"NEWSLETTER"
Virgil Abloh is now the "menswear artistic director" at Louis Vuitton, the first black creative head in the brand's history (and the second Ghanaian to lead a major House division—shoutout Ozwald Boateng at Givenchy). He's come a long way from that infamous Tommy Ton photo eight years ago, when he was just one of Kanye West's sidekicks. Now, he's one of the biggest names in fashion in his own right, with riots forming outside the Paris shows for his line, Off-White.
In the LVMH announcement, Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke said that he's been watching Abloh since he and Kanye were interning at Fendi together: "I am thrilled to see how his innate creativity and disruptive approach have made him so relevant, not just in the world of fashion but in popular culture today." A lot of that innate creativity is putting quote marks around capital letters. When Katherine Bennard visited the Off-White store in New York's SoHo neighborhood, she noted that:
On his wooden pants hangers, it says “PANTS HANGER”; on the bottom of shoes, “LEATHER SOLE”; on knee-high boots ($2,100), “FOR WALKING”; on a giant leather bag ($2,900), “SCULPTURE.” With a Duchamp wink, on Instagram he signed a fan’s iPhone by putting quotes around its Apple logo, then signing “VIRGIL.” Many pieces in the store say simply OFF (like periwinkle sweatpants, $667) or WHITE.
He famously told Thom Bettridge that "Duchamp is my lawyer," so a generous reading of his output is that he is asking us to question the ubiquity of all the items in our lives in a way that leads to some genuine contemplation. "This is what we learned from Barbara Kruger," he said. "You can evoke meaning by crashing two things together." (Lucky for him, people love crashing their money into his pocket.) The biggest excitement around Abloh seems to be with his collaborations: Nike. IKEA, Sunglass Hut. Wherever he goes, hype follows.
It's important to note the wave that Abloh is riding. Kim Jones, who Abloh is replacing, brought Supreme to a Paris runway. Jones is replacing Kris Van Assche at Dior Homme, who released a BMX bike through the brand. And Hedi Slimane, who Van Assche replaced at Dior Homme (and now holds Ablh's dream job at Céline), is famous for his obsession with (male) youth culture. But as Rachel Tashjian writes in her summation of the Abloh news,
Phoebe Philo’s departure from Céline (replaced with a male designer, no less) has left many women’s fashion enthusiasts wondering about the state of clothing for and by women in an art form that has traditionally been our own creative province. But with these major appointments at Dior and Louis Vuitton, and the inevitable business expansion that will follow, the spotlight is now firmly on menswear.
The excitement's all in menswear, and all the menswear excitement is in streetwear, a scene famously hostile to women—shoutout Abloh's boy Ian Connor. Hopefully some of that Céline energy that inspired him for so long will push back on all that unpleasantness.
The biggest question that people who aren't already under Abloh's spell might ask is: Are his clothes any good? In her latest Off-White review, Robin Givhan wrote that "Abloh is at his best whipping up desirable accessories or engaging in a collaboration that lets him juice up an established brand, rather than when he is creating something out of whole cloth." Rather than drawing fame for his design work, she said that he belongs to an era in which "fashion is more excited by a designer’s heat than what’s on their sketchpad." Raf Simons, whose Nebraska swearshirts Abloh copied a couple years ago, isn't quite sold either. When Noah Johnson asked Simons which young designers were exciting him, he went out of his way to say "Not Off-White. He’s a sweet guy. I like him a lot actually. But I’m inspired by people who bring something that I think has not been seen, that is original."
But who cares. Rawiya Kameir writes that
Six years ago, Virgil Abloh tweeted an improbably prescient thought: "Design is the freshest scam. Quote me on that one." The exact context of the post is unknown to me, but it was one of those perfectly relevant archival tweets to have been dug up this morning, following the news that he, of Pyrex Vision, Been Trill, Off-White fame, had been named the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. In group chats and across social media was a consensus that he, a dilettante designer obsessed with shallow iconography and Raf Simons, being rewarded with such high post, was a manifestation of that tweet. A scam, if you will.
Just because someone gets something they might not deserve doesn't erase the reality of them having it. Virgil might not "DESERVE" a high-fashion creative directorship, but he has one. And now we'll see what he does with it.