Things like "influence" and "importance" are vague concepts. But it's easy to see that Milanese fashion brand Off-White has 5.4 million followers on Instagram, while founder Virgil Abloh has 3.1 million. It's easy to see Rihanna wearing these clothes and that the Nike Air Prestos, designed by Abloh and released this summer, were mentioned over 250,000 times on social media and were so hard to get that they are now available on resale apps with markups of around 450 percent.
The brand was founded in 2012, and its popularity is not new, but now it reaches heights that can confuse the idle but curious fashion observer. His guiding principle is simply "everything in quotes", for example, "everything is ironic, as well as the main recognizable design element on clothes - short quotes." A black dress with the words "little black dress" written on it, in quotation marks. Lace from a pair of $700 sneakers with "Shoelaces" in quotation marks. A scarf with "scarf" written on it in quotation marks. Off white to buy the original is not so cheap, so be prepared to pay $ 700 for laces from sneakers.
Off-White makes a lot of clothing that you might recognize as high fashion, but it's more known for things like $1,000 sweatshirts; expensive and tongue-in-cheek phone cases; a brisk collaboration that boosts the $1 billion sneaker resale industry; branded, at first glance, non-functional industrial-themed belts; and his… experimental furniture.
"ALL IN QUOTATION MARKS", FOR EXAMPLE "ALL IS IRONIC, AND THE MAIN RECOGNIZABLE ELEMENT OF DESIGN ON CLOTHING IS SHORT QUOTATION MARKS"
As strange as it was for kids to line up and pay over $1,000 to buy a literal brick released by Supreme two years ago, at least it was clear that in some ways it was a joke. Off-White is no joke. These are extremely expensive streetwear - primarily t-shirts, hoodies and sneakers - beloved by Reddit teenagers, wealthy club kids of New York and Milan, pop stars and rappers in every magazine and social media feed, and mostly by the high fashion elite. , including Abloh fan Marc Jacobs. Also Julia Roberts.
It's not hard to find people who would say that Abloh leads a personality cult dependent on teenagers who don't know better, that his undeniable historical importance as the most prolific designer of his generation belies his seeming disinterest. to give someone cause for concern. He often says things like, “We're lucky to have an audience that is the most supportive of brands right now. Basically, we are all independent brands and retailers.”
Rarely the question "what's the matter?" seems fair or interesting, but what's the point?
Off-White started with a brush - or extended hug - with a celebrity
To answer this question, we must go back to 2002. That was the year that Virgil Abloh—the then 22-year-old son of two Ghanaian immigrants raised in Illinois (his mother was a seamstress)—graduated from civil engineering. program at the University of Wisconsin Madison. That same year, Abloh met Kanye West and began designing his merchandise and album art.
At the same time, Abloh was working on his Master of Architecture degree, which he received from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. (This is to demonstrate two of his most notable qualities, namely that he is intelligent and seemingly has boundless energy.
West and Abloh interned at Fendi together in the summer of 2009 and said they were not allowed much of anything but became better, closer friends. Abloh officially received the title of West's "creative director" in 2010. (That alone makes him a trendsetter: every rapper now has a creative director, and Rihanna has about 14.). Abloh's first major public project with West was West's art direction. collaborative album with Jay-Z,Watch the Throne , which drew him into the wider social and commercial circle of hip hop.
In 2012, Abloh opened a boutique called Pyrex Vision, which was based on a concept that went viral because it was basically a (very enviable, just-smart enough) scam: buying simple, cheap Champion essentials and super discounts on parts of a dead Ralph Lauren. stock, then screen-printed his ultra-simple graphics over them and sold them for hundreds of dollars. It was cool ! It was controversial! It featured A$AP Rocky!
The following year, Abloh founded his label Off-White. He concentrated the design aesthetic on diagonal lines and the iconography of American cities: the white arrows. Plain labels. Industrial packaging with branded zipper. High-quality fabrics and familiar streetwear shapes. After that, it was all about racing: the first womenswear line, Off-White, debuted at Paris Fashion Week in 2014 and was selected as a finalist for the coveted LVMH Prize that placed Abloh in rooms with all the top shoppers, designers and people. connectors in the infamous, infamous rich and infamous white industry. They liked it !
In 2017, Off-White partnered with Nike to develop 10 of the company's most popular and classic styles. There are no, basically no words for how popular and how difficult this line is to acquire.s there were neakers. While the starting price was around $200, most of the pairs available seem to have ended up in the hands of celebrities, with resale prices now hovering north of $1,000.
Then, in 2018, Abloh was appointed art director of Louis Vuitton menswear – call it a coup or a triumph, it was above all abouthow wrote every fashion or business publication that you can name and discuss by every public figure. who has ever, for whatever reason, had anything to do with expensive clothes. Rihanna came to his debut in Paris; Playboy Carty and Kid Cudi were models in it.
