Virgil Abloh doesn’t have a desk. The designer has a label, Off-White, one of the most hyped in fashion, which is based in Milan – but no workplace from which to run it. Instead he works on the street, in cars and on planes, flying 320 days a year. Today we are in the Centre Momboye, a dance school in Belleville, Paris, where Abloh is casting his autumn menswear show. His phone, I’m told, is his desk, and as we talk, he stares at it for 10 minutes as if to make the point. He then produces a toothpick and fiddles with that instead, switching from one to the other for the duration of the afternoon.

Abloh might be 37 and married with kids, but he has a millennial mindset, and an iPhone addiction to boot. This isn’t surprising. In many ways, Off-White is an Instagram success story. The label has 2.7m followers and Abloh has 1.4m – by comparison, Rick Owens has 836k and Céline 840k. Aside from Balenciaga, few labels steer their social media like Abloh, who posts street signs (an inspiration) and unusual street style alongside fashion shots. But while Instagram is a handy marketing tool, Abloh uses it to serve another, more interactive purpose. In December he turned up at a small west London newsagent for a guerrilla signing of System magazine with him on the cover. Within hours, a Supreme drop-sized queue had snaked round the block, waiting to glimpse the elusive designer. When he announced his S/S 18 show on Instagram, he did it to get fans inside. “The address AND time are here for all the kids to come,” Abloh posted. “Very inclusive, not really exclusive.” The morning of the show, the kids and the fashion industry arrived en masse, hoping for a peek into the Off-White world.

Designer Virgil Abloh and Naomi Campbell on the catwalk during Paris fashion week 2018. Photograph: Richard Bord/Getty Images

The collection was an unexpected shift away from his usual logo-heavy streetwear – this time, it was all leather power suits, tulle dresses, floral prints and lots of pink. The key inspiration was Princess Diana, pearls and all, with Naomi Campbell closing the show in £295 cycling shorts. “I was born in 1980, so I remember Princess Diana from my periphery,” Abloh says. “She was also the same age as me when she died, so…”



Abloh launched Off-White in 2014 and within a year he had been nominated for the LVMH prize, the only US designer in the group that year. By December 2017 the label had won best Urban Luxe brand at London’s Fashion Awards, beating Supreme and Martine Rose, and it is now worn by the Hadid sisters, Solange and Jay-Z. Abloh has also worked with Levi’s and Moncler, and is bringing out a collaboration with Ikea this year. The day after his menswear show in Paris, his name was being mooted as a frontrunner to take over at Burberry or Louis Vuitton. Off-White has now been positioned behind Balenciaga and Gucci as the fifth “hottest label” in fashion, according to Lyst. All in all, it’s an exhausting and extraordinary feat, given he’s shown just 10 catwalk collections – and trained as an engineer and an architect.

I come from a different school of thought about clothing. To me, this is an art practice Virgil Abloh

Tall and imposing, dressed in a Carhartt hoodie (black), jeans (black) and Nikes (black), Abloh has quite the presence. We sit down, him with a selection of cold-pressed juices and a matcha-based drink, me with a glass of water. I read him the headline of a recent interview which describes him as the coolest, biggest designer in the world. Abloh leans back and puffs out his cheeks. “I don’t believe all that,” he sighs, reaching for a juice. “My brand started in the streets and the alleys of the internet – I come from a different school of thought about clothing. I understand people see it as fashion. To me, this is an art practice.” By art practice he likely means his designs, although it’s unclear and makes for a bit of a highfalutin start. Except that beneath the surface, beneath the cold-pressed juice and the iPhone, Abloh seems genuinely baffled by this sudden, grandiose positioning within the industry. “I mean… it’s weird, isn’t it?” He pauses. “I just want to live up to the greats of fashion.”

Off-White started out as a streetwear label, papered with logos. Streetwear has become a divisive term, though, and I pause when I use the word. “It’s fine, though,” he says. “I saw how you reacted, saying that to me. But we need words to describe something. I take it upon myself to add a layer of thoughtfulness to the term. It has a connotation that’s not bad, but it’s not good. I am trying to define it while it’s definable. Streetwear is fine – but it’s evolving.”

Virgil Abloh in his studio during Paris fashion week. Photograph: Hélèn Pambrun

That’s a lofty defence, but then Abloh is a lofty guy. He loves technical jargon and refers to Off-White as a “brand” and catwalk shows as “documentaries”. Fashion is something he wants to “record” – indeed, he requests that all interviews are recorded and given to him, so he can keep them as references. He’s even called Virgil, like the poet. Today, he speaks about fashion in a thoughtful, sometimes tangential way. For example, when we talk about the label’s black and white stripe motif, which resembles caution tape, he explains it is based on Duchamp. “The idea [that] an everyday object is art. Branding is generic and if I adopt the generic, then it becomes my branding, but it normally occurs in life.” As for the label’s quotation marks around phrases such as “For Walking” on a pair of boots, or “website” on the website, they represent a sort of ironic detachment and a comment on the idea of originality. At one point he describes himself as “a recording system for what I believe is positivity, open-mindedness, empowerment and breaking down stereotypes that more reflect how people see the world”. When I ask him why Off-White is called that, he says: “Off-White is not black or white, it’s a conundrum. It’s not a colour. But it is a colour.” He pauses. “If you sit with me for a day, that’s how I talk.”

