.

‘Virgil and Nike thrived together because he understood the brand’s role as a cornerstone of culture while Nike understood the importance of truly supporting creatives and their visions,’ says Shannon Abloh, the chief executive officer and managing director of VA Securities. ’This beautiful four-day experience at Miami Art Week will honour their legacy together and champion both Virgil’s open-source methods and his genuine commitment to collaborating with and inspiring others.’

For information on opening hours and programming of ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes c/o Architecture,’ follow @arch___itecture.  

Responding to Virgil Abloh’s appointment as menswear artistic director at Louis Vuitton in 2018, British graphic design legend Peter Saville – whom Abloh called his ‘personal mentor’ – described the polymathic American designer’s work as ‘a stream of semiotic propositions, semiotic codes’. At Off-White, his 2013-founded label, and subsequently Louis Vuitton, as well as in his personal projects, Abloh was interested in signifiers, shards of text, ideas. A boot might be labelled ‘For Walking’, in the designer’s signature Helvetica font and quotation marks; collections accompanied by a pages-long glossary of Abloh-isms (‘The Vocabulary According to Virgil Abloh’); a copy of Wallpaper* designed to be sliced in half down the middle. ‘If you go to one of Virgil’s shows, it’s not really a fashion show, not in the sense that fashion ever was,’ continued Saville.

It is unsurprising, then, that of his many influences – which spanned Caravaggio and Mies Van de Rohe to Arthur Jafa and Miuccia Prada – it was the iconoclastic French artist Marcel Duchamp to which he most often returned (Abloh playfully referred to him as ‘his lawyer’). In particular, he was drawn to Duchamp’s conception of the readymade, how through the artist’s intervention, a toilet bowl could be transformed into an object worthy of display on a gallery plinth. Of that 1917 work – a porcelain urinal, titled Fountain and signed with the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt’ – Duchamp spoke of how a quotidian object could be instilled with ‘the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist’. ‘Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance,’ he wrote in 1917. ‘He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.’

Virgil Abloh: ‘Life is collaboration’

Such a description proves equally applicable to Abloh’s approach, which took recognisable objects and transformed them by adding a slogan or aphorism, or shifting their design in barely perceptible ways (in a presentation titled ‘Personal Design Language’ he referred to the 3 per cent approach, the idea that an object needs to be altered by just 3 per cent in order to become something new). For the earlier part of his career, the focus lay largely on streetwear, attempting to shift its connotations in the 2010s, when it was largely derided by those at the echelons of fashion. ‘Streetwear in my mind is linked to Duchamp,’ he told The New Yorker in 2019. ‘It’s this idea of the readymade. I’m talking Lower East Side, New York. It’s like hip-hop. It’s sampling. I take James Brown, I chop it up, I make a new song. I’m taking Ikea and I’m presenting it in my own way. It’s streetwear 10.0 – the logic that you can reference an object or reference a brand or reference something. It’s Warhol – Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s soup cans.’

This approach was particularly evident in his vast catalogue of collaborations at Off-White, Louis Vuitton, and under his own name, which encompassed several of the world’s most recognised brands – among them Ikea, Mercedes-Benz, Nike, Levi’s, Evian, Vitra, Jimmy Choo, Moncler, Byredo and Moët & Chandon (collaborations with brands were accompanied by others with artists, musician and filmmakers). These collaborative gestures provided much of the energy behind his work, up until the very end. Just days after the designer’s death – he died on 28 November 2021, after a two-year battle with a rare cancer called cardiac angiosarcoma (see our Virgil Abloh obituary) – Mercedes-Benz presented a Mercedes-Maybach electric show car during Art Basel Miami Beach designed in collaboration with the designer (it went ahead with the family’s wishes). ‘A humble contribution to Virgil’s vast legacy… It exemplifies the possibilities of future design and is the result of an ongoing cooperation with the polymath artist,’ the car company said at the time. 

In the year since his death, Abloh’s legacy has lived on through such collaborations, several of which were worked on by the designer and then released posthumously, including those with Church’s, Alessi, Cassina and Victorinox. True to Abloh’s vision, it is fitting that these encompass brands that represent the pinnacles of their various practices, oftentimes chosen for their synonymy with a singular product (such is the case with Victorinox, which is forever linked with the Swiss Army Knife, or Church’s, with shoes). These interventions reflected Abloh’s work as menswear artistic director of Louis Vuitton – itself synonymous with the very pinnacle of luxury fashion – where he riffed on the house’s archetypal codes through his distinct lens. The implications of his appointment at Louis Vuitton have been well documented, marking the first Black artistic director in its history. ‘To show a younger generation that there is no one way anyone in this kind of position has to look is a fantastically modern spirit in which to start,’ he said on the day of the announcement. 

Later, in 2020, he was more explicit about the uniqueness of his position in a document titled ‘Manifesto’ which was distributed with his S/S 2021 menswear show. ‘Every season, my team updates “The vocabulary according to Virgil Abloh: A liberal definition of terms and explanation of ideas”. Under I for irony: “The presence of Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton.” For all intents and nuances, I have often spelt out the interceptive reality of myself as a Black man in a French luxury house,’ he wrote. ‘This is my invitation to move forward together with awareness, hope and determination. You are witnessing unapologetic Black imagination on display.’ 

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Abloh’s various collaborations often began with what he called a ‘tourists versus purists’ ideology, the ‘organising principle’ of his entire output. ‘It’s my main device to understand the sections of culture that move culture forward,’ he said in 2019. ‘You have a purist, that’s like, “I know the whole art history of everything, you can’t do this, this was done 20-times before you thought of it”. Like, this is the pure institution. Then there’s the tourist, who’s bright-eyed, curiosity-driven, that has a lust for learning, and they support whatever.’ (Abloh saw himself as both.)

‘We met a decade ago at a dinner in Milan,’ says fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen, a longtime collaborator with Abloh, who earlier this month released his Assouline-published book Louis Vuitton: Virgil Abloh, which documents the designer’s time at the house. ‘He came in, sat down next to me, we started talking, and we never stopped. Virgil always talked about fashion purists versus tourists: the establishment versus those who aspire towards it. During our friendship and all the work we did together, those roles melted together for both of us. Our friendship and collaboration were founded in a curiosity for the things that set us apart – quite a rarity in this day and age.’

Madsen believes this ‘tourists versus purists’ dichotomy was at the heart of Abloh’s approach to collaboration: ‘When you take one domain of knowledge and introduce it to another – whether they’re founded in completely different practices or cultures, or similar worlds – a sort of immaculate conception takes place. You enlighten different groups of people about things they never knew about or never felt they had access to. You create democracy and inclusivity, a transition that doesn’t just add to your business value but to your human value, too.’

Indeed, several of those who collaborated with the designer have expressed this feeling of ideological exchange. In the foreword to his book Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech – an accompaniment to the exhibition of the same name which began at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019 and has since toured various cities – curator Michael Darling calls it a ‘loop of interdependence’. ‘Collaboration is integral to Abloh’s approach: not only does he draw from a dizzying array of sources, but also works with and facilitates connections among graphic designers, musicians, fashion designers, and visual artists. This broad engagement with the cultural landscape is both generous and generative.’

Spanish architect and designer Patricia Urquiola, who collaborated with Abloh in various capacities, including overseeing his collaboration with Cassina (Urquiola is art director of the Italian furniture brand) notes that ‘between art and music and fashion, so many lenses were part of his approach’. Titled ‘Modular Imagination’ and released posthumously, the collaboration comprises various modular blocks which can be built into a chair, a table, or more unconventional shapes (Cassina says it will enter their permanent catalogue as a mark of respect to the designer). 

‘I think we are going to see a lot more of these types of situations where people are collaborating with people with another point of view,’ she says, noting that Abloh reflected her own desire to cross disciplines in her working practice. ‘I think in our line of work we should be doing more capsules, to give new voices to companies. They aren’t always going to be perfect, but they are a test.’

CEO of Victorinox, Carl Elsener Jr, who earlier this month released a limited-edition Swiss Army Knife made in collaboration with Abloh and Off-White, speaks of the designer’s ability to reflect a brand’s heritage in a new light (the collaboration was part of a wider Off-White project, titled ‘Equipment c/o Post Archive Faction c/o Victorinox c/o Helinox’, which collates 12 items ‘that explore the meaning and survival of humanity in our contemporary landscape’). ‘He was thinking: what are the tools humans have used to survive?’ says Elsener, noting that it led Abloh towards the Swiss Army Knife, a multi-use object which echoed the functions of stone-age flint. ‘He was looking at something existing and bringing new elements to it – while making this connection to the very beginning of time.

‘[The collaboration] taught us we could be more open. He really had this openness, this creativity, but then the details and the function are still really important… I think the collaboration made us more daring.’

In a previous interview with Wallpaper*, Alberto Alessi, president of Alessi – which released its own posthumous collaboration with Abloh featuring a metal knife, fork and spoon with a carabiner – concurred. ‘I found that Virgil had a completely different way to look at things and objects,’ says Alessi. ‘I remember that the first reference he showed me was a wrench – very far from the elegance of what we habitually think of as good design. It was almost brutalist. I found this very interesting, as for us it was a new approach. Alas, we had very little time to make our collaboration with Virgil, but I am so glad we did.’

Elsener says he is ‘proud’ of his collaboration with Abloh. ‘The only sad thing is that Virgil isn’t here too.’

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In September 2020, Abloh created a limited-edition cover of Wallpaper* – matt white, the only decorative flourish is a dotted line and scissor symbol, the suggestion being that it should be sliced straight down the middle by the reader. ‘Cutting the physical object makes the magazine come alive and reinforces the concept that the magazine's media may be physical, but it also occupies a space figuratively and literally,’ he said at the time. He called the act democratic. He personally sliced and signed 184 copies; these special editions were playfully titled ‘2 for the Price of 1’, with proceeds going to the Virgil Abloh “Post Modern” Scholarship Fund, which fosters inclusion within the fashion industry by providing scholarships to ’students of academic promise of Black, African-American, or African descent’.

‘It’s important that the door is left open for kids just like me,’ he said to Wallpaper* at the time. ‘The future of fashion, the future of design, the future of management and all these careers is an urgent matter. It is vital that figures like me embed within their work a component to fortify that effort.’

‘He made high fashion feel like a domain in which everyone can participate,’ says Madsen. ‘He and his work transcended the boxes in which we place people and fashion, and for that reason, an infinitely broad spectrum of people could relate.’ Collaboration, he continues, was essential to this way of working. ‘He was a second-generation American-Ghanaian man, who grew up in the hip-hop community, studied architecture and became an establishment fashion designer. His background was literally about clashing cultures, so that impulse was instinctive in everything he did. But it wasn’t just practical. He saw unity in transcendence.’

Abloh’s final collection for Off-White – A/W 2022 – was displayed in March 2022 at Paris Fashion Week, featuring a 28-piece haute couture collection produced and fitted prior to his death the previous November. A pair of white flags hung over the runway, printed with perhaps his most famous aphorism, ‘Question Everything’. Off-White call the phrase ‘Virgil Abloh’s guiding philosophy’; at the 2019 Figures of Speech exhibition, the same message was printed on a black flag.

In many ways, his collaborations were questions in themselves. What might an object look like when placed in a new context? How do we perceive something when its design is changed, even by just 3 per cent? How can the familiar be made unfamiliar? Definite answers weren’t important. Curiosity was everything.

Now led by image and art director Ibrahim Kamara, this impulse continues at Off-White; the recent S/S 2023 show featured collaborations with musical duo Tshegue and movement director Nicolas Huchard. ‘There is a regenerative spirit as we approach the cusp of something new. In the unknown, there is the freedom to imagine. Possibilities are boundless,’ read the collection notes.

