Five designers. Five different points of view.
Virgil Abloh, Maximilian Davis, Martine Rose, Lev Tanju and Florence Tétier have all approached the crafting of their labels by eschewing industry expectation and building a new type of narrative on fashion – putting community first, and catalysing the culture around them.
Celebrating them as oracles of what is next, we invite their thoughts and insights into an industry and world very much in flux, and what the future may hold.
Florence Tétier on being a born outsider, “unschooling” and the power of chaos
Lev Tanju on skate dreams, the Olympics and embracing your fantasies
Martine Rose on preserving your “wonkiness”, dodging the mainstream and true luxury
Maximilian Davis on carnival maximalism, his Trinidadian heritage and freedom through clothing
Virgil Abloh on junglizm, design with Nigo and Instagram karma
Virgil Abloh.
Virgil Abloh tinkers with the status quo better than most. His vision is never singular; instead, he is creatively driven by grabbing the best of what is happening in the real world and online, mish-mashing them together for clothes that speak as social commentary on the culture of today.
With both his own Off-White label and his tenure as men’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton, his work seems purpose-driven and perfectly agile. That’s perhaps because the design polymath has always been willing to collide with culture wherever it met him. The streets of Chicago, the club nights of London, dragging and dropping on the world wide web, or in an atelier in Paris’s Rue du Pont Neuf.
And while his designs never fail to garner chatter, Abloh is more interested in the unsaid. He interrogates the negative space between the great ideas (take the upcoming collaboration between Nigo and Louis Vuitton, for example) and where he can make the connection. It’s not where a lot of creative directors would naturally go, but as Abloh explains, “A lot of the time [when] fashion is sold to us, the archetypes are X, Y, Z. Often when we say ‘high fashion’ – fashion with a capital F – we mean the people cemented in the canon of fashion. I very much exist to challenge that, by simply being who I am and presenting my work.”
“I definitely don’t think about the past too much. I’m sort of always working ahead. Shayne Oliver, whom I respect a lot, explained how we are at the point where Black designers can just reference themselves. And that’s very empowering. I think one thing I’m not is a pure futurist. I see how, in design, people get obsessed about two things: being completely new, and being the future.
They use the word ‘new’ as if it’s like fairy dust, as if no one else in the world exists and your ideas are in a silo – that triggers a whole other set of problems. With the future, I get it, you know, I’m not an idiot. I understand this idea of futuristic thinking, I understand the allure, it sounds cool. It leads humanity on; things become better. But I don’t lean on these things as a method of scoring points. I stand for diversity, I stand for a lot of things in the past that haven’t been dealt with or contextualised properly. So, in my own canon, I’m dusting off how important Goldie is, for example. [It’s] his personal history – when you look at how jungle and drum & bass music is having a revival for a whole new generation, [people] may not know that it was a Black artform. I might start DJing 30 minutes of jungle and somebody could come up to me thinking that electronic music doesn’t come from the subcultures of Black and brown communities. In that way, I think, ‘Wait, I like the past.’ I like dusting off and recontextualising the past more than completely going towards the future. I think that’s fine for others, but for me,
