It dovetails into the art-heist sub-narrative of film-the poetic, powerful multi-disciplinary piece made entirely by the diverse crew of talents Abloh has brought to work at Vuitton. “It’s bigger than ‘What’s ours’? This isn’t a science fair. Readings and misreadings dangerously depend on who’s looking, he argues. It “Begs the question of who can claim creation? Provenance is reality, while ownership is myth,” go his notes.Ī further section deals head-on with those who will ‘Go fish,’ by making accusations of copying the second they see something they think they recognize-he’s suffered from that. At a deeper, sharper edge lies the culpability of Eurocentric art and fashion for centuries of stealing from heritages that did not belong to them, and the erasures that stemmed from that. “Everyday objects-who invented our everyday objects?” At one tangent, that’s a retort to ‘purist’ critics who looked down on Abloh’s importation of generic ‘streetwear’ into high fashion. Part of that is his challenge to the supposed ownership of ideas, art, culture. The outsider who became the insider the man with the power to bring young people with him into the former exclusion zone of high fashion. The purist is the person who knows everything about everything.” Abloh exerts his positionality as both. A tourist is someone who’s eager to learn, who wants to see the Eiffel Tower when they come to Paris. “It’s my organizing principle for my point of view when I make things. Purist,” the slogan he wrote when he entered Louis Vuitton in 2018 returned on bags this season.
The multi-level consciousness, and his ambition to educate, include, and create aspiration is down-to-earth in one direction, and high-flown in many others. “We sat through so many heavy conversations in 2020, some so heated that things can’t be discussed anymore. “We’re still reeling,” he said, in a telephone call from Chicago, before the film’s release. Make it up to me.” And: “As Black people, as trans people, as marginalized people, the world is here for our taking, for it takes so much from us.”Ībloh has mustered an educational encyclopedia of answers to the ineluctable questions that have been troubling all designers: over the point of fashion, of shows, of making clothes in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement and all the crises thatīlew up in humanity’s face last year. make spaces” “Take down the walls, unravel the mysteries. His sixth collection, named ‘Ebonics,’ came with a film directed by Josh Johnson that was powerfully centered on spoken word and performance, a call to radical thinking through the lens of menswear.Īmongst the words delivered by Saul Williams and Kai Isiah Jamal were these: “Deconstruct the narratives. Biden was being planned, Virgil Abloh’s launch of his Louis Vuitton collection today also resounded with the poetry and intellectual purpose of Black consciousness taking its rightful place. Whether or not he had prior insight into how yesterday’s Inauguration of President Joseph R. There are no accidents of timing in history and culture.