How Virgil Abloh Is Tapping Into Youth Culture And Democratising Fashion

When Off-White founder Virgil Abloh launched his new Nike collaboration – a 10-piece trainer collection that reworks iconic styles – earlier this year, it was with an initiative called Off-Campus: a series of fashion workshops and panel talks which you simply needed to enter a raffle to attend. Hosted by some of the industry’s cult creative figures – Kim Jones, Grace Wales Bonner, Michele Lamy, Martine Rose – it seemed to exemplify the things about Abloh that makes him so appealing to a contemporary audience. What the creative polymath has achieved in his career is remarkable: he initially trained as an architect and first rose to renown as Kanye West’s creative consultant, but got his fashion education interning at Fendi before meeting Louis Vuitton’s artistic director, Kim Jones, sleeping on his sofa and “[forcing] him to teach me in his front room in Maida Vale”. He founded Off-White in 2013, and its key codes have since become ubiquitous – notably, the ironic quotation marks around everything, strong emphasis on branding, and a heavy dose of post-modernism. But even more remarkable is the power he seems to hold over a young demographic that most powerhouses are struggling to engage. Read more at British Vogue.