Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS

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For a collaboration with Hiroshi Fujiwara, Abloh designed a money clip that looks like a credit card. “Don’t let Zara and Uniqlo educate you on the price of a garment because that’s not fashion,” he once said. “That’s like McDonald’s. Your health is tied to that — a 99-cent nugget.” He has also collaborated with McDonald’s. Virgil and Rihanna in Paris. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Off-White benefits from high fashion’s desperation to regain youth appeal For one, there are those who believe the foundation of Off-White is stolen ideas: In July, the Norwegian sportswear brand Helly Hansen filed a trademark infringement and unfair competition suit in Illinois federal court, accusing Abloh of ripping off its logo in many of his designs.

At the same time, Abloh worked on a master’s degree in architecture, which he received from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. (This should demonstrate two of his more notable qualities, which are that he is smart and has seemingly boundless energy.) Alex Castro, an illustrator at The Verge (and of this article!) and a notably cool person, is my last best hope to understand the brand’s dominance, since even the hypebeasts are capable of openly questioning it. “All of the power of Off-White is in the quotation marks,” he says. Then he details a very complicated emotional process, reacting to a rug that Abloh designed that says “Keep Off” on it:

In its archiving of the Off-White x Nike collections, ICONS ultimately encapsulates the wider impact of Abloh’s work within fashion, his way of taking classic forms, deconstructing them, and turning them on their heads. There is one image in the book which symbolises this and which Kyes says crystallised the entire project for him. It’s a prototype of a Jordan 1, a shoe that sits at the very pinnacle of Nike’s signature designs, that has been deconstructed by Abloh with an X-Acto knife. “When we found that prototype I instantly got it,” says Kyes. “You could see it was a breakthrough.” They don’t all love it. Many of them are lukewarm. Many of them openly hate it! Many say it’s “aesthetically good stuff” but that they can’t get behind the “disingenuous” message of the brand.

Off-White is the hottest brand in the world, according to the quarterly ranking released by the fashion and e-commerce platform Lyst. It’s rare that the question “what’s the deal?” feels fair or interesting, but, uh, what’s the deal? Off-White started with a brush — or prolonged embrace — with celebrity Taking cues from the DIY industrial aesthetic of “The Ten” collection, the book’s design also draws inspiration from references including the 1972 art exhibition catalogue Documenta 5 which Kyes calls a dictionary of the 20th century. “It was always clear to us that ICONS should aspire to be the Documenta of sneakers,” he says. This influence reveals itself in the second half of the book. With the opening chapter centring the visual history of Abloh’s collections, ICONS shifts its focus to creating a lexicon that defines the key people, places, objects, and ideas that shaped the project.When it comes down to it, Virgil Abloh’s Off-White show was all elevation, exhilaration, and education. Orchestrated by fashion’s master of simultaneous, multi-channelling action, there was much going on in all directions—not for nothing did he name it “Laboratory of Fun.” Let’s start with the exhilaration, though: As the effective opener to the first IRL Paris haute couture season since the pandemic hit, it was joyful reunion, a fantastic repurposing of the ritual of the catwalk as a measure of change, and a brilliant performance by MIA, all rolled into one. Away from fashion week, and Abloh’s work with Nike also contributed to the transformation of the sneaker landscape. Originally teaming up with the sportswear giant in 2017 for a remixed, red-plastic-tagged reimagining of Nike’s most recognisable styles, “The Ten” collection became one of the biggest collaborative collections in sneaker history. Made up of reworked Air Jordans, VaporMaxes, and Blazers, the capsule was certainly one of the most hyped, and helped cement the sneaker as a legitimate resident of the realms of high fashion and art.

Abloh is valuable to them because he sits at the intersection of art and commerce and popular culture: At the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills this fall, you could go see 35 sculptures created in collaboration by Abloh and Japanese fine artist Takashi Murakami. Before the exhibit closed, Drake bought one of them. During a lecture at Columbia University last February, Abloh compared his cover art for Kanye West’s Yeezus to the Coca-Cola can, saying, “Being able to brand content that shapes a generation is not a small thing.” The late Virgil Abloh was a groundbreaking design visionary and his innovation, energy and spirit live on in his accessory collections today. Our curated selection contains several of the label's original calling cards, including the diagonal stripe and distinctive arrows that are synonymous with the brand.West and Abloh interned together at Fendi in the summer of 2009, and have said they were allowed to do basically nothing but did become better, more intimate friends. Abloh officially took on the title of West’s “creative director” in 2010. (That alone makes him a trendsetter: Every rapper has a creative director now, and Rihanna has approximately 14.) Abloh’s first big public project with West was art direction for West’s joint album with Jay-Z, Watch the Throne, which pulled him into the broader hip-hop social and commercial circle. It’s no hyperbole to say that Virgil Abloh had a defining role in shaping the course of fashion across the course of the last decade. Alongside the likes of Demna Gvasalia and Kim Jones, the Off-White designer ushered in a new era for the industry, as streetwear infiltrated runways and redefined the meaning of luxury. Controversy, though, of course, is conversation. And conversation is brand awareness. And boy, are the boys of Reddit ever aware of Off-White. There are only 2,000 members of the Off-White specific subreddit, but the 807,000 readers of the primary streetwear subreddit discuss it constantly. In fact, it didn’t feel like an ending at all— or like one of those one-off seasonal performance spectaculars that come and go at fashion shows. It’s more a beginning of a new era: All weekend, Abloh had been running what he called “a festival” from the new Paris Off-White flagship store at the crossroads of Rue de Castiglione and Rue du Mont Thabor. At the heart of the Parisian luxury neighborhood, the store breaks new ground as Abloh gives over its most valuable first floor space to “showcase local creativity as a platform to amplify the voices of the community.”