‘Where I think art can be sort of misguided is that it propagates this idea of itself as a solo love affair – one person, one idea, no one else involved,’ Abloh said in 2018. ‘Life is collaboration.’

The prolific collaborative output of late American designer Virgil Abloh continues with a new Swiss army knife, created in a partnership between historic Switzerland-based Victorinox and Abloh’s Milan-based label Off-White. Embarked upon over two years ago, the pocket knife – officially titled ‘Off-White c/o Victorinox Limited Edition Swiss Army Knife’ – marks one of a number of posthumous collaborations from the genre-spanning designer, who died close to a year ago, on 28 November 2021. 

Speaking from the upper floor of Victorinox’s new store on London’s Oxford Street – which opened yesterday (17 November 2022) – Victorinox CEO Carl Elsener Jr, the great-grandson of founder Karl Elsener, and Carl’s wife Veronika Elsener, chief marketing officer, say that it was Abloh who first approached the brand about the project. ‘He’s such an icon of culture; you can see how he’s always approaching things in a very conceptual way,’ says Veronika. ‘Bringing that to our products really changes the perspective. He has become this superstar, an eminence.’ (Carl adds that the couple’s daughter, then studying industrial design in Los Angeles, was particularly excited about the prospect of a collaboration with Abloh).

Off-White c/o Victorinox Limited Edition Swiss Army Knife

Carl notes that Abloh began the project by thinking about what he calls ‘the origins of mankind’, a consideration of the various objects that have allowed for human survival. One of these was carved rock or flint, which was used for multiple purposes by Stone Age dwellers – to cut food, carve markings, cut trees, start a fire. ‘I think the Swiss army knife is today’s stone,’ smiles Carl. ‘Abloh was thinking: what are the tools humans have used to survive? Stones were once the only tools we had. People worked on them to make them more useful, precise, functional.’

As such, the various components of the collaborative Swiss army knife – the knife, the saw, the bottle opener – recall the jagged edges of rock, jutting outwards from the main body of the knife (which is crafted from Corian, a material used for the first time by Victorinox in this collaboration). Its unexpected design, Carl says, initially was a shock to those manufacturing the knife in the brand’s Swiss factories. ’We have been making our Swiss army knives for 125 years and in that time we have tried to optimise it, develop the blade. People have been working for us for 20, 30, 40 years, so they maybe didn’t understand [this collaboration] immediately. But now I think they are incredibly proud.’

Of collaborating with Abloh, Carl and Veronika call it a transformative experience. ‘I think it taught us we could be more open,’ says Carl. ‘He really had this openness, this creativity, but then the details and the function are still really important.’ Veronika calls him ‘a modern-day Leonardo [da Vinci]’ who ‘explored universal themes’. ‘He had this courage to look at what we do from a bigger picture, to bring in history, and his own background,’ she says.

Available as a 3,000-piece edition, the Off-White c/o Victorinox Limited Edition Swiss Army Knife will be available on Victorinox’s website and stores, alongside selected Off-White locations (it is also the hero piece of a wider ‘Equipment’ project that Abloh worked on with Korean brand Post Archive Faction). Carl says that the Swiss army knife’s release coinciding with the new London store opening – just metres from department store Selfridges – was a happy coincidence.

The store itself, in process since before the pandemic, aims to reach a more expansive audience by being placed in the heart of one of London’s busiest shopping streets. The upper floor of the store is designed to recall the precision of the Victorinox workshops, seeing stainless steel cabinets and birch wood surfaces provide a clean backdrop for an array of the brand’s home and Swiss army knives (a service will allow you to customise or assemble your own), while downstairs houses watch, luggage and fragrance collections. 

‘We want to become more modern, more fresh,’ says Carl of the shop’s design, part of a new way of imagining the brand’s retail spaces (Oxford Street is the second store in the evolving concept). It aligns with Victorinox’s aim to open the brand to a new generation of consumers, of which the Off-White collaboration is an intrinsic part. ‘The collaboration has made us more daring. We are so happy, and so excited –the only sad thing is that Virgil isn’t here too.’

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Earlier this year, in March, historic British shoemaker Church’s released the first instalment of its collaboration with Off-White, titled Off-White c/o Church’s. Masterminded by the late Virgil Abloh, it is one of the several collaborative projects which defined the American designer’s career at both Off-White and as men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton. 

First debuted as part of Abloh’s A/W 2022 Paris Fashion Week show for Off-White – which would prove to be the final collection before his death on 28 November 28 2021 – this month sees the third drop of the limited-edition collection, defined by a ‘remastering’ of Church’s classic designs (the first saw the brand’s storied ‘Burwood’ Oxford brogue, which dates back to 1953, emblazoned with ‘Special Events’; the second saw the ‘Consul’ shoe dotted with holes to evoke ‘Swiss cheese’ or ‘meteor showers’).

The latest instalment, which arrived in stores yesterday (25 October 2022), continues what Church’s calls Abloh’s ‘Question Everything’ philosophy – a slogan memorably written on white flags carried by models at the designer’s A/W 2022 show. ‘Virgil Abloh’s guiding philosophy and a reminder never to settle for the status quo,’ said the brand in a statement at the time. Here, this translates to what Church’s says is ‘an examination of design norms, while upholding the artisanal traditions and stylistic history of the British footwear brand’.

Off-White c/o Church’s: the third instalment

As such, this latest iteration of Off-White c/o Church’s comprises two styles – the ‘Shannon’, a Derby show first created in the 1970s, and a new version of the ‘Burwood’ which Abloh first reimagined as part of the collaboration’s first drop. The ‘Shannon’ – known for its ‘whole-cut’ design which sees the entire shoe constructed from a single piece of leather – is updated with a screen-printed scissor motif and dotted lines designed to mimic those used in patternmaking. It is completed with Off-White’s signature branded leather tag. 

The ‘Burwood’, meanwhile, sees the classic brogue – its perforated construction first designed to allow water to drain in wet weather – updated with a thick, spongey rubber sole. Distinctive bright pink laces are decorated with various quotes, another one of Abloh and Off-White’s aesthetic signatures. 

This latest drop was launched as part of Frieze Art Fair earlier this month with an event titled ‘The Imaginary Club’ which saw a celebratory evening of contemporary jazz (a ‘modern jazz club’ was erected in London’s St John’s Smith Square; performers, curated by Benji B included Yussef Dayes, CKTRL, George Riley, DJ Zakia and DJ Judah Afriyie). The two new styles are available now on Off-White’s website and Farfetch – though, as with other such mementos of Abloh’s pioneering legacy, they likely won’t be around for long. 

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When Patricia Urquiola – the Spanish multi-hyphenate whose eponymous Milan-based studio spans product, industrial and furniture design, as well as architecture and art direction – got to the point of showing her capsule clothing collection for Weekend Max Mara last February, she decided to break with tradition. Until then, the Italian fashion label had always presented its collections in its own Milanese showroom; instead, Urquiola chose the headquarters of rug manufacturer CC-Tapis, a label with which she has long collaborated. ‘Sometimes you just have to change the rules,’ she says. 

The collaboration itself marked a first for Urquiola. Despite having forged strong connections with the fashion industry throughout her career (she has worked on projects for Missoni, Salvatore Ferragamo and Louis Vuitton, and had a close working relationship with the late Virgil Abloh), this is the first clothing collection she has created. (Urquiola, though, is insistent it is not a ‘collection’ but ‘just a capsule’, ‘then you are braver and you don’t think about the responsibility,’ she says.)

It arrives as part of Weekend Max Mara’s Signature line, an ongoing project whereby various international creatives are drafted in each season to create a collection that fuses their own approach with the label’s heritage. Previous collaborators have included model Alek Wek, costume designer Gabriella Pescucci, interior designer Anthony Baratta, and artists Richard Saja and Donald Robertson. Urquiola is the tenth participant. 

The collaboration is an expansion of Urquiola’s comprehensive previous work with textiles that is defined by a broad if sometimes unconventional use of colour. She had always been aware of Weekend Max Mara – ‘I’m a woman, I live in Milan,’ she says with a smile – and says the appeal of this project was its allowance for working across disciplines with freedom, an unrestrained approach that she has long championed in her own work. ‘They described to me this idea that, through Weekend Max Mara, they wanted to share more and more conversations with people who are not from their world, to get the energy of colour, of having another approach to the work. They were really insistent on that.’

The capsule is titled Habito, a Spanish word that Urquiola explains means both ‘habit’ and ‘to inhabit’. ‘I approached [the capsule] not only as a designer but as a woman,’ she explains, noting that each item of clothing, which often features hybrid elements, is designed to reflect the needs and contradictions of everyday life. ‘I think the clothes that women wear are an emotional habit, they are the tools we need for living.’ That said, Urquiola notes that she was ‘not searching for a woman’s silhouette’, instead designing garments that felt stripped of traditionally gendered elements to create a reflection of the way she dresses day to day (often, she says, this emerges in the use of oversized, cocooning silhouettes). 

The capsule began in Max Mara’s archive, a place Urquiola was keen to explore at the start of the project. ‘They had all the pieces from the first collections, from the 1980s, and out of this came the dimensions, the oversized shapes, they were the volumes we were looking for,’ she says. As such, the collection comprises a series of coats – ‘coats are the most representative [pieces in the collection], the most hybrid ones’ – in variously amplified proportions, combining playfully juxtaposed fabrics (in particular, heritage wools and ribbed knits with technical nylon). Other elements include a vividly coloured gilet, reminiscent of her colourful CC-Tapis rugs that formed the backdrop of the presentation, giant clasp-top clutch handbags (a version of the house’s ‘Pasticcino’ bag), and shirting with expansive plissé sleeves. 

Urquiola believes that now is the time for such experimentation, ‘to do capsules, to put yourself in new situations, to give new voices to companies,’ she says, noting this approach was in part inspired by watching Abloh work so broadly across design disciplines. ‘This project with Weekend Max Mara was about mixing our ideas, a playful moment where you interact with different worlds, and other points of view. I came out of my comfort zone,’ she says. ‘Which is always a good thing.’

INFORMATION

A version of this article appears in the November 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

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The late Virgil Abloh was a master of the 'collab', expert at pointing established brands in new directions, recontextualising trusted design tropes, and all the time interrogating the language and signifiers of luxury and good living.

All of that played out in his creative relationship with Mercedes-Benz and the group's chief design officer Gorden Wagener.

The pair collaborated on a one-off, raw-finished reworking of the Mercedes G-Class in 2020 (Project Geländewagen) and a conceptual off-road grand tourer, tagged Project Maybach and revealed at Design Miami in December 2021, just days after Abloh's passing (and with his family's sign-off).

The ultra-luxe wing of the German car giant has just unveiled a third Abloh collaboration, the limited-edition Maybach by Virgil Abloh.

The new design, finalised just before the designer's death at just 41, is not an experimental reimagining but rather a bespoke edit of the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class S680 that will be produced in a limited run of 150.

The new car picks up on the two-tone colour combination Abloh devised for Project Maybach, a glossy obsidian black lacquer set atop a shimmering sand. This scheme continues in the Napa leather-lined interior.

Abloh also got to work on the car's digital displays, creating a bespoke luxe user interface for the special edition car.

‘Virgil had such a holistic way of approaching design – it was not just about the product in hand, but the whole narrative and inspiration around it,' says Wagener, adding that Abloh had a 'question everything' approach.

Wagener describes the new car as a kind of drivable 'trickle down' distillation of Project Maybach’s conceptual design (though most customers will probably be driven, and in some style. Even without Abloh enhancements, the S680, launched last year, is a chauffeur-ready luxury sedan of the first order, bristling with technology, hand-crafted materials and engineering refinements).

