Virgil Ablohs Final Off-White Collection Is His Most Radical

Table Of Content

• Express Takes A Detour Into Bankruptcy Closing Over 100 Stores
• Off-White benefits from high fashion’s desperation to regain youth appeal
• Social Media Influencers Must Now Label Retouched Photos Under New Norwegian Law
• The Virgil Abloh phenomenon, or how the Off-White designer conquered the world
• Off-White™ To Return to Paris Fashion Week With "Black by Popular Demand" Show
• The Success of Off–White Is Anything But Ironic

But it’s easy to see that the Milan-based fashion brand Off-White has 5.4 million Instagram followers and that founder Virgil Abloh has 3.1 million. It’s easy to see that Rihanna wears these clothes, and that the Nike Air Prestos designed by Abloh and released this summer were mentioned more than 250,000 times on social media and were so hard to buy that they are now available on resale apps at markups of around 450 percent. It is an undeniable tragedy that Abloh wasn’t able to see Off-White break into the most historic and elite and French sartorial category. Abloh was always more enamored with streetwear’s populist possibilities than with its aesthetics, and Off-White was at its core a populist project, a manifesto for how to infiltrate an industry that never really wanted to claim people like him. In his quest to build Off-White into a respected luxury house, couture was Abloh’s final challenge. Last year, LVMH took a 60% stake in Off-White, which meant Abloh had more than one of the top design jobs at the Vuitton parent company.

Express Takes A Detour Into Bankruptcy Closing Over 100 Stores

The company has been struggling over the past few years to keep up with consumer preferences, differentiating itself in the market with product offerings and fighting off intense competition in an over-stored U.S. market. Now, LVMH and New Guards Group, the Italian fashion conglomerate that operates and produces Off-White, appear set to continue building on Abloh’s vision. In comments published by Business of Fashion this morning, Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke, who has been working with New Guards co-founders Davide De Giglio and Andrea Grilli to steer Off-White, described plans to turn Off-White into an “eternal” brand he compared to Dior. “Off-White is in the position that Dior was in 1957,” Burke told BOF. “Monsieur Dior had only been at the house for 10 years when he died.

Off-White benefits from high fashion’s desperation to regain youth appeal

Circles have been a recurring motif at Off-White, but these are more orderly than the meteors that bit holes into OW sportswear and accessories in recent seasons. They also appear as closures on men’s jackets made from what looks like bubble wrap, and as cut-outs on women’s knitwear. Abloh is benefiting from larger trends, such as the Instagram-driven return of logos, hip-hop’s ascendancy to be the dominant form of American popular music, and the rise of mass-produced “algorithmic” style — but he’s also spurring them, and capitalizing on them more robustly and quickly than anyone else. Off–White is one of the world’s most popular luxury brands— and its predominant aesthetic appears to be irony. Express will close 95 name brand stores along with all 12 UpWest retail locations (AP Photo/Andrew ... [+] Harnik).

Social Media Influencers Must Now Label Retouched Photos Under New Norwegian Law

Whether or not he oversaw the design of these sets, he deserves credit for making the men’s sartorial skirt feel about as practical and intriguing as just about any designer. Led by Bella Hadid in a minuscule electric-blue sheath dress, the cast of friends included Honey Dijon, Alton Mason, Joan Smalls, Amber Valletta, and Georgina Grenville. Time spent backstage inspecting the clothes—a wildly fresh experience after so long spent peering at garments through screens—showed the ultra-sophisticated precision tailoring of leather ( a cream skirt-suit; a pair of ice-blue and lavender coats) and a whole new approach to stamping Off-White’s identity through graphics. Abloh’s unmistakable cross-and-arrow logo—globally identifiable on Off-White hoodies on any street—is now minimized in a black and white logo print; a print knowingly set to compete on a level with that of any establishment Parisian fashion house.

AMO Designs a Paris Flagship for Virgil Abloh's Off-White - Metropolis - Metropolis Magazine

AMO Designs a Paris Flagship for Virgil Abloh's Off-White - Metropolis.

Posted: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The Virgil Abloh phenomenon, or how the Off-White designer conquered the world

It is also fair to say that whether Off-White’s designs are rip-offs will cease to be a very interesting question, as we sit back and watch more and more youth-craving fashion brands attempt to copy everything else about it. In this way, Dapper Dan first popularized the notion of luxury streetwear. Almost two decades later, Virgil Abloh founded Off–White, a luxury brand that catapulted streetwear into the realm of high fashion that Dapper Dan once sought to emulate. Since its founding in 2013, Off–White has amassed popularity at an almost exponential rate.

MORE FROM Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear

Effective immediately, Express named Mark Still as its new CFO. Express’ revenue dropped 40% in 2020 due to the pandemic mandating non-essential stores to close, equating to over $800 million in sales losses for the year. Express, a multi-brand fashion retailer whose portfolio includes Express Express , Bonobos, and UpWest, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and intends to close more than 100 stores. The move, according to the company, is to better position Express for stronger growth in the future.

It seems dumb at first glance, and then you end up thinking about the humor in it, and then you end up thinking about society and the rules we live in, and capitalism and norms and wherever that leads you. Because it’s so simple and approachable, a lot of streetwear kids may think it’s deeper than it really is. Similar to Rick and Morty, it makes people feel smart, but is it really saying something about capitalism and society that already hasn’t been said?

In March 2024, Express received notification from the New York Stock Exchange indicating that the common stock of the company would be delisted, and trading of its common stock on the NYSE was suspended. In August of 2023, Express planned to lay off about 150 employees through 2024 to save $30 million but that move only represented a portion of the planned $120 million cost reduction effort. The company had taken cost reductions in 2023 and had planned to continue reducing expenses going into 2025. However, by filing for bankruptcy, the company has the opportunity to restructure its operations including renegotiating its many lease agreements that will remain after the closure of some of its stores. The men’s tailoring is sharply done—adult, if you will—but the jackets are distinguished by large circular rings embroidered over the chest pockets. These were apparently inspired by Meccano, the century-old model construction system designed by the English inventor Frank Hornby that might’ve prompted Abloh’s pursuit of architecture later on.

Collaborations

In that conversation, he was also referring to the challenge of making an Off-White suitcase in collaboration with the 120-year-old German luxury luggage brand Rimowa (majority-owned by LMVH, which paid $716 million for an 80 percent stake in 2016). That suitcase — priced at $1,700 — was the most popular item among the teenagers who flocked to Hypebeast’s first New York streetwear festival this October. 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. Your health is tied to that — a 99-cent nugget.” He has also collaborated with McDonald’s.

That was the year that Virgil Abloh — the Illinois-raised then-22-year-old son of two Ghanaian immigrants (his mother was a seamstress) — graduated from the civil engineering program at the University of Wisconsin Madison. It was also the year Abloh met Kanye West and started designing his merchandise and album art.

Abloh has said it takes him 10 minutes to come up with many of his designs. He’s also said he wants to help Apple design the next iPhone. His aesthetic interests are simplicity and efficiency, his commercial interests are what could be called economically avant-garde — dramatic, cartoonish, garish markups of basic items marketed primarily to kids, by celebrities, turning unattainability into a sport and pastime. When he introduced Off-White’s “For All” diffusion line, it included four T-shirts and four hoodies that could only be purchased in brick-and-mortar stores in major cities, ranging in price from $95 to $170. Things like “influence” and importance are watery concepts.