A picture of a Louis Vuitton trunk. This is how Virgil Abloh anticipated yesterday's big fashion news to his 1.6 million Instagram followers. The French fashion house confirmed shortly after the post that Abloh had become the new artistic director of Louis Vuitton men's collections. Abloh follows in the steps of Kim Jones who left in January to start at Dior where he takes Kris van Assche's place.
Born in Rockford, Illinois, Abloh has been on a constant rise in the last few years or so. He doesn't have a formal fashion education, but studied engineering and architecture, then met Kanye West, started working as a DJ and became West's creative director, designing the rapper's merchandise.
West and Abloh interned at Fendi in 2009 (ah, but to know more about the selection process behind this internship...) to try and learn more about the luxury industry. Abloh then launched his sporty/streetwear project Pyrex Vision in 2012 that mainly consisted in printing the name of the brand on Ralph Lauren shirts (sold at $550) and, at the end of 2013, he started Off-White (owned by the Milan-based NGG-New Guards Group that also produces and distributes Marcelo Burlon County of Milan and Palm Angels, among the other brands).
Since then Abloh applied for federal trademark protection for a generic logo characterised by black and white thick diagonal stripes (in the hope, maybe, of being able one day to sue for trademark infringement pedestrian crossings...), put random words in Helvetica in quotation marks (because decontextualising a word is fun and writing "Sculpture" on a bag or "For Walking" on a pair of boots is pure art) and launched a series of collaborations with Nike, Ikea (upcoming), Sunglass Hut and German luggage maker Rimowa (this collaboration will arrive in the stores this summer), just to mention a few.
Abloh also entered the art world thanks to a project at the Gagosian Gallery in London with previous Louis Vuitton collaborator Takashi Murakami, and a solo show in Tokyo, not to mention the exhibition of past and current work scheduled for 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Last year at the Florence menswear show Pitti Uomo, Abloh also collaborated with artist Jenny Holzer on a piece that focused on the immigrant crisis.
Louis Vuitton betting on Abloh is good news from one point of view: he is indeed the first African-American to lead a Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy-owned brand and a 164-year-old French luxury house.
From the point of view of Abloh's critics, the appointment is the final confirmation of the worst fears young people enrolled in a fashion course may have at the moment: you can invest as much as you own, you can study as much as you want and have all the talent that needs to succeed, but nowadays it is not your knowledge that counts, but your level of coolness, the hip aura fluctuating around you and the number of your followers.
Louis Vuitton seems indeed to have bought not into Abloh's talent and design skills, but into his numbers: most features about the appointment mention Abloh's 1.6 million and Off-White's 3.1 million Instagram followers, highlighting how the designer is more capable of shifting products and selling them to the Instagram addicted millennial consumers than of designing them.
Besides, by choosing Abloh the group has maybe done a disservice to the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers: Off-White made it onto the shortlist of the 2015 edition but didn't win it and now Abloh got a major design job at LVMH. In a way the appointment proves such awards are useless, after all why offering a major post to a finalist rather than a winner?
At the same time it is perfectly understandable why the fashion house went for Abloh: Louis Vuitton's recent collections have maybe focused more on the hype than on the tailored - think about the A/W17 collection that launched the Supreme collaboration. Abloh stands between street culture and high fashion and Louis Vuitton is desperate to replicate the success achieved with street icon Supreme.
Will Abloh deliver considering that his collections have consisted in remixing things continuously, lifting and borrowing multiple references from other designers and fashion houses? Those who defend Abloh fully support him and justify his copies by claiming he is ironic (the same thing they say about Demna Gvasalia...), but it is clear that Abloh's phenomenal success is not based on originality, a point highlighted also by Raf Simons in an interview with GQ last year.
For the time being Off-White founder doesn't seem to have clear plans about what to do with this huge luxury toy box he has been given to play with: he hopes to rejuvenate the brand, possibly creating a project and using it as a case study on how to update a luxury house.
Will this be a marriage made in heaven or a 6 to 9 months job? We would be tempted to bet on the short tenure for too many reasons, but, who knows, guess it will just go on until the hype lasts.
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