‘Together with Virgil, we broke up existing design idioms,' adds Wagener. 'Over the years, automotive design has perfected aerodynamic shiny surfaces. In our collaboration, we experimented with monolithic forms or sanded-down surfaces which led to the more “raw” appearance of Project Geländewagen. Launching a street-legal model limits creativity but we are proud of bringing a piece of the collaboration to those who want to be part of it.’

A capsule Off-White/Project Maybach fashion collection, launched alongside the S-Class, is a slightly more accessible way of buying into the partnership’s creative legacy. The collection includes sand-coloured T-shirts, hoodies, and crewnecks as well as baseball caps and driving gloves. 

The Maybach by Virgil Abloh boasts a hefty and hugely refined V12 engine, but Mercedes says it will launch its first fully electric Maybach model in 2023, an electric SUV that will share technology with the acclaimed Mercedes EQS. An electric Abloh-designed production car – the Project Maybach concept was imagined as all-electric – might perhaps have been a more fitting tribute to the partnership. As Wagener says, though, Abloh was an auto enthusiast, and his last Maybach is a distinct, elegiac celebration of a particular kind of luxury.

INFORMATION

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In 2017, when Virgil Abloh launched The Ten – a reinterpretation of ten iconic Nike trainer styles, from the Nike ‘Air Force 1 Low’ to the ‘Air VaporMax’, the Nike SNKRS app promptly crashed due to unprecedented online traffic. Abloh’s trainer designs – accented with elements of his idiosyncratic design lexicon, such as collage, ironic typography, asterisks, and industrial and utilitarian embellishments – have become cult collector’s items for sneakerheads and graphic design buffs alike, now more so than ever in the wake of the creative polymath’s passing in November 2021. 

The most valuable charitable sale at Sotheby’s in nearly a decade

Abloh unveiled a collaboration with Nike and Louis Vuitton as part of the Parisian maison’s S/S 2022 show – an ‘Air Force 1’ silhouette accented with the two brands’ design signatures – and in January, Sotheby’s announced an auction of 200 pairs of the sneakers in limited-edition colourways. Bidding on the shoes, which were available in a selection of sizes, fetched $25.3 million, more than eight times the auction’s overall $3 million high estimate, with proceeds going to the The Virgil Abloh™ “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund.

The calf-leather designs – which celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1982-designed ‘Air Force 1’ – were emblazoned with Louis Vuitton’s Monogram and Damier prints in rich brown hues. The style also celebrated Abloh’s affection for quotation marks, featuring the word ‘Air' on its sole. Each pair of the sneakers was be sold with a Louis Vuitton pilot case, a reinterpreted archival design that was also showcased, in hazard orange, at the brand’s S/S 2022 show; the case features Louis Vuitton’s classic S lock closure in white metal finishing and includes a luggage tag in the shape of the Nike Swoosh. 

The most valuable charitable sale at Sotheby’s in nearly a decade, collectors from Asia comprised 40% of the buyers, but bidding was amalgamated across fifty countries. This was an auction that attracted a younger clientele, with more than two-thirds of all bidders under 40, and more than half of all buyers under 40. A significant majority of bidders and buyers participated in a Sotheby’s sale for the first time, with more than 75% of buyers new to the auction house. Collectors competed for rare sizes: Lot 1, Size 5 led the auction, achieving $352,800, Size 9 achieved the highest total value by size, totaling $3.4 million across 26 lots and the most competition was for Size 8, with a total of more than 1,400 bids. 

‘We are thrilled that the record-breaking fundraising auction for Virgil Abloh’s Post Modern Scholarship Fund has generated such exceptional results. We are proud that thousands of students will be able to benefit from the proceeds, allowing us to continue to uphold Virgil’s mission to inspire and support future generations,' said Michael Burke, Chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton of the record-breaking charity sale. 

 INFORMATION

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Whilst Louis Vuitton's understandably outsize tribute to Virgil Abloh has dominated coverage of Design Miami 2021, another Abloh side-project has quietly gone on display at the city’s Rubell Museum. The launch of the creative polymath’s second collaboration with Mercedes-Benz, which only went ahead after consultation and a green light from his family, provides more evidence of Abloh’s unique ability to twist a brand's design language into fresh and future-facing shapes.

In 2020 Abloh created a one-off re-working of the Mercedes G-Class, Project Geländewagen, but the new project, for Mercedes-Benz’s luxury Maybach division, is an entirely new design. Again a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz chief design officer Gorden Wagener, and celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Maybach brand, the new show car is essentially a two-seat, off-road electric coupé, a 6m-long grand tourer with SUV ambition.

Project Maybach by Virgil Abloh and Mercedes-Benz

As with many of Abloh's projects, this is as much an effort to track and overtake the slippery signifiers of luxury as it is a design exercise. Like the one-off G-Class, Project Maybach, as it is tagged, plays with the trappings of luxury and luxury travel in the tricky space where they meet the quieter language of function and utility (in that, it shares a kind of common purpose with the North Face x Gucci collaboration from early 2021, and the new Jil Sander Arc'teryx range).

The exterior, in a sandy monotone and wrapped in a roll bar, talks of high-stakes adventuring, though fundamentally the car remains a sleek luxury coupé, including a slick, sci-fi chrome grille. 

The Maybach brand, though, is really about the cabin experience, the luxurious glide to your destination, as much as it is about the externals or the driving experience (they presume a hired hand will do the driving for now, and an AI will do it in the future).  

Abloh and Wagener have imagined the interior as a kind of modular hotel room, with seats that fold down to become a first-class flat bed. Polished aluminium is contrasted with super-soft sandy leather (tanned naturally, with coffee shells) and a jacquard houndstooth-finish headrest doubles up as a blanket, while compartments open to reveal reading lights. The seats can also be packed up, suitcase-style, and removed, should you wish to install them in your high-end tent. 

Mostly, Abloh and Wagener were having fun here. See the Maybach branded axe, for use in emergencies only. At the same time, they have, in places, reinvigorated and tightened up the sloppy tropes of luxury car design and pointed a perhaps tired typology in new directions. Mercedes-Benz may say that Project Maybach is a modest contribution to Abloh’s design legacy, but there is little to be modest about. 

INFORMATION

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A hot-air balloon hovering in the sky, red lights illuminating the motif of a paper aeroplane mid-air, fireworks exploding into slivers of colour, the symbols and signs at Louis Vuitton's menswear show at the Maritime Marina in Miami on 1 December were ones of freedom, liberation and ascension. 

The show, held during Design Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach 2021, was originally planned as a S/S 2022 spin-off, incorporating 30 new looks into the brand's upcoming offering. Following the passing of the maison's men's artistic director Virgil Abloh on Sunday 28 November, after a private battle with cancer, the show was revised as a celebratory tribute to the self-professed ‘image-maker’ and not ‘designer' – a creative polymath, one of the few Black male figures to lead a luxury French house, and the first to lead Louis Vuitton. 

Possibility has always been at the heart of Abloh's shows for the house, a visual representation of his coming of age, a symbol of universal wall-shattering success for so many. His debut S/S 2020 show for the house – complete with a rainbow runway – referenced the fairytale world of The Wizard of Oz. Post-show, Abloh left a message of optimism for millions of young creatives globally, posting an image of himself at the head of the Palais Royal garden catwalk, with the caption ‘You can do it too’.

Louis Vuitton’s show films – broadcast at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, also championed community. For his original S/S 2022 show, Abloh brought together Black musicians and poets including Goldie, Saul Williams and Lupe Fiasco, in a story focused on passing down concepts and traditions through generations. 

‘Virgil was Here’

The Miami show – live streamed worldwide – opened with Abloh’s own words: ‘I’ve been on this focus in terms of my art and creativity, of getting adults to behave like children again. That they go back into this sense of wonderment.' That sense of naivety, childhood liberation, and unrestricted imagination was conveyed in silhouettes that were genre-breaking and fanciful: neon and tie-dye suiting, puffball skirts and kilts, LV monogram sportswear, looks that defied convention, referencing both rave culture and formal wear. 

The show closed with Abloh's eternally poignant words: ‘Life is so short that there's no point wasting a day subscribing to what someone thinks you can do, knowing what you can do.’ Fireworks exploded in flashes of red and orange across the water, and the words ‘Virgil was here' illuminated the sky.

INFORMATION

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Virgil Abloh, the men’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton and CEO of Off-White, has passed away at the age of 41. In a statement released this evening, 28 November 2021, LVMH, Louis Vuitton and Off-White announced that Abloh had died from cancer, which he had battled privately for several years.

A creative polymath and diverse, boundary-breaking figure, Abloh is famed for transcending a host of creative fields, spanning fashion, art, design and music. Born in 1980, in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian immigrant parents, he obtained degrees in civil engineering and architecture, two fields which propelled him from distinct project to project – that he famously coordinated with digital wizardry largely via WhatsApp – including collaborations with Harvard Graduate School of Design, Ikea, Nike, Takashi Murakami, Carpenters Workshop Gallery and Mercedes-Benz. 

Abloh first dipped his toe into the fashion industry in 2009, when interning at Roman house Fendi, alongside Kanye West. The stint encouraged a collaboration with the rapper, who appointed Abloh creative director of his creative agency, Donda. In 2012, Abloh launched his first fashion label, Pyrex Vision, a bootlegging-inspired brand that drew on his democratic approach to design, and screen-printed upcycled pieces from renowned labels including Ralph Lauren. ‘Whenever I’m presented with a design project, the first thing I relate to is the context,’ Abloh told Wallpaper* in June 2019. 

Bridging the gap between luxury fashion streetwear, Abloh launched label Off-White, also in 2012, a men’s and women’s clothing label renowned for its semiotics-driven approach to design, using apostrophes and asterisks as motifs. In 2017, ‘The Ten’, saw the reinterpretation of ten signature Nike silhouettes, including the Air Jordan 1, Nike Air VaporMax, Nike Force 1 Low and Converse Chuck Taylor, which were reworked using collage, lettering, ironic labels like plastic tags and zip ties, and featured raw, sculpted finishes. The shoes sold out in minutes when they launched, and Nike’s SNKRS App crashed due to unprecedented traffic. 

In 2018, Abloh was appointed men's artistic director of Louis Vuitton – one of the few Black designers to lead a luxury French fashion house. The appointment marked a milestone moment for representation of people of colour within the fashion industry. His debut show for the house, held outdoors at the Palais-Royal gardens in Paris, featured models walking down a rainbow runway. ‘It marked the beginning of a new era, an inclusive atmosphere as 1,000 fashion students were invited to attend. They lined the catwalk, each wearing collectable branded t-shirts. On show seats, guests were presented a map which highlighted the different continents the show’s models hailed from. The first third of the show was walked by Black models, including a host of Abloh’s musician industry friends,’ wrote Wallpaper* contributing editor Dal Chodha in his report on the seismic show.

Abloh did not refer to himself as a designer, but an ‘image-maker’ – his Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Sternberg Press-published book, Insert Complicated Title Here, featured a series of his ‘cheat codes’ for working and designing. These include ‘Signs of “Work in Progress”’ – working without a perfectionist mindset; working according to ‘A societal commentary’; and ‘Question your mentors’.

In 2019, ‘Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech’ opened at the MCA Chicago, celebrating Abloh's career output to date, spanning projects from his DJing to high jewellery design, Ikea and Nike collaborations. The show, designed by OMA, Abloh’s long-term collaborators, opened with a new version in November 2021 at the Fire Station in Doha. A poignant section, Black Gaze, analyses Abloh’s role in challenging the fashion and design industry’s long-standing exclusion of Black talent, and his ability to provide other people of colour with a global platform.