Three months later, Abloh unveiled a Nike collection designed specifically for Serena Williams, and here is a partial list of other collaborations he completed and sold in the same 12 months: Champion, Le Bon Marche, Selfridges, SSENSE, KM20, TheDoubleF, Gore-Tex , Browns, Timberland, Burton, Jimmy Choo, Chrome Hearts, Vivendii, Rimowa, Hirshleifers, Ikea, Kith, Equinox, A-Cold-Wall, Burton, Grog and Sunglass Hut.
In collaboration with Hiroshi Fujiwara, Abloh designed a money clip that looks like a credit card. "Don't let Zara and Uniqlo inform you about the price of clothes because they are not fashion," he once said. “It's like McDonald's. Your health is tied to this – a 99-cent nugget.” He also collaborated with McDonald's.
Pascal Le Segretin
Off-White capitalizes on haute couture's desperation to regain youth
Off-White is the most popular brand in the world, according to a quarterly ranking published by the fashion and e-commerce platform Lyst.
Last year, it climbed 33 positions on Lyst's rankings and surpassed older luxury fashion houses like Gucci and Balenciaga for the first time this quarter. This first ranking spot should be taken with a grain of salt, in the form of a whitish non-public company, and we know absolutely nothing about its earnings (we know Gucci and Balenciaga have seen "stellar" growth this year). In addition, Lyst's index methodology relies heavily on non-transparent sources: proprietary search, view, and purchase data, social media "engagement statistics," and "sentiment analysis." It also includes Google search data, which is public, but it's not clear how it's weighted in this secret, sort of suspiciously complex algorithm.
Regardless of the methodology, the index tells us the obvious: "Luxury" today is fashionable streetwear. Street fashion has been a boon to the $300 billion global high-end fashion industry and helped it grow by about 5 percent in 2017.
Last October, Federica Levato, a partner at consulting firm Bain & Company, told Business of Fashion: "Shoppers are getting younger, which is very good for the medium and long term survival of this industry." She continued, “For example, there is a large luxury T-shirt market worth 2.5 million euros that is growing very fast. And a half billion euro market for rubber sliders, which is very unusual for this market.”
This marriage of opulence and affordability is the cornerstone of Abloh's creative pursuits and his business, and earlier this month he discussed his Louis Vuitton appointment with CNBC, saying, "My base consumer can sometimes be 12 years old, and as you know, they are. . an incredible task, but I love the challenge of translating a brand that could be 100 years old to a person who is 12 years old. I specialize in this."
Noam Galay/Getty Images
In that conversation, he also referred to the challenge of creating the Off-White suitcase in collaboration with 120-year-old German luxury suitcase brand Rimowa (a majority stake held by LMVH, which paid $716 million in 2016 for an 80 percent stake). This $1,700 suitcase was the most popular among teenagers who flocked to New York's first Hypebeast streetwear festival this October.
Abloh is capitalizing on bigger trends like the return of Instagram logos, the prevalence of hip-hop as the dominant form of American popular music, and the rise of mass-produced "algorithmic" style—but he's also spurring them on, and using them more effectively and quickly than anyone else. - or another.
Nike climbed five spots on Lyst's brand rankings this year as well, and the Off-White x Nike Air Presto was the hottest product of the year, higher than West's new Yeezy Boosts or Balenciaga's tongue-in-cheek trend. disfiguring Triple S sneakers. The company reported annual revenue of 6 percent for 2018, bringing in $36.4 billion.
Abloh is valuable to them because he sits at the intersection of art, commerce and popular culture: this fall, the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills featured 35 sculptures created in collaboration between Abloh and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Before the exhibition closed, Drake bought one of them. During a lecture at Columbia University last February, Abloh compared his coverYeezus Kanye West cjar Coca-Cola, saying, “The ability to brand content that shapes a generation is no small thing.”
It's just that no one understands our modern word salad better.
Off-White and Virgil Abloh are extremely controversial, which is free publicity of its own.
The brand is ambiguous. Abloh's understanding of what is good, beautiful, and important seems to be based on what makes an impact, not necessarily on any coherent or discernible moral or intellectual worldview.
This is a complex hero: last summer he worked with hugely renowned socially conscious conceptual artist Jenny Holzer to create a line of pro-immigration and anti-nationalist statements, and that winter he designed t-shirts for Planned Parenthood.
At the same time, he still supports stylist Ian Connor, a well-known hip hop musician who has been accused of rape over 20 times. In a 2017 W profile that declared Abloh "the king of social media super-influencers", he called Connor a member of the "inner circle" along with the creative director of A$AP Mob A$AP Bari, who was also accused of sexual assault (video evidence was leaked on Reddit shortly prior to his arrest) and with whom Nike ended ties last year.
