Virgil Abloh, the chattiest of designers, has made words part of his Off-White design lexicon since the beginning. Until now they haven’t featured much in his work for Louis Vuitton, but this time around he had something to say, though he didn’t do so with the ironic distancing of the quotation marks that are his signature elsewhere. Here in this pre-season collection, an intarsia sweater instructs us to separate fashion from fiction, and a debossed leather jacket offers the sage advice: Don’t let your day job define you.
Half a year ago when Abloh released his pre-spring line for Vuitton, he said the early months of isolation had him thinking about fashion’s role in the looming environmental crisis. Sincerity swapping places with bluster is a pandemic after-effect altogether more surprising. Being the opposite of irony, the quality of earnestness has never been considered cool. Abloh said this season’s statements also “come from quarantine and solitude.” Let’s see if he has enough influence to bring his peers over to his new way of thinking.
Of course, the most important words in what Abloh describes as this “relaxed formal” collection are Louis and Vuitton. His many experiments with branding logo-ing include embossing and debossing leather with the iconic LV monogram, and applying bright yellow rubber treads in the form of Ls and Vs to the bottom of bags—“making them super-durable,” he explained. Most interesting is the work the studio did around salt-dyeing fabric and leather in an oversize Damier check motif. Alboh first began experimenting with the Damier check while collaborating with his friend, the Japanese streetwear designer Nigo, earlier this year.
On the subject of his fall 2021 runway show scheduled for next month, Abloh said it’ll follow the new model he established with his spring 2021 collection, which is now on view in Miami at Vuitton’s Design District store, meaning it will debut in Paris and then go on the road. In his usual way with words Abloh said, “we have a slogan in the studio: Don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.”