Virgil Abloh and Wallpaper*

Last year, Wallpaper* invited Abloh to take over the limited-edition subscribers’ cover of its September 2020 Style Special issue. In the most groundbreaking addition yet to Wallpaper’s limited-edition cover series – understated, tactile and radical – Abloh invited the reader to cut the magazine in half with a scissored graphic. The act was meant to highlight the magazine as an object. As an added element of his cover takeover, Abloh personally cut and autographed 184 copies of the magazine, titling this 2 for the Price of 1. The cutting took place on 25 August 2020, at premises of Abloh’s regular collaborators Oetee, and the issues were available to buy (funding a fashion scholarship project) on canary---yellow.com, an open access site dedicated to his incredible output of work.

‘Virgil transcended culture and broke down boundaries. He was an absolute pleasure to work with – a creative force – engaged, intelligent, connected, collaborative and warm. We have lost a truly positive mind, his impact and legacy will live on,’ says Sarah Douglas, editor-in-chief of Wallpaper*.

Famously humble, kind and softly spoken, Abloh was famed for his support of others, championing a new diversification of industries associated with elitism and inspiring a new generation of creatives. A group of burgeoning, talented names gained his support and mentorship, including Samuel Ross and Heron Preston. In August 2020, he launched the fashion scholarship fund ‘POST-MODERN’, which is dedicated to fostering equity and inclusion within the fashion industry by providing scholarships to promising students of Black, African-American, and African descent. The scholarships are managed in partnership with the Fashion Scholarship Fund (FSF), an American non-profit association that supports the future of fashion. It also encompasses the 'Free Game' Mentorship Series, a website of free how-to guides, accessible to anyone.

‘It’s important that the door is left open for kids just like me,’ Abloh told Wallpaper* in September 2020. ‘The future of fashion, the future of design, the future of management and all these careers is an urgent matter. It is vital that figures like me embed within their work a component to fortify that effort.’

After Abloh's first runway show for Louis Vuitton, he posted an image of himself, a hand clutched to his head, standing at the top of the runway. The caption read ‘you can do it too...’. He is survived by his wife and two children.

It's technically winter in Doha, but it's not just the city's temperatures that are red-hot. A duo of blockbuster fashion exhibitions is warming the city’s sartorial cockles; both opened in early November 2021 as part of the schedule of Qatar Creates. The global summit – which focuses on cultural innovation across disciplines including art, design and fashion – also played host to the third iteration of Fashion Trust Arabia, an annual gala from the non-profit initiative, whose mission is to support designers across the MENA, with financial backing and industry support.

Here, we present the fashion exhibition must-sees in the city encircled by desert. 

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’

M72 

Closes 31 March 2022

The first fashion exhibition on show at M7 in Msheireb Downtown Doha – a new hub for fashion, design and tech entrepreneurship designed by architects John McAslan + Partners – is the latest travelling iteration of the seminal retrospective that first opened at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, before moving onto the V&A in London, and then Brooklyn Museum (where it runs until February 2022, see our guide to NYC fashion exhibitions).

At M7, Doha dives into the design history and language not just of Monsieur Dior, but of the creative directors that succeeded him: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri. This show – curated by Olivier Gabet and featuring new scenographic installations by Nathalie Crinière – also features pieces owned by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, a long-standing client of Christian Dior Couture.

‘Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech’

Fire Station

Closes 31 March 2022

The creative polymath’s first museum exhibition in the Middle East, ‘Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech’ offers a mid-career retrospective, straddling the spheres of visual arts, music, fashion, architecture and design. The exhibition was first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Abloh’s home city, before moving to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. In Doha, it is exhibited across three gallery rooms, and features more than 55 works charting the remarkable output of the Pyrex Vision and Off-White founder and men's artistic director of Louis Vuitton.

Semiotics, streetwear and the nature of dialogue and narrative come into focus as Abloh explores the power of the logo, the role of street signs and the symbolism of high jewellery. Most poignant is the exhibition's Black Gaze room, which analyses Abloh's role in challenging the fashion and design industry’s long-standing exclusion of Black talent, and his ability to provide other people of colour with a global platform. The show is curated by Michael Darling in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Samir Bantal from AMO/OMA.

There is a lazy, quick take on Samuel Ross that positions him as simply an acolyte of Virgil Abloh and a younger, British varietal. Both have had superficially similar career trajectories, building international fashion brands around streetwear staples – Off-White in Abloh’s case, A-Cold-Wall* in Ross’. Neither went to fashion school, but both have what Ross calls ‘hard skills’; Abloh studied architecture, Ross illustration and graphic design. They both have collaborated with major sportswear brands, Nike most notably, to mutually beneficial effect.

Both share a ferocious work ethic and what can look like imperial ambition; they can come off as calculating and hyper-smart engineers of contemporary desire and the machinery of influence and status. And they are both, of course, Black men in what is still largely a white man’s business. In truth, it is not that one has followed the other, but that both have understood and come to redefine luxury, the new possibilities of brand building, and a creative practice built around collaboration and transdisciplinary activity. Following in the footsteps of Kaws, Kanye, Takashi Murakami and Tom Sachs, they know that the distinctions between street art and fine art, streetwear and catwalk, commerce and activism have all but dissolved. Or rather, that the borderlands between these categories are the most interesting and transformative places to be. 

Both have also created sculptural objects and furniture. Ross and designer Jobe Burns formed Concrete Objects in 2017, to create ‘aesthetically inclined, functional objects’ inspired by the Bauhaus and brutalism. In 2019, he launched SR_A, ‘a studio operating within the fields of luxury industrial design, interior installation, architecture, furniture design, sound design and sculptural/visual communication’. He was awarded the Hublot Design Prize that year. And, as he says, his A-Cold-Wall* catwalk shows were, in effect, large-scale sculptural installations.

Furniture designs by Samuel Ross, and his Design Miami showcase

Earlier this year, under the SR_A umbrella, he created three chairs, ‘Recovery’, ‘Signal-3’ and ‘Trauma’, which were later acquired by Friedman Benda gallery in New York. Never short of conceptual ambition, Ross conceived the collection as tracking 300 years of Black experience, of wrenching dislocation, shattered and recovered identity, and class struggle. And, remarkably, they work as a fresh take on the most essential of design typologies. ‘Trauma’ chair, as the name would imply, is particularly powerful. Tall and imposing, like an African tribal throne, it is built in burned oriented strand board (OSB), lacquered with a mix containing molasses and peppered with die-cut holes. It talks of torture, slavery, wounding, scarring and healing, and has already been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art.

At this year’s Design Miami, Ross and the gallery will present two new series of work. ‘Rupture’ includes a low table, stool and lounge chair, all in marble and steel, and ‘Amorphous Strand’, two benches in steel and fired OSB. These functional sculptures – a long time in the planning and signalling a new commitment to working in the ‘fine art’ space – seem to get at the specifics of Samuel Ross, the things that actually make him a singular designer and creative practitioner. ‘Putting those materials together felt quite significant,’ he says. ‘It signals the permanence of me moving into design objects, into fine arts. I was always focused on reconstituted materials, and I was interested in the way you can allude to the idea of propagation. And those materials were fibrous and malleable, a bit more elastic. This feels far more concrete.’

‘I’ve been working on this privately for the last five or six years. The pull of the art and design space is really having time to think, and time to iterate, to note and jot and sketch. The time to add to a cultural dialogue’ – Samuel Ross

If the harder materiality of the new pieces marks Ross’ new commitment to sculptural investigations, they are also part of a long-term conversation about craft, engineering and technology that began in his childhood. ‘I think a lot has to do with perspective and identity,’ he says. ‘I was raised by two artists. My mother is a painter, my father a stained-glass artist and a painter. Both went to art school and both dabbled in design. I’m the product of a highly educated household that values art and material, so there is this narrative of making and craft and experimentation. And in the early days of A-Cold-Wall*, I was really looking at ways to integrate the artisan touch and unique patinas.’

This matching of industrial processes and craft processes has been a long-term concern for Ross: ‘I’ve been working on this privately for the last five or six years. And there’s been a lot of learning; how to work materials, fabrications, layers of engineering that come into play.’ Now he has the confidence that he can say what he wants to say in these forms, materials and processes. And he wants to keep doing it. ‘There’s an emotion, a sensitivity, there’s an expression, but there’s also a want, need and desire to learn as much as physically possible about material,’ he says. ‘That physical process is so important. It’s not really just about what I feel like doing, it’s about what’s the most efficient way to convey something.’

The universe of Samuel Ross

Ross is always generous in crediting mentors, confidants and other influences. And he says conversations with the Black Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates have helped shape his thinking around the new design pieces. ‘He has a background in urban planning, in craft and engineering and woodwork, he understands the semantics of materials, the way they can deliver a message.’ 

Ross has always understood the potential of material as message. He had been working as an artist and a freelance designer and created a streetwear label 2wnt4 as a side project when, in 2013, Virgil Abloh messaged him on Instagram. Abloh was working on his Pyrex Vision project and was interested in Ross’ work. Ross interned with Abloh during the inception of Off-White, before advancing to become design assistant at both Off-White and Kanye West’s creative studio, Donda.

He launched A-Cold-Wall* – which he calls ‘a material study for social architecture’ – in 2015, when he was just 24. Backed with a 2,000-word dissertation, A-Cold-Wall* was designed to be a proper brand and not just a conceptual experiment, but it also encoded a particular take on race, class and the Black British experience. 

Commercial success came quickly, but it has perhaps come at a conceptual cost, or at least diverted Ross’ energies. Functional sculpture offers more space to talk about what he wants to talk about: ‘The pull of the art and design space is really having time to think, and time to iterate, to note and jot and sketch. The time to add to a cultural dialogue,’ he says. ‘It’s a completely different mindset to developing garments at the scale we now are. It’s just as fulfilling, but with garments I’m really looking for problems to solve, in the supply chain, material costs, how we communicate with our audience. With the design work, I feel like I can add to channels of thought. I want to ensure that there is balance in what I call the agnostic truth about what it is to be Black British; to move through the class system, to have this dislocated relationship with Africa and West Africa because I’m Caribbean.’

The new pieces also address Ross’ relationship with the promise of modernism and ideas around functionality, service and positive action in the public realm. He wants to leverage all he knows about design in the digital space and his street art and streetwear smarts to introduce the work, and the ideas behind them, to a different audience: ‘The democratisation of fine art and design objects has been something that I’ve been wracking my brain about because it is a closed space for the most part. And so every artwork kind of exists in AR and VR, and as a 3D object, to engage that wider and younger audience.’

Ross is famously hard to keep up with in conversation; he has an intense hunger for ideas, for concepts, theoretical systems. Inevitably, the lack of diversity in design, and ways of addressing it, also commands a lot of his energy and attention. He also understands that there is a model that he, Abloh and others have helped redefine. It’s a model centred around ‘plurality, meritocracy and design, disciplines and deliverables’. It’s about hard skills, hard work, clear intent and working across mediums, talking in a range of voices – much like his biggest influence, the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli. 

We talk about the wave of young architects and designers of colour launching their careers with that kind of energy and creativity, using film, print, theatre,  digital media and more to explain their work and practice. ‘It’s become the new norm and it feels highly optimistic,’ says Ross. ‘It is good to see people kind of stepping off the cliff and understanding there is a finite amount of time we all have and if we’re going to really go at this, we should be high-risk.’

INFORMATION
Friedman Benda presents a solo booth showcasing Ross’ latest works at Design Miami, 1 – 5 December 2021
Ross’ self-published book Object – Form. Form!, £250, is out now
samuel-ross.com
friedmanbenda.com

A version of this article appears in the December 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*272), on newsstands and available to subscribers.