And when it comes to actual design, Abloh's motto "everything is in quotes" is a rallying cry for ironic aloofness. But he can also be sincere: "We were a generation that was interested in fashion and shouldn't have been there," he told W when asked about being the first black to design his own line at Louis Vuitton, which was about 165 years.
What he does is both important and easily discernible. When Abloh became Louis Vuitton's director of menswear design, C. Austin Collins wrote for Vanity Fair that the coincidence made more sense than it seemed: "Off-White's signature diagonal stripes and tongue-in-cheek quotation marks are for the hype best and the celebrity obsessed. just as coded and class-aware as the interconnected LV monograms for another generation.”
Collins also noted that the brand has a "youthful silliness, a raw sense of pop weirdness" and acknowledged that "detractors are claiming it is fraudulent". Off-White has many such detractors.
On the one hand, there are those who believe that Off-White is based on stolen ideas: In July, Norwegian sportswear brand Helly Hansen filed a trademark infringement and unfair competition lawsuit in Illinois federal court, accusing Abloh of ripping off its logo. in many of them. his projects.
Even before that, Diet Prada, a popular Instagram account notorious for describing fashion industry heists semi-accurately, pointed out that the Off-White logo was almost identical to the 1965 Glasgow Airport design by the renowned British design group. . They found a photo of Abloh in his office with a copy of a modernist design book that had an entry for the logo in question, and also accused him of plagiarizing Calvin Klein's Raf Simons and the Japanese label Anrealage.
Abloh said that many of his projects take him 10 minutes to complete. He also said he wants to help Apple develop the next iPhone. His aesthetic interests are simplicity and efficiency, his commercial interests are what can be called economically avant-garde - dramatic, caricatured, flamboyant mark-ups on basic goods that celebrities sell mainly to children, turning inaccessibility into sports and entertainment. When he introduced the "For Everyone" diffuse line of Off-White, it included four T-shirts and four hoodies, which could only be bought in mainstream stores in major cities, priced between $95 and $170.
No one can decide if it's shiny or empty, but they'll keep talking about it.
Disputes, of course, are talk. And conversation is brand recognition. And boy, did the Reddit boys ever know about Off-White. The special Off-White subreddit has only 2,000 contributors, but the 807,000 readers of the primary streetwear subreddit are constantly talking about it.
Not everyone likes it. Many of them are warm. Many of them frankly hate it! Many say it's an "aesthetically good thing" but they can't hide the brand's "hypocritical" idea.
"Maybe Virgil is one of the greatest designers of our generation, or maybe he's just Kanye's best friend," writes one user. "I like to think it's somewhere in between." Abloh is a highly American tale of incredible success driven by work and highly likely success driven by celebrity proximity and success driven by luck.
Pascal Le Segretin/Getty Images
Alex Castro, illustrator at The Verge (and this article!) and a particularly cool person, is my last best hope for understanding brand dominance, since even hypebeasts can openly doubt it. "The power of Off-White is in quotes," he says. He then goes on to describe in detail a very complex emotional process, reacting to a rug that Abloh designed with the words "Stay Away" written on it:
It seems silly at first glance, but then you start thinking about the humor in it, and then you start thinking about society and the rules we live in, capitalism, norms, and where that will take you. … But then I still think it's stupid again. Because it's so easy and affordable, many street fashion kids might think it's deeper than it actually is. LikeRick and Morty , he makes people feel smart, but is he really saying something about capitalism and society that hasn't been said yet? Probably no.
Off-White is huge - it's undeniable - and the best explanation for the brand may simply be the products themselves: Rihanna's $1,000 over-the-knee white leather boots that say "for walking" (in quotation marks) to the back of the calf, when in fact she was wearing them to stand on stage and perform a private concert for label executives at last year's Top Dawg Christmas party.
Or John Mayer's Off-White x Nike Air Prestos, which he probably got for free before paying Grateful Dead-obsessed Instagram brand Online Ceramics to color them for him, inspiring a former Hypebeast editor to tweet that we've reached peak Tie -Dye" and "Most Street Fashion Sentence of 2018" in one fell swoop.
Or the Off White Converse translucent high top sneakers reviewed by famous YouTube freak Brad Hall: “Right foot says left, left foot says right, this could completely rewire my brain, not sure if I’m ready for which.” I, for one, love that completely useless neon yellow floor-length tutu that Beyoncé once wore.
“Honestly,” Castro told me. "Off-White does have firearms." This is true. It's honest. It's also fair to say that whether or not Off-White's designs are fake will cease to be a very interesting question as we sit back and watch more and more youth-hungry fashion brands try to copy everything else about it.
