February 28, 2020 |
The Off-White brand is about more than just clothes, said Virgil Abloh. Not only has he brought a much needed diversity to fashion and made streetwear the most marketable commodity in the industry but he has also brought a whole new fan-base to the luxury world. The brand was the most searched online last year even when its in-demand founder took time out for the sake of his health.
Abloh is now back and ready to design a post-streetwear world (he declared it dead in 2020). What replaces it? The first look, worn by Bella Hadid, was a tulle ball gown. Abloh does love a grand gown and hit Instagram gold last year with Hailey Beiber’s wedding dress. It was worn with an Arc’teryx jacket – the Canadian outdoor performance-wear brand is Abloh’s latest collaborator. There was tailoring, but not the stuffy kind. A lean black coat with a low slung garter-frill belt, was slit to the hip. Another skirt suit came swimming with distorted houndstooth checks. The post streetwear future isn’t just for kids. Yolanda Hadid walked the show in a white leather jacket with a spray paint motif and Carolyn Murphy reprised a cut-out slinky white dress she wore on Tom Ford’s Gucci runway in the 1990s (one of Abloh’s design “quotations”). Apple green leather overalls brought a souped-up workwear element. The next chapter for Off-White starts here.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans.