Ghanaian spatial design studio Limbo Accra’s rich network has developed through global partnerships that founder Dominique Petit-Frère has nurtured with leading urban space-makers and architectural enthusiasts. Our series of profiles explores the studio’s collaborations in order to discuss critical issues of our time, such as design intention, intergenerationality, creativity and change through Africa and its diaspora. For this instalment, we talk to Alaska Alaska studio director Tawanda Chiweshe on what it means to support Black-on-Black design, and how to empower the next generation of design changemakers.

Tawanda Chiweshe of Alaska Alaska

Tawanda Chiweshe is a ‘creative navigator’, designer and studio director of Alaska Alaska, a London-based multidisciplinary design practice founded by Virgil Abloh. The studio was established as a space to nurture the talent of young individuals in the industry, giving them career-changing opportunities and in so doing, empowering a new wave of Black design innovators. 

Chiweshe and Limbo Accra’s Dominique Petit-Frère were brought together through the development of Freedom Skate Park, Ghana’s first-ever recreational skate park, however their connection goes beyond this. They share philosophies on the ‘power of design communities’, serendipitous connections, and the importance of utilising these to create tangible design solutions.

Just as, in a previous article in this series, digital platform Hood Century’s founder Jerald ‘Coop’ Cooper comments on the power of language in design, Chiweshe recognises that the design world often excludes people from a process which is fairly ‘instinctive’. He maintains that Alaska Alaska works against these barriers through ‘empowering him to verbalise his thoughts’ and in turn ‘empower those in his orbit to do the same’.

When asked about design influences, Chiweshe explains: ‘From attending school in Hertfordshire to art school in London, my culture has been alien to all the contexts I’ve been in.’ As a consequence, his culture has given him an ‘anchor’ from which new experiences continue to be ‘juxtaposed as frames of reference’. Contrary to what he had been taught in art school, he later came to appreciate that design perspectives from his place of heritage were valuable, and ‘deserving of the same imbuement of esteem given to a Le Corbusier’. 

On how to instill ‘alternative’ value systems and frames of reference in design, he remarks that there are ‘intersectional issues’, which require ‘intersectional solutions’. Chiweshe’s work through Alaska Alaska shows that through a combination of both practical and theoretical work, the steps towards unearthing new design worlds can be made tangible. The importance of challenging design perspectives and values is essential for laying new design pathways for future generations and his work through Alaska Alaska is but one activation site where these changes are happening. 

In creating the below media piece, Chiweshe was inspired by the idea of a ‘cutting room floor’, something he’s ‘always perceived to be more important than the final outcome’. He was interested in channelling ways to present work that ‘doesn’t look in its final state or showcased context’ – in addition to showing multiple pieces of work together, allowing the works to create their own relationships.

We are currently gearing up for the next instalment in this series of profiles by Wallpaper* and Limbo Accra – already including Hood Century in the US, and Alaska Alaska in London, with more to follow soon.

The Covid-19 pandemic, to many a moment of reset and recalibration, has incentivised many shoppers to invest in clothing with a conscience. Sustainability-driven design is a key tenet of luxury conglomerate LVMH’s Life 360 plan, which highlights six lines of action, including a ‘circular approach to creativity’, which promotes reabsorbing materials into supply chains. 

A recycle and reuse mindset was integral to men’s artistic director and Wallpaper* collaborator Virgil Abloh when conceiving Louis Vuitton's A/W 2021 collection. In the cinematic show film to accompany the offering, directed by Josh Johnson, a troupe of models including musicians Mos Def and Saul Williams, strode an ambiguous setting resembling a marble-swathed airport (surely everyone’s most coveted destination right now), some carrying tactile travel and shoulder bags emblazoned with the classic LV monogram, crafted using recycled fabrics.

Louis Vuitton Felt Line: the maison’s most sustainable accessories yet?

Three designs, a ‘Keepall’, ‘Keepall XS’ and ‘Soft Trunk’, make up the Louis Vuitton Felt Line, a capsule offering of jacquard bags, crafted using organic cotton, recycled wool-based jacquard, 100 per cent recycled polyester derived from excess fabric stocks, and recycled plastic. The styles have a wondrously textured finish, and the brand’s signature logo has been crafted using tufted Lurex thread, which creates a kaleidoscopic mirage effect as the monogram appears and disappears across the silhouette. Vuitton’s A/W 2021 collection featured a tailored coat constructed using the same sustainable principles. 

Bags in the Louis Vuitton Felt Line also bear a new, eco-minded emblem, designed by Abloh in celebration of the brand’s environmentally minded milestone. They join the label’s catalogue of collector’s item pieces, including artist-created and logo-manipulated styles by Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons and, most recently Urs Fischer. Abloh’s modern motif, patched onto the styles using leather from excess stocks, is a marker of Louis Vuitton’s development policy; it is working towards manufacturing 100 per cent of its products through eco-conception by 2025. 

INFORMATION

louisvuitton.com

Braun celebrates its 100th birthday in 2021, and for the occasion, the German company has teamed up with Virgil Abloh for a shiny update of one of its most iconic pieces.

The anniversary celebrations include a design refresh of Braun’s Wandanlage hi-fi audio wall unit from 1965, which Abloh reinterpreted into a ‘functional art’ piece, and a short film shot at Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Illinois, where the designer discusses his inspiration and references. ‘I have always had a deep appreciation for Braun design,’ says Abloh. ‘For the brand’s 100 years, I jumped at the opportunity to reimagine this iconic Braun product and challenge what we have come to expect from design.’ 

His piece for Braun features a polished chrome surface, a nod to both the German brand’s functional aesthetic and Abloh’s own cultural references. ‘Chrome has a long history within the Black canon of aesthetics, whether that's platinum chains or gold teeth, there's that shine that heightens importance,’ says the designer. The material also references Abloh’s musical universe, from the brass and silver instruments of Mamie Smith’s 1920s blues band to the bespoke polished slabs on the cars made popular by the hip-hop stars of the 1980s.

To complete the celebrations, Abloh has also curated a musical remix in collaboration with Houston sound designers The Chopstars. Titled ‘Internationalism’, the track is available from SoundCloud, and offers an opportunity to delve into Abloh’s aural inspirations. The selected music, the designer explains, embodies an approach that is about ‘eclectic, genre-less, longevity, connection, using sound to paint pictures; to me, this track exemplifies the Braun ethos of good design – it’s timeless and meant to be appreciated and enjoyed over time’. 

Braun and Virgil Abloh had recently collaborated on the classic BC02 alarm clock, which the designer recreated in new bold shades and distinctive motifs from his Off-White collections. This new initiative strengthens the bond between the most iconic of modernist design brands and one of today's most brilliant creative minds.

‘The final result that we've developed in partnership with the Braun team is deep within the ethos of Braun, to build things to last, to truly be timeless, while allowing new stories to be told,’ continues Abloh. ‘We all make stuff. The goal is to make it with purpose.’

Watch: Virgil Abloh explains the reimagined Wandanlage hi-fi by Braun

INFORMATION

braun.com

Braun and Virgil Abloh's Off-White renew their partnership to launch a collaboration based on the German brand’s classic BC02 alarm clock.

A modernist design derived from the AB1, the iconically simple alarm clock designed by Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs in the late 1980’s, the new design was updated by Braun to improve arm movement and integrated lighting. Braun is no stranger to collaborative interpretations of its classics, having given over the alarm clock to Sir Paul Smith for a limited edition in 2020. 

Abloh has always been transparent about his admiration for Braun’s iconic, modernist household objects and with this collaboration he can now leave his distinctive mark on this relevant piece of design history. ‘I have always had an appreciation for Braun – iconic design that’s built to last,’ he said. 

Available in two limited edition colorways, the BC02 battery-operated alarm clock by Off-White combines Braun’s design integrity with Abloh’s visionary approach to domestic objects. Merging minimal industrial design and functionality with a new artistic vision, the collaboration instils a novel contemporary aesthetic into a design classic. 

Available in white, black, red and blue in its original version, the new Off-White c/o Braun BC02 alarm clock comes in bright orange and powder blue, and is finished with Off-White’s distinctive branding placed alongside with Braun’s own visual identity on both the clock’s face and its back as well as the packaging. The new Pantone shades were chosen by Abloh to ‘stand out in an interior design setting’, and give new bold character to the square objects.

The collaboration also marks the first steps of a new partnership between Abloh and Braun, which will see the designer reinterpret a Braun piece from the past century in a questo to open up the conversation on the role of design today.

INFORMATION

off---white.com

The second home collection from Virgil Abloh’s fashion label Off-White follows its ethos of ‘identity by design’; brand signatures, such as arrow patterns, hand logos and Swiss cheese-style ‘meteor’ holes, enliven everyday objects from doormats to deckchairs. With the ceramics, however, it’s a quiet irregularity that sets them apart.

‘The artisanal elements within the ceramic pieces are inspired by wabi-sabi,’ says Abloh. ‘What is perfect is questioned.’ Perfectly imperfect jugs, mugs, bowls and plates are tactile and earthy in matte black, with glossy insides, while illustrated white ‘art print’ versions bring angels to our table. It’s all just the thing for moments of coffee, calm and contemplation. As for a tablecloth, Abloh’s arrow print is the way to go.

Wallpaper* Design Awards 2021

INFORMATION

off---white.com

Got a soft spot for the skull, spot, butterfly and pill motifs synonymous with Damien Hirst’s artworks? We suggest you get your digital paddle ready for Virgil Abloh’s latest auction on his modern gallery and retail platform Canary Yellow – a selection of biker jackets, shirts and sweaters that have been customised by the artist himself. 

‘Beverly Hirst Recycler', is a collection crafted on both sides of the Atlantic, by Hirst and clothing artist Tetsuzo Okubo, who specialises in customised upcycled garments, ‘Damien made everything in London, then the pieces were sent to LA where I incorporated my signature patches,’ Okubo says of the punky designs, which include paint-splattered and zip-detail items from Hirst’s archive, peppered with smiley-faced spots, skulls and pills with colourful coatings. ‘We kept an open process and of course, I shared my design with him every time before sewing it down.'

Hirst and Okubo see their creations as wearable art pieces to be worn, not to be displayed on a wall. An item from ‘Beverly Hirst Recycler' will be auctioned every day this week on Canary Yellow. A pixelated camouflage shirt has already sold for $4500. We suggest your set your timer for the next sale. That next smiley face-swathed silhouette could be yours.

INFORMATION
gallery.canary---yellow.com

Virgil Abloh is famed for his harnessing of digital culture, designing via WhatsApp, creating dialogues through social media, and using the online world as a tool for democratising fashion and the elite luxury landscape. But for the the multi-hyphenate creative's latest project, a compendium charting the design history of ‘The Ten’, his famed 2016-born trainer collaboration with Nike, he looked to the power of the printed page.

‘I teamed up with Taschen to publish a book titled ICONS ‘Something’s Off’ that does exactly what Instagram captions can’t do,’ Abloh announced on his personal Instagram feed. ‘It’s essentially the whole logic of how. It’s a printed documentary of the Off White and Nike project. All the ones I’ve done to date and a window into all the ones to come.’

The now cult ‘The Ten’, saw the reinterpretation of ten signature Nike silhouettes, including the Air Jordan 1, Nike Air VaporMax, Nike Force 1 Low and Converse Chuck Taylor, which were reworked using collage, lettering, ironic labels like plastic tags and zip ties, and featured raw, sculpted finishes. The shoes sold out in minutes when they launched initially back in 2017, and Nike's SNKRS App crashed due to unprecedented online traffic. 

‘Icons’ traces the entire creative history of these designs, with its extensive 352 pages punctuated with concepts, prototypes and text messages between Abloh and Nike’s designers. Designed in partnership with London-based studio Zak Group, the first half of the book presents a visual overview of sneaker lexicon, while the second, features the people, places, objects, ideas, materials, and scenes integral to the evolution of the project. Text is contributed by Nike's Nicholas Schonberger, writer Troy Patterson, curator and historian Glenn Adamson, and Abloh himself.