Virgil Abloh and models at Paris fashion week 2018. Photograph: Richard Bord/Getty Images

Abloh takes a while to relax, but when he gets going, he fires through a range of topics with fluency. He doesn’t pretend to be a classic fashion designer, defers regularly to others (mainly Alexander McQueen, whom he “thinks about a lot”) and waxes fondly about discovering Caravaggio, the Enlightenment and architects such as Rem Koolhaas. He is quick to draw on the similarities between fashion and architecture, and history – which is where he, the historian, comes in. He thinks dividing disciplines is old-fashioned, that one dictates the other: “Both are creative service industries – there are people on the end of the ideas.” The people he means are mostly kids, hypebeasts, people like him who “grew up wearing Tommy Hilfiger and Polo in malls”, and it’s these people – the kids – that are his dream customer. The problem is that those boots designed “For Walking” cost £1,500, for example. As if to address the sticking point, he recently designed a cheaper diffusion line – though it’s not exactly cheap (£66 for a T-shirt, say), and it’s precisely this disconnect between customer and cost that has spawned a world of Off-White fakes. “Fakes don’t bother me,” he shrugs. “The goal of Off-White is not to buy Off-White. It’s to know about it.”



Princess Diana is a role model for women of our time. I wanted to keep her name in the zeitgeist Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh was born in 1980 and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. His parents are from Ghana, but they moved to the US before he was born – “At some point they wanted to make it to the western world, where their dreams were,” he says. He describes his childhood as “awesome” and “suburban”, spent playing soccer, skateboarding and DJing. “I mean I was a kid who didn’t have the first world knowledge of art and fashion. I was the kid shopping in malls.” Abloh studied engineering and architecture in Wisconsin and Illinois, largely at the behest of his parents (“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he shrugs). As he continued to DJ, he had a creeping realisation that design was design, and maybe he could apply his studies elsewhere. “So I took an intro to art history. That’s when the bulb went off.” The realisation was gradual, though: “My parents weren’t versed in art. And I thought art was a trophy or a symbol of wealth.”



Virgil Abloh and Kanye West at the Hood by Air show, at Mercedes-Benz fashion week in 2013. Photograph: Startraks Photo/Rex

It was after meeting Kanye West that things took a turn. There are various stories about how they met, though it’s thought West “discovered” Abloh when he was a DJ named, brilliantly, Flat White, in Chicago over 10 years ago. Abloh went on to design his merch and the Watch The Throne album artwork, get nominated for a Grammy and work as a sort of fashion consultant with West (having been billed as the rapper’s “consigliere” for much of his career, Abloh understandably doesn’t want to go into it). During this period, there were other ventures, including selling dead-stock Ralph Lauren rugby shirts and interning at Fendi, but it was being mentored by the late, great Louise Wilson of Central Saint Martins’, who also taught McQueen, that sealed the deal for him to move into fashion

A model wearing one of Virgil Abloh’s designs inspired by Princess Diana. Photograph: Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage

Before our interview, I’m told Abloh will not talk about race or politics. Given both inform his designs, his aesthetic and his entire process – and that, if the rumours are true, he is likely to become one of the most high-profile black designers in fashion history when he inevitably gets a top gig – it seems an odd thing to censor. Still, he will discuss things in a roundabout way. He describes the appointment of Edward Enninful at Vogue as “super exciting” and says this appointment is a sign of “the actual tectonic plates of new land being formed”. Then, more obtusely: “I’ve been thinking about this a lot – tides change when positions evolve... There’s fresh energy for something to be represented.” Presumably he means diversity, although he remains characteristically unclear.

Virgil Abloh and Kaia Gerber pose backstage at the Off/White show at Paris fashion week. Photograph: Pierre Suu/Getty Images

Winning the Fashion Award for Urban Luxe in December was an emotional experience for Abloh. “The most rewarding thing is that there’s a category at all,” he says, referring to labels such as Gosha Rubchinskiy and Supreme as well. “It’s not me winning. It’s us.”



When talking about the politics of designing for women in 2018, Abloh is more open: “Contemporary news dictates a lot. I want to reflect the time. Womenswear gives me an opportunity to be a relevant reflection. To not speak from the male voice.” I ask him about fashion in a post-Weinstein world and he says, simply, that he likes the idea of girls wearing sneakers and jeans one minute, of putting models in polka dots and pearls the next. Because women can be both. “My duty is to represent young women, to make them role models, through the guise of Naomi [Campbell] and Princess Diana.” He adds: “The recording of fashion is happening. It’s up to us to show what’s happening so that in 50 years they can see there was a global Women’s March and how the uprising is reflected in fashion.” His summer show at the Pitti in Florence, a collaboration with feminist conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, was in fact focused on the international refugee crisis and immigration, as well as the Women’s March – a striking collaboration given he is the son of Ghanaian immigrants, and Trump had been in power just six months. He might not enjoy discussing sticky subjects but he certainly broadcasts his thoughts through his work.

Off-White’s success has been boosted by social media but it would be unfair to reduce it to just that. The label is succeeding because of the designs, and the timing, and Abloh would probably agree with both. “[Each] season’s concept isn’t drastically different,” he says, although it’s come a long way from logos plastered on bags, belts and boots. It occupies that very now territory between high fashion and elevated streetwear, referencing key cultural moments. If Balenciaga under Demna Gvasalia is about referencing social culture and giving it a new, awkward spin, Off-White is more self-referential, more overt with what it borrows. “Princess Diana is a role model for women of our time,” Abloh says. “I wanted to keep her name and legacy in the zeitgeist.” It’s sentimental, a bit niche and, in many ways, the epitome of postmodernism – fashion designed during an era that has forgotten how to think about the past. As for Abloh, he’s fast becoming one of fashion’s biggest agitators, simply by borrowing from youth culture and selling it back to the world.