My love/hate relationship with Virgil Abloh
Let’s make the story short. Virgil Abloh, a kid from Chicago. Studied Civil Engineering and then Mastered in Architecture. Influenced by skateboarding, grunge and hip hop music, street art and pop culture. Friends with Kanye West. Founded Pyrex vision. Founded OFF-WHITE. In 2018 he was appointed creative director for Louis Vuitton. In his free time, he Dj’s in Paris or Ibiza or maybe opens a show for Travis Scott in London. Has collaborated with Takashi Murakami and even with IKEA. In a few words, he masters everything he does.
His relevance is huge. He is the perfect example of a multi-faceted artist that applies his concept to various expressions of art. He is the example that whatever you want to do in life, you can do. He mastered the art of networking and most importantly, at least for me, he is the spokesperson for minorities in a world that once was ruled by rich Europeans.
As much as I love Virgil and what he represents, I think he succumbed to conformity. His early fame was due to the irony that he carried in his pieces. From his early days in Pyrex, he “simply bought a bunch of rugby flannels, slapped ‘Pyrex 23’ on the back, and re-sold them for an astonishing markup of about 700%”. This strategy worked for him back in the day because he brought something new to the market. People were buying a name. A vibe. But he continued with this trend. OFF-WHITE sells purses and t-shirts with the word “t-shirt” in the front and the iconic OFF-WHITE logo in the back for a price that I wouldn’t buy a t-shirt for. The problem is that he continued this creative process when he arrived to Paris. After his first collection for Louis Vuitton, every runway is simply archive pieces in which he adds an orange chain or a new buckle and markets it as the re-birth of the French Maison. In simple words, Abloh has always done the same. Play with irony, play with subtle details and small tweaks in his clothes and market it as a concept. Thing he can do with freedom with his brands, but that leaves a lot to wish every time he presents a collection for LV.
Due to his conformist style and the great influence he carries, has consequently made fashion all look the same. Virgil is great when it comes to trendsetting, given he brought streetwear to high fashion. As a consequence, big brands have profited from this trend and turned to Abloh’s conformist style and recurred to selling their brands as a name, a print, a monogram or a big logo. Right now brands from Burberry to Valentino or even Alexander Mcqueen that once were trendsetters, plaster their logos and monograms over their more iconic pieces, creating their ready-to-wear collections. This effect was also seen in a different market. Because Virgil made it almost look easy to hit it off as a great designer by printing anything over a white t-shirt, right now every kid that can afford a couple of Gildan t-shirts prints any kind of design over it, calls themselves a fashion designer and sells it for 60$ even though it might’ve cost him less than 10$ to make. Fashion should be treated as art, but the current trends sets us in the pop art era.
Even though I am not a big fan of Virgil as a fashion designer, undoubtedly he will be the designer of the decade as he marks a before and after in high fashion. He is the trendsetter of the moment and is continuously defining what streetwear is by whatever he wears at the moment. Millions of eyes, from 16-year-old kids in Chicago to the people who run fashion publications are looking at him and this is why he should take responsibility and create a better product that at the end will become a trend.