‘I believe local bookstores are vital. Indie bookstores have always been hubs of community and culture and they deserve support', Abloh continued in his Instagram post, in reference to the physical distribution of Icons. An international group of independent bookshops, many of which are Black-owned are selling the book before its global release on 22 January, including Malik Book in Los Angeles, Mendo Books, Amsterdam and Mag Culture in London.

INFORMATION
nike.com
taschen.com

‘Taking the familiar and making it new'. That was the drawing board manifesto for Virgil Abloh’s new Off-White™ HOME collection now available via the Off-White™ website. Conceptualised by Abloh with the intention of dressing every room in the home – from front entrance to bedroom, kitchen to living space – the collection is characterised by a HOME orange fluorescent label, its inspiration drawn from Off-White’s ready-to-wear collection. Pieces are presented, variously, with Abloh’s signature swimming man logo, ‘Off-hand' and ‘Off-cross' logos, and distinctive meteor holes while the colour palette is mostly neutral; black-grey-beige tones with fluorescent pink and orange accents. ‘I’ve taken familiar items in the home and produced them in a way akin to my personal signatures, prioritising craftsmanship and celebrating the sophisticated modernity of Off-White™ explains Abloh. ‘Taking something familiar and making it new means that you are essentially designing with fragments of your mind.'

The new collection adds Off-White’s signature, trademark language, branding and methodology to everyday items and furnishes them with a fresh perspective, a system of voids and holes providing what Abloh calls, ‘a logic of seeing through something to make more of an identified connection with that object.'

The collection begins at the home’s front door entrance – three doormats in three assorted models and sizes to adapt to different spaces and needs. For the living room, the HOME Collection includes a series of mohair throw blankets and pillows, the inspiration for these pieces coming from Off-White’s ready-to-wear collection. Additionally, the collection holds cylindrical-shaped upholstered stools covered in fabric printed with wave, bird and arrow motif graphics also from the ready-to-wear collection – with wallpaper offerings in identical patterns. Ceramic pieces for the kitchen and living room are inspired by the designer’s fascination with Japan’s wabi-sabi aesthetic which centres on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. ‘The fact that what is perfect, is questioned,' muses Virgil. ‘Are these things made by hand...or by machine?'

Off-White™ HOME’s take on the humble umbrella adds an interior graphic that reads ‘insert sunshine here', visible only to the user when the brolly is fully opened. ‘The idea of "Insert Sunshine Here" printed on the inside of an umbrella is a culmination of Off-White™ signatures coming to a crescendo, says Abloh. ‘Text, language, emotion and directive....the DNA of Off-White™ manifested on home objects.'

Directed by Daniel Burdett

INFORMATION

@Off-White
off-white.com

The abstract elan of graffiti artist Futura (Lenny McGurr) has long captivated the fashion world. For Louis Vuitton’s A/W 2019 runway show, Virgil Abloh invited the artist to live tag the brand’s New York-inspired show set, in a nod to the famed orbs and narrow squiggles he used to spray paint across the city in the Seventies, where he ran in an avant-garde art circle with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Dondi White. Just last month, Sotheby’s auctioned a pair of 2005 Futura-designed Nike Dunk High Pro trainers for $63,000 USD as part of its ‘Cult Canvas’ auction. 

A creative polymath working across fashion design, photography and album art, Futura relaunched his streetwear label Futura Laboratories in May 2019, after an eight-year pause. The brand’s relaunch was first stocked and celebrated at Dover Street Market Singapore, where in line with the opening of Futura's major exhibition ‘Constellation’ in the city – an exclusively commissioned artwork was installed instore.

Now, Dover Street Market and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo has continued her celebration of Futura's aesthetic oeuvre with an installation of spherical sculptures embellished with archival prints, on display on the ground floor of Dover Street Market London. These kaleidoscopic, textural artworks were selected by Kawakubo in spring 2019, and feature as striking prints in Comme des Garçons SHIRT’s A/W 2020 collection. The offering features shirts, tote bags, and tees, panelled and collaged with Futura’s nebulous forms.

Rendered in planetary form, the orb-like steel and vinyl sculptures on display are a symbol of Futura's graffiti-focused world. For those living in London, it's just got a little closer.

INFORMATION

Until 12 November

doverstreetmarket.com

In the most groundbreaking addition yet to Wallpaper’s limited-edition cover series, designer Virgil Abloh is cutting our September 2020 issue in half.

We invited Abloh to take over our cover to coincide with our exclusive first look into ‘Project Geländewagen’, an art project with Mercedes-Benz chief design officer Gorden Wagener that reinterprets the German brand’s classic G-Class SUV series. 

Like the artwork, which has a stripped-down appearance and a specially developed exterior paintwork to ‘show remnants that a hand touched it’, Abloh’s cover is understated, tactile and radical. The cover space is a matt white, with the requisite Wallpaper* masthead and cover credit visible only as a layer of gloss varnish.

Across the centre of the cover is a horizontal dotted line in black, with a scissor graphic that invites the reader to cut the magazine in half – an act meant to highlight the magazine as an object. ‘Cutting the physical object makes the magazine come alive and reinforces the concept that the magazine's media may be physical, but it also occupies a space figuratively and literally,’ Abloh explained in his design proposal.

As an added element of his cover takeover, Abloh has personally cut and autographed 184 copies of his cover.Titled ‘2 for the Price of 1’, these special editions are now available for sale from his website, canary---yellow.com.

The cutting took place on 25 August 2020, at premises of Abloh’s regular collaborators Oetee, who worked with him on his exhibition ‘Figures of Speech’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago last year. 

‘I was trying to develop an idea that was more than just a 2D cover. I treated the magazine like a 3D object, essentially a call to action,’ he explains. ‘The only graphic design essentially present requires the end user to cut it in half. The essential premise is that readers respond to it however they wish. It’s a proposition that needs an end user; the idea is democratic.’

‘We're a generation on the fringe of digital being ever-present, but print also being an emotional connection to the past. Projects like this can meld those two worlds together, and be engaging to both,’ he continues.

All profits from the cut and signed covers will go to the Virgil Abloh™ “Post Modern” Scholarship Fund, which is dedicated to fostering equity and inclusion within the fashion industry by providing scholarships to students of promise of Black, African-American, or African descent. The scholarships are managed in partnership with the Fashion Scholarship Fund (FSF), an American non-profit association that supports the future of fashion.

‘It’s important that the door is left open for kids just like me,’ reflects Abloh, the son of Ghanaian immigrants in Chicago who ascended the ranks to become one of the world’s foremost designers. ‘The future of fashion, the future of design, the future of management and all these careers is an urgent matter. It is vital that figures like me embed within their work a component to fortify that effort.’

For an in-depth look at Project Geländewagen, by Wallpaper* Germany Editor Sophie Lovell and photographers Bafic and Frederic Seemann, see here.

INFORMATION

The cut and autographed covers are available for purchase now), $30, with all profits donated to the Virgil Abloh™ “Post Modern” Scholarship Fund, see canary---yellow.com.

Abloh’s cover design is the latest addition to the Wallpaper* limited-edition cover series, which features a specially created artwork by a different artist, architect or designer each issue. Limited-edition covers are available to subscribers only; for more information, see wallpaper.com/subscribe 

Mercedes-Benz announced today that it is collaborating with the multi-hyphenate designer, Virgil Abloh, to create a unique artwork.

Titled Project Geländewagen, the artwork will modify and reinterpret the German carmaker’s G-Class SUV, a robust off-road vehicle with a distinctive boxy silhouette, first launched in 1979. It draws on the hallmarks of the Mercedes-Benz brand: premium materials, superb craftsmanship and highly developed design; and intends to deliver a new vision of luxury that is defined by the sharing of ideas and disciplines.

In the preview announcement, Abloh calls the project ‘a perfect chassis to interject modern artists’ ideas of what the future can be stylistically, within conceptual car design’.

Echoing Abloh’s enthusiasm for creative experimentation, Mercedes-Benz chief design officer Gorden Wagener says that they are ‘set to create something unseen’ in automotive design, fashion and art. The project articulates Mercedes-Benz’s positioning as ‘more than a luxury carmaker, it is a design brand and luxury label.’

Project Geländewagen will be revealed digitally to a global audience on 8 September 2020, at 4pm CET on mercedes-benz.com.

Recognising a duty to support the arts and the international creative community in a time of uncertainty, Mercedes-Benz and Abloh have agreed to auction off a home-scale replica of their unique artwork following the launch event, with all proceeds donated to a charity that supports the arts. The winner of the auction will also receive a personal introduction to Abloh and Wagener, to learn more about the inspirations and intentions for the artwork.

The full story on Project Geländewagen, with exclusive preview imagery, will run in the September 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands from 20 August. Wallpaper* subscribers will receive the issue with a limited-edition cover by Abloh. 

INFORMATION

Project Geländewagen will be unveiled with a digital event on 8 September, at 4pm CET, at mercedes-benz.com. Limited-edition covers of the Wallpaper* print edition are exclusive to subscribers, see wallpaper.com/sub20

At first glance, Virgil Abloh's pastel ‘Sculpture’ rings for Louis Vuitton appear like simple, graphic shapes in scrumptious sherbet shades – take a closer look, however, and a raft of contradictions is revealed.

Made from hard metal, with an acrylic-based varnish, the designs – which pinch details from Haussmann’s Paris – are playfully weighted in French history. Drenched in the same sweet tones as the Louis Vuitton S/S20 menswear collection, the rings are encrusted in the type of intricate whorls and coils that curl around classical Paris columns, like fragments from that city’s rich urban architecture. The effect is unexpectedly understated; coloured in the same hues and with a lack of obvious definition, the embellishment is rendered almost invisible. It is Abloh’s way of fusing old and new; by seamlessly bridging the chasm between the classical and contemporary, he draws our attention to the evolving role of jewellery through the rings themselves.

Further traditional references emerge in familiar signet ring silhouettes. Reminiscent of classic jewelled rings, here Abloh renders old signifiers of power and fraternity anew. The ring becomes imbued with new symbols, its non- precious guise and cartoon-like shades challenging traditional values. §

As originally featured in the May 2020 issue of Wallpaper* (W*254), available to download free here

INFORMATION

louisvuitton.com

Announced today at New York Fashion Week, Virgil Abloh and Evian's new Activate Movement initiative comprises a €50,000 grant for sustainability-focused design and innovation projects, open to 18–35 year olds, alongside the launch of an exclusive 750ml glass bottle and two refillable SOMA bottles. Both facets of the initaitve centralise circularity and look to a positive design future.

‘We hope to inspire curious minds and support young people who want to enact change for a more sustainable future,' says Shweta Harit, Evian's global vice president of marketing. ‘The launch of the sustainability-focused contest is to prompt the youth of today to consider purpose-led sustainable innovation. We invite anyone to apply that hopes to activate change through sustainable design thinking.'

Supporting the work of emerging talent has long preoccupied Abloh. His London-based design studio Alaska Alaska is staffed by young, multi-disciplinary creators, handpicked by the designer himself. ‘I chose people that reminded of me, in the early years of my career,’ he explains. ‘I started out as an architect but had like much bigger ambitions than just architecture, so what I now try to look out for young talent, find it, and give it impact. That’s the exact opportunity that I had when I was young.’

‘I’m looking for something that is open-minded and modern. Lead us to better solutions for the future’ – Virgil Abloh

Abloh’s meteoric rise to global success started with an internship in Fendi’s Milan headquarters. Here, he was scouted for his ability to connect so naturally with the pop-culture ideas and aesthetics of ‘now'. Abloh has often celebrated his internship start, and looks to provide even better, more creative, and more diverse opportunities for those just starting out in the industry.

