Virgil Abloh’s Archive Goes on View in Paris, Shedding Light on His Creative DNA

At an undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest lie the archives of Virgil Abloh, the late American designer whose imprint on the worlds of high fashion and pop culture endures.

Abloh wore many hats—painter, furniture designer, costume artist, architect, DJ—and his archives reflect this omnivorous approach. He seldom threw anything away and across a 20,000-strong collection there are two decades of sketches, skateboards, sneaker prototypes, advertising mockups, vinyl records, mixtapes, magazine cutouts, and more besides. Everything, in short, was potential source material.

More than 700 of these items have traveled to the Grand Palais in Paris where they combine to not only spotlight one of the 21st century’s most influential designers, but share how Abloh thought about creativity. “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” arrives on what would have been the designer’s 45th birthday and runs the length of Paris Fashion Week.

The timing is hardly coincidental: from 2018 on, Abloh spent considerable time in the city as the director for Louis Vuitton Menswear, and four years on from his death, the 10-day show serves as reunion of sorts for friends, collaborators, and fans. Mahfuz Sultan, the co-director of the Virgil Abloh Archives, who met the designer in a MoMA elevator in the mid-2010s, called the show “a love letter to the city that inspired him most.”

The love letter is certainly more show than tell with Abloh’s “codes” discernible by experiencing the eclectic range of his work, rather than following a set of hard and fast rules. “His codes were a methodology,” Chloe Sultan, co-director of the archives, said over email, “to open-source his methods and allow for learning, education, and mentorship, creating a type of transparency and accessibility that worked to democratize fashion.”

It’s a greatly expanded edition of a project that opened in Miami in 2022 and here spreads across 13,350 square feet of the Grand Palais.

Visitors enter the exhibition via the gift store. It’s a witty back-to-front approach and perhaps a nod to hype the that has surrounded the merch at earlier Abloh shows. The store in question is Colette, Abloh’s favorite Parisian concept store, which is fittingly filled with offerings. This includes the first Abloh-designed T-shirt carried by the boutique in the late 2000s, scented candles, his Braun alarm clock, and crossover products with the likes of Been Trill, Cactus Plant Flea Market, and Travis Scott.

The point is an immediate blurring of the lines between art and commerce. And it’s one that continues inside with an exhibition that is something like a very contemporary cabinet of curiosities that belonged to a generational tastemaker.

A stand will place a traffic cone alongside piles of folded T-shirts, wire mesh chairs, and luxury handbags. There’s an array of more than 200 Nike sneakers (many never released). Examples of his collaborations with Ikea, Vitra, Evian, and Baccarat are dispersed among ceiling-high shelves. The invitation is for visitors to create their own links and inferences, and they can do just that at the Nike Media Lab, a phalanx of computers loaded up with a terabyte of Abloh’s files.

Upstairs, Abloh’s Pont Neuf studio is faithfully recreated, laying piles of papers and project samples on a vibrant orange table. Racks of tightly packed clothes hang nearby and set of speakers and DJ decks he designed sit at the ready.

“Virgil strongly believed in making art and creativity accessible and available to everyone,” Sultan said. “That’s why this exhibition is fully open to the public. We want to create a space where people can engage with his legacy, be inspired by it, and build upon it.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com