Virgil Abloh, who died unexpectedly in 2021 at age 41, defied categorization. Born in Rockford, Illinois to Ghanaian immigrants, he learned to sew as child, studied civil engineering in college and then architecture in graduate school. He entered the world of fashion sideways, without formal training, upsetting the status quo first with the stratospheric success of Off-White and then with his appointment as Artistic Director of menswear at Louis Vuitton. He pierced the divisions between pop culture and couture, fashion, music, and design, and was as influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Mies van der Rohe, Albert Murray, Rammellzee, Drake, DJ Benji B, Kylie Jenner, and Bella Hadid, as by the storied histories of high fashion houses. He was fascinated by the commodification of culture and the dialectic between appropriation and reappropriation, between 'high' and 'low'. He admired the ready-made and the imitative for the way in which they force you to think carefully about the context in which they were created. He felt originality was a sham, and saw clearly the way Fashion, with a capital F, depends on the policing of who is allowed the mantle of 'genius'. The establishment bridled at his approach even as they celebrated his work. He, in turn, understood that people wanted him to be a symbol, to fit an idea of the Black Designer, but he refused any kind of easy definition.
Here, in Work in Progress, is a blueprint for a way to live, a conversation between friends, a challenge to any idea of black and white thinking. A portrait of an iconoclast, WORK IN PROGRESS takes us inside the mind of one of the most visionary and transformational designers of our time.
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