Abloh’s advice: work hard – and use digital

According to Abloh, there’s never been a better moment to jump into the design world – and make a splash. ‘The barriers are the lowest that they've been in quite some time,’ he says. ‘I think it’s obvious that there a lot of undiscovered talent out there – that’s why I enjoy this project so much. I'm giving a people a chance to let their work come to the top.’

‘Hard work, good ideas and persistence will undoubtedly lead to success,' he continues. ‘Whether it be opportunities like Activate Movement, or even just putting your work out there, and letting it be seen and resonate online – it will lead to an initial practice.’

Abloh will judge the entries himself, alongside a representative from Evian, and an expert panel. The judges hope to be taken aback by the entries' creativity – and grant guidelines have been left deliberately sparse to support this. ‘The upside of a project like this is not having too many prescribed details,’ Abloh explains. ‘I want to be surprised. That's the benefit of having an open-source angle to this. I don't want to have a pre-described notion of what comes in. I’m looking for something that is open-minded and modern. Lead us to better solutions for the future.’

Glass half full

There’s a tug of war industry-wide between the impetus to create more objects, and the necessity to be sustainable. ‘I think our generation has learned that more stuff isn't necessarily necessary, its how we use and how we attach ourselves to the thing in the world that are important,’ says Abloh.

This circular ‘less but better’ approach has influenced Evian’s new limited edition Activate Movement collection, designed to make you want to hold onto your water bottle for longer, ultimately reducing reliance on less single-use, virgin plastic. Designed in collaboration with Abloh and Alaska Alaska studio, the bottle features an infinite loop of droplets. The logo represents ‘the power and potential of every small action to create positive change’, Abloh explains. QR codes on the Activate Movement glass bottles will direct people to the online contest, ‘merging the physical product with the digital space'.

A natural fit

The designer has held the title of creative advisor for sustainable design at the water bottle company since December 2018. In this position, he has launched glass bottles and accessories through much-hyped ‘Drip Drop' events in New York City. Evian's Shweta Harit makes no secret of the brand's ambition to ‘drive scale' and reach more people through Abloh's large audience. ‘By having a series of ongoing creative projects and discussions, Virgil has been able to gain a deep understanding of our long-term commitment towards sustainability and demonstrate how he will be able to bring his unique touch into making this happen,' she explains. 

The collaboration with Evian feels is a natural fit for Abloh, too. ‘For me, it’s always exciting to collaborate with what I perceive to be the best in class,' he explains. ‘It’s important that I have the ability to design products that can affect change or feel like a good contribution to the world at large. Obviously freshwater is a vital source of life so it became synergistic for Evian and I to create a lineage of products that give us the ability to add colour around water.’

INFORMATION

Entries open today (10 Febuary) until 31 March 2020. Apply for the grant: evian.com

It seems that cultural-disturber Virgil Abloh has a concrete plan for Paris-based design laboratory Galerie Kreo as he launches his third major furniture collection, ‘Efflorescence’.

His first collection for the gallery, it's also the debut of Galerie Kreo into street culture. In the collection, tables, consoles, seats and vases are swathed in Abloh’s free-hand graffiti streaks. As founder and creative director of streetwear label Off-White, Abloh aficionados will notice familiar marks emblazoned on his previous collaboration with Gore-Tex.

Galerie Kreo presents ‘Efflorescence’: a furniture collection by Virgil Abloh

The furniture collection's 20 architecturally-aligned pieces draw a focus on concrete in its pure form, questioning how a material interacts within our natural and artificial environments. Pieces are indented with perfectly shaped cavities, creating a sense of organised destruction. Each work within the collection has been specially hand tagged, with neon sprays of Abloh’s graffiti.

The most impressive piece in Efflorescence is ‘Bench 2’, a skate ramp-esque seating solution measuring almost three-metres-long. Another of Abloh’s excavating offerings include Mirror 1, a slab of thick-cut glass which seems reminiscent of a cheese knife; corners are rounded while circular-cut recesses seem irregularly appropriate.

‘Chair 1’ and ‘Chair 3’ seem pared-back: simple concrete cubes feature a sharp ridged back with indents and a graffiti motif. ‘Here, the heritage of brutalism, its forms and ideas, are literally perforated, extruded to serve as a pedestal for the creative expression of the street,’ says Abloh. Although 2019 saw Abloh taking a break from his hectic work cycle and techno disk-jockeying, it’s clear he's back with bite.

INFORMATION

‘Efflorescence’, until 10 April 2020, Galerie Kreo
galeriekreo.com

ADDRESS

31, Rue Dauphine
75006 Paris

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Benji B is all about connecting the dots. Fashion, music, design – for the London-based DJ and producer the art forms are all on the same plane, tapping into the same frequencies. ‘I don’t see a distinction. All of these practices are about turning ideas into form,’ he says.  

It’s a philosophy that has shaped his career for over 20 years – first at the helm of his BBC Radio 1 show and his seminal club night, Deviation, and more recently through his work in fashion as the go-to curator of sound and music for the likes of Louis Vuitton, Cerruti 1881 Paris , Celine, Bethany Williams and Gieves and Hawkes.

Crafting some of the most memorable fashion week soundtracks, Benji collaborated closely with Phoebe Philo during her time at Celine, experimenting with everything from time-delayed speakers to famously recording the ambient street sounds of Paris.

‘That particular collection was inspired by a French film that had extremely crude sounds. I recorded drilling on the street – and it was amazing to watch the audience response. Some of the most famous fashion critics feeling uncomfortable, and then watching that discomfort turn to surrender. It was fascinating!’

When long-term friend and collaborator Virgil Abloh took the helm of Louis Vuitton as artistic director for menswear in 2018, Benji was the natural choice as music selector. ‘Putting together the show in the Palais Royal, it was just a moment,’ he says of their debut S/S 2019 collaboration – where Canadian group BadBadNotGood brought to life the rainbow hued collection, changing keys with each colour shift. ‘It’s such a privilege to use music to add another dimension to how people engage with fashion.’

It’s not just the clothing but also the set design that shapes the sound. ‘When I do music for fashion shows, it’s about the space and responding to it. The music can be a complement to the set or a juxtaposition to it’ he says. Seeing the collection at an early stage, he thinks about the whole experience, how it will sound, look and feel. ‘The music I do is not in the background, it’s part of the experience. It’s part of the clothes, it’s part of the art.’

Like Abloh and Kanye West – who he also regularly collaborates with, Benji is compelled by the more democratic direction of fashion in the social media era. ‘Instagram has blown apart the idea of gatekeepers. The idea that you have to get to a certain stage before you are able to engage with nice things, whether its expensive watches or fashion, no longer applies. The true definition of luxury is not a power yacht in Monaco, it’s something that’s hand made – whether that’s from an established brand or a new designer who has taken the time to craft a piece. It’s really about authenticity.’ 

What’s meaningful to people in their everyday lives is what drives him. ‘The reason I love design so much is that people are able to turn ideas into something that has a use. This is true of furniture and music, but also great clothing. When you cut through the circus of the fashion world, when you work with the true creatives – Virgil Abloh, Bethany Williams, Kim Jones – without exception these people are amazing artists. They are at the level of Frank Gehry or Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring – that’s why they are where they are. Sometimes with the noise of fashion you can overlook how authentic and gifted these people truly are.’

How does he see the fashion show evolving in the future? ‘Well, it’s mind blowing to me that we can stream shows on Instagram Live. That wasn’t possible just a few years ago. But when you think about it, McQueen did AI twenty years ago – so who knows where it can go next? In a sense London deserves so much credit for bringing theatre to fashion shows over the years.’

INFORMATION

mixcloud.com/benjib

Watch Maison et Objet Designer of the Year Michael Anastassiades tour us through his practice

It’s a new decade, but true to form, Paris’ winter cultural offerings roll on in. While the deep dive of Charlotte Perriand’s work stays strong at Foundation Louis Vuitton and fashion troops flocked in for menswear A/W, three new solo shows empower the limelight. Virgil Abloh brings street culture to Galerie Kreo, Herve Van der Straeten invites us onto his fun ride and Daniel Arsham takes us to 3020 at Galerie Perrotin in an exploration of historic sculpture. Inside the Maison et Objet (17-21 January) halls, Michael Anastassides presents his refined mobile lighting, while fresh talent on the French design scene get in the frame.

Explore our highlights from Maison et Objet and beyond

Fun Ride by Hervé Van der Straeten

Over in the Marais district, the French artist-designer brings the whimsical essence of funfairs to his tenth solo show. Zappy (pictured) and Looping are among the names of the new consoles that will entertain viewers – products in lacquered wood and bronze. 35 pieces in total come together in Van der Straeten’s pleasure ground, including the Spider cabinet and Crystalline chandelier, and for added play, he shares the dialogue with the interdisciplinary work of artist duo Arotin & Serghei too – extending the visual treat through colour and light.

Rising Talents Awards

The gaze remains on home turf for the January 2020 edition of the Rising Talents Awards, as six French emerging names, Wendy Andreu, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, Laureline Galliot, Julie Richoz, Adrien Garci (pictured) and Natacha & Sasha, have been chosen by a jury that includes Pierre Charpin, Didier Krzentowski, Guillaume Houzé, Pierre Yovanovitch, René-Jacques Mayer and Françoise Seince. True to the Parisian spirit, many of the designers have had a stint at local institution ENSCI Les Ateliers, while an eclectic range of techniques filter through the work, including cartoon software, hand craft, laser cutting and ecological solutions.

Trame

It may be cooler climes, but new brand Trame is sending us energy from the Mediterranean with its launch of homeware and accessories created with historic stories in mind. The first range travels to Morocco, with hand crafted pieces inspired by stories of Madame de Blois, King Louis XIV’s favourite daughter. Italian designer Maddalena Casadei, London and Warsaw-based Maria Jeglinska and Julie Richoz from Paris have devised this inaugural collection, titled ‘A voyage to Meknes,’ that includes ceramics, rugs, curtains and blankets that are embedded with the artisanal culture of Morocco. Milan-based Studio Vedet have been tapped for the brand’s art director, and the collection will also travel to Salone del Mobile later in the year.

Michael Anastassiades Designer of the Year 2020

One of our shortlisted Designers of the Year, London-based Anastassiades goes full circle for Maison et Objet – the location where he first showed wares from his eponymous studio back in 2007. Over ten years on, he has been very busy, and 2019 marked his first retrospective in his home country of Cyprus. For this special showcase, he brings together all 16 of his Mobile Chandeliers (including some new iterations) with the poetic mastery his studio has become known for. ‘For me, it is important to always show something different, make sure that what I design explores a new idea.’

‘Efflorescence’ by Virgil Abloh at Galerie Kreo

Following two major design launches with both Vitra and Carpenters Workshop Gallery last year, Abloh has been tapped by Galerie Kreo for a street culture range. Architectural concrete forms have been emblazoned with the Chicago-born creative’s graffiti in a merging of eras, from brutalism to street culture. Read more here.

INFORMATION
maison-objet.com

By the time Vincenzo De Cotiis went to the Politecnico di Milano to study architecture in the late 1970s, Italy’s radical architecture movement was at the forefront of the country’s design culture. In that context, it may seem surprising that De Cotiis was more inclined to arte povera’s use of rudimentary materials. ‘I feel tangent to everything that is artistically expressed through materiality,' says the Italian architect and designer, who set up his studio in 1997. ‘Its recyclability has always been part of my artistic path, like fibreglass.'

For his new collection ‘Éternel,’ launched at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris, De Cotiis has produced 18 pieces, including dining and coffee tables, chandeliers, stools and a lounge chair. Simultaneously playing with the vocabulary of furniture and sculpture, the collection combines solemn materials such as iridescent cast aluminium and brass with eastern influences, such as lanterns made of glass with silver foils and cabinet surfaces that emulate Japanese ceramics.

‘I have always been passionate about Japanese architecture,' says the Milan-based designer, whose first projects in the 1980s were already infused with eastern references. ‘Today, I find this influence in the attention towards the minimal and the intimate.'

While it may be the designer’s first solo presentation in France, it certainly isn’t his first collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. In 2018, the London headquarters presented ‘En Plein Air,’ a 20 piece-strong solo display inspired by late 19th century al-fresco painting.

Meanwhile in Venice, to coincide with this year’s Art Biennale, his 17-metre-long wall made of recycled fibreglass and silver plated brass can be seen at the group exhibition DYSFUNCTIONAL, at Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’d’Oro, alongside the work of Rick Owens and Michel Lamy, Virgil Abloh, Studio Drift and Ingrid Donat, to name a few. 

‘I always seem to find myself somewhere between the functionality of the object and its abstract presence,‘ the designer and architect says of his long-standing artistic inclination. Of his new pieces — which also coincide with the launch of a book published by Rizzoli Electa — De Cotiis says that ‘their function is perhaps the last thing to be considered.’

INFORMATION

‘Éternel’ is on view until 21 December; carpentersworkshopgallery.com

ADDRESS

54 Rue De La Verrerie,
Paris, 75004

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

‘Twelve thousand square feet of exhibition space is still just scratching the surface of what Virgil has done for the past 20 years,’ says Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, who scoped Virgil Abloh for the survey show – before his Louis Vuitton appointment as menswear director in 2018 – on the basis of holding up one of Chicago’s ‘local superstars’.

The exhibition is a bit of a ‘cheat code’ for understanding Abloh, the creative director, designer and polymath. It covers a lot of ground: his work with Kanye West as a product and graphic designer for 10 years, his DJ career, Off-White, Louis Vuitton, Ikea, and lots in between. ‘We have laid the ground work, so someone can come in after us,’ says Darling, in recognition that there will be much more to come.

Abloh and Darling teamed up with AMO’s head of design Samir Bantal to formulate and design the show. Four sections divide up Abloh’s offering from 1989 to date: Music, Fashion, Design and the Black Gaze – the final section ‘cuts through the hype and the buzz’ and ’brings to the surface the social commentary especially around race, that’s been there from the beginning,’ says Darling.

The buzz is represented by the graphic ‘culture wall’ that welcomes you into the exhibition – an ‘autobiographical, matrix of influences’ inspired by the visual identity of Rem Koolhaas’ 1978 book  Delirious New York, featuring portraits, references and text.

Abloh’s relationship with Koolhaas and OMA goes back to when a new building was being built at the Illinois Institute of Technology campus when Abloh was an architecture student there. The relationship developed further when the pair sat down for an interview for System Magazine in 2017, and it was Abloh’s idea to get AMO involved in the exhibition.

Bantal describes the process of working with Abloh on the exhibition as akin to Nanggol (the original version of bungee jumping, performed as a ritual by the men of Vanuata – without the elastic line) and ‘almost strictly’ all collaboration was online: ‘endless threads of scrollable ideas free from location or time’ writes Bantal in the ‘Figure of Speech’ catalogue.

His work with Abloh and observations about his work led Bantal to conclude ‘the idea of the Prototype as an effective strategy’: ‘A prototype is open-ended and receptive to critique. A prototype is a perfect freeze of exploration, liberated from a definitive end goal,’ writes Bantal.

Walk around the exhibition with these words in mind. You’ll see Abloh fearlessly venturing from project to project, unafraid of failure or new pursuits, priding himself in his ability to be a ‘tourist’. ‘I’ve crafted my output into opening minds, instead of reaffirming closed minds,’ says Abloh in a conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Bantal, explaining his tourist/purist dichotomy. Some prototypes in the exhibition feel like finished works, others feel like the start of something exciting, and some probably made it off the drawing board slightly prematurely, but such is life.

Abloh’s IKEA furniture design prototypes are piled up in the exhibition ready for a bonfire. They are reverse prototypes, taking history and working forwards, summarising, simplifying and stripping back – representing Abloh’s interest in opening up classic 20th century design (think Prouve, Le Corbusier and Nakoshima) to a millennial consumer audience. These works also interrogate his interest in copyright law, public domain and fair usage. ‘A couple of the rugs made it into the world’ says Darling, as we observe the pyre.

Instead of prototypes, some works look more like props. Fake functional objects wheeled out from backstage at the Virgil Abloh show. A billboard spelling out ‘Advertise here’ with graffiti on the back. Concrete style graffitied furniture pieces and a reflective, high-gloss stainless steel iPhone-shaped mirror for Kreo. Diamond studded paper-clip jewellery for Jacob & Co. These objects nod to Abloh’s formative years as a skateboarder in suburban Chicago.

While a T-shirt could feel like a prototype, Abloh makes it a work of art. T-shirt screen-printing frames hang on the walls like masterpieces. One framed Supreme t-shirt in the show has never been worn, and only ever displayed in a frame in a museum. From his early t-shirt printing ventures with J Boogie in Chicago as a teen skater, to making merchandise with Kanye West, to designing the Pyrex 23 t-shirts (a comment on young black men, drug culture and Michael Jordan), to his work with re-used Champion and Ralph Lauren flannel tees, working with Shayne Oliver from Hood by Air, Off-White staples, and pieces for Louis Vuitton – such as an unreleased tie-dye Pistolesi leather t-shirt for Men’s SS19 seen in the show, or a simple black and white staff t-shirt for the first runway show. The t-shirt is a medium that Abloh has mastered.

A whole set of unreleased Nike trainer prototypes on a low plinth are also works of art – studded, bulbous beauties, labeled “prototype”, smooth and contoured in phoenix red or bulky dinosaurs in grey and transparent plastic. The trainers don’t feel like throw-away prototypes, they are there to be studied and savoured.

More than anything, the exhibition shows how Abloh approaches fashion as an artist. As creative director of Off-White launched in 2013, and artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, from March 2018, he has worked to embed concepts and thinking into collections, campaigns and runway shows. The exhibition presents artefacts and remnants of these – a bright yellow neon sign used in his first Off-White runway show in Paris (F/W 16) reading ‘You’re obviously in the wrong place’. Or his first campaign images for Louis Vuitton shot by Inez and Vinoodh featuring children of colour playing with luxury Louis Vuitton products.

Abloh is saying a lot: the A/W 2019 collection titled ‘Sliding, backwards, slowly’ featured rubber coated LV-branded neon gloves and a shirt and pants featuring graphics from The Wiz cartoon, that adapts the Wizard of Oz from an African-American perspective. In the final room, the ‘Keep all’ LV bag with a hefty orange chain to keep it safe, speaks of who he is in the world, and how the luxury industry perceives young black males walking into an LV store. Abloh’s ‘black gaze’ that runs throughout the exhibition and infiltrates his work is personal, but it also feels universal in many ways. He brings a perspective that echoes that of many.

Right now, we are still caught up in who Abloh is, but after seeing this exhibition, maybe you'll start thinking more about what he is actually saying. Abloh summarises in the final conversation of the catalogue spoken to founder and editor-in-chief of Vestoj, Anja Aronowsky Cronberg: ‘...My goal is to disappear and let the work speak for itself.’

INFORMATION

Virgil Abloh: "Figures of Speech" , MCA, 10 June to 22 September 22, 2019
mcachicago.org

The onslaught of summer typically brings with it a mushrooming of pop-up stores, bars and other fun short-term concepts, but few can hold a candle to Nike’s newly launched temporary initiative in Chicago: the opening of the NikeLab Re-Creation Center, in partnership with the ultimate polymath and Chicago native, Virgil Abloh. Now running through 28 July, the space has been designed to empower the local youth and community by tapping into the cultural pulse and heritage of Chicago, and hence help nurture the next generation of homegrown creativity.

Backed by a robust line of programming, such as workshops, giveback programs and of course, exclusive merchandise, the Re-Creation Center most notably involves a roster of influential, Chicago-based creative forces – selected by Abloh himself – who will not only host and lead sessions, but also serve as mentors for a specially curated mentorship program as well. These figures include graphic designer Chuck Anderson, photographer Paul Octavious, fabric designer/artist Alyx Harch, architects/designers Thomas Kelly and Carrie Norman for brand identity, and architects Ann Lui and Craig Reschke of Future Firm.

The mentorship program will welcome ten Chicagoan creatives for an eight week long immersive experience with Abloh and the mentors, which will enable them to not only refine their area of expertise, but also open themselves up to other complementary areas to their practice.

Although this enviable opportunity for career development is only available to a lucky few, all visitors to the NikeLab Chicago Re-Creation Center will be able to access the Reuse-a-Shoe initiative – a unique installation that recycles worn-out trainers by turning them into Nike Grind, the sports powerhouse’s proprietary material that transforms recycled footwear and surplus manufacturing material into premium sport surfaces like running tacks, gym floors, courts, playgrounds and turf fields. This material will ultimately be used in the building of a community basketball court in Chicago, also designed by Abloh, that’s currently set to open ahead of NBA All-Star 2020.

INFORMATION

NikeLab Chicago Re-Creation Center is open until 28 July. For more information, visit the Nike website

ADDRESS

673 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago
IL 60611

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Like most American teenagers, Virgil Abloh, the multi-dexterous creative behind cult fashion label Off-White, grew up coveting Nike trainers. In his younger days, Abloh and his friends would sketch shoe ideas and send them to Nike (they were politely rejected). This week, Abloh’s highly anticipated reimagining of ten iconic Nike styles is being unveiled in all its glory. Simply known as ‘The Ten’, the collection teams Off-White’s irreverent styling with Nike’s iconic heritage for a fresh design perspective.

In Abloh’s hands, the ten Nike silhouettes – Air Jordan I, Air Max 90, Air Presto, Nike Air VaporMax, Blazer Mid, Converse Chuck Taylor, Nike Air Max 97, Nike Air Force 1 Low, including two new styles: Nike React Hyperdunk and NikeLab Zoom Fly SP – have been revamped with deconstructed and material interventions.

Shoes have been cut by hand and reconstructed, remade with translucent uppers and reversed materials, and emblazoned with text placements, such as ‘Shoelaces’ on shoestrings and ‘Air’ on the soles of NikeAir. The designer also bought a typographic touch to his recent Resort S/S 2018 collection, emblazoning heeled boots with the phrase ‘For Walking’ and monochrome clothing with the term ‘Floral Print Here’. For Abloh’s Nike collaboration, embellishments, such as plastic tags and zip ties, highlight each style’s merit as a glowing example of product design.

Abloh’s approach is not only informed by sneaker culture and his longtime affection for Nike’s wares, it is also distinguished by a raw and unfinished aesthetic – a prevailing influence in his many projects. While an exciting mash-up of different creative influences, each style remains intrinsically true to its original form.

The designer says, ‘My design point of view is to grab attention, but still to do it in a poetic way. It’s easy to be disruptive, it’s harder to be chic. I want to do both at the same time and I want to express those ideas not only in shoes and clothing, but furniture and artwork [as well.] There’s no discipline that I define myself to. My ideas are non-specific to the medium it can end up on.’

To celebrate the launch in New York, Nike has set up the Nike Off Campus – a platform showcasing installations designed by Abloh devoted to each of the ten shoe styles. The space, which is currently up on Wall Street and will travel to London next, will host a series of talks, studio sessions and workshops with designers, artists and visionaries curated by Abloh, and is intended to spark new ideas and conversations in the realms of sport, design and culture. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Nike website and the Off-White website