PARIS — For Virgil Abloh, Paris was a lot larger than simply Fashion Week.
“It was home, where he lived with his family,” mentioned Chloé Sultan, who curated the brand new exhibition “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” along with her husband, Mahfuz Sultan. “He cared deeply about Paris — not just as a fashion capital but as a city. He collaborated with local rappers, skaters, Arabic-speaking kids and francophone performers who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a spotlight. This was the city where so many of his dreams were realised.”
Spanning two flooring in a wing of the Grand Palais, “The Codes,” which opens Tuesday on what would have been Abloh’s forty fifth birthday, is the centrepiece of a 10-day tribute to the late designer, who died in 2021. The formidable occasion, titled “Virgil Abloh: World’s Fair,” was organised by the Virgil Abloh Archive — an arm of Virgil Abloh Securities, the entity conceived by Abloh’s widow, Shannon, to protect his inventive works and make them accessible — and underwritten by Nike, one among Abloh’s key collaborators. It takes its queues from the uniquely multidisciplinary, collaborative method Abloh took to his tasks all through his lifetime, and contains activations and pop ups with the likes of 0fr., Abloh’s favorite Paris bookstore; Castor Fleuriste, a florist he usually labored with; and Baccarat.
Abloh’s private archive included greater than 20,000 catalogued objects spanning trend, design, music, artwork and ephemera, round 700 of which “The Codes” shows for the general public for the primary time. Highlights embody a copy of Abloh’s workplace at Louis Vuitton, the place he turned the primary Black creative director in the historical past of the home, not solely designing its males’s collections however giving the general Vuitton model contemporary power.
“Virgil was a collector and physical archivist from a young age. He was always interested in preserving parts of cultural history that were important to him, his own practice of remembering them,” mentioned Shannon Abloh through electronic mail. “The mission of the Virgil Abloh Archive is to keep his ideas alive.”
It’s a mission that’s been sophisticated by final yr’s sale of Off-White, the as soon as white-hot label Abloh helmed, to Bluestar Alliance, beneath which it’s develop into more and more indifferent from the designer’s imaginative and prescient.
Keeping the Legacy Alive
As Sultan places it, “This show isn’t the end of the story — it’s one public chapter of the archive’s work. Virgil cared so much about his audience bringing their own point of view. That’s the spirit we hope continues.”
The exhibition doesn’t shrink back from the total vary of Abloh’s observe. The partitions are rigorously adorned with sneakers, letterman jackets, luggage and baggage from the completely different manufacturers Abloh designed for all through his profession. A pc station permits guests to view blueprints from Abloh’s digital information.
“Virgil had the eagle view,” mentioned DJ and radio host Benji B, who labored carefully with Virgil as music director for his Louis Vuitton reveals. “What you see here is not someone who worked for different companies, it’s someone who had different companies as vehicles for his big picture vision. It’s a through line that connects what he did for Nike with Louis Vuitton, Off-White and so on.”
Few understood the facility of Abloh’s work as early as Sarah Andelman, co-founder of Colette, the Paris idea retailer that offered streetwear alongside high-fashion manufacturers lengthy earlier than others.
Colette, which stocked t-shirts from Abloh’s first model Pyrex Vision and went on to hold Off-White earlier than the store closed its doorways in 2017, is having a mini-revival as a form of present store promoting unique Abloh-linked merch, from sweatpants to keychains, in the direction of the doorway of the exhibition. “I couldn’t refuse when they asked Colette to take part,” Andelman mentioned “They’re even screening the film ‘Colette Mon Amour.’”
“Even when he was doing a few t-shirts with Pyrex, he already had a vision for an empire,” Andelman recalled. “At Colette, we had the ground floor for T-shirts and sneakers, the first floor for luxury. Virgil’s brand sat right in the middle,” she recalled. “It was rare that I didn’t know where to put a brand!”
She sees the multi-layered format of “World’s Fair” as quintessentially Abloh. “He wouldn’t limit himself to one community — he was too curious. Paris was so important for him, and it makes sense the project unfolds across the city. That’s how Virgil worked — always bringing things together.”
Virgil Was Here
For Andelman, Abloh’s legacy lies in the doorways he opened. “He showed many that everything was possible. You don’t need to study fashion in a classic way to become a creative director. You need to work hard, be curious and stay open-minded. Wherever you come from, you can make it.”
Before he died, Abloh had a hand in staging his personal retrospective, “Figures of Speech,” which opened at MCA Chicago in 2019 earlier than touring to Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn and Qatar. Spanning trend, artwork, design, music and ephemera, it was the primary exhibition to seize the total scope of his observe.
“Virgil himself co-curated ‘Figures of Speech,’ so there was complete continuity between his intention and the reality of that show,” mentioned Sultan. “‘The Codes’ is different — it’s the story told through his archive, what he left behind. It’s as much a time capsule of his era as it is a portrait of his work.”
It additionally emphasises the networks of collaboration and cultural currents he each drew from and amplified.
“People still feel deeply emotionally connected to, inspired by and moved by Virgil,” mentioned Shannon Abloh. “His focus on building community and fostering belonging continues to be extremely powerful and moving. There continues to be a deep emotional need for this sort of real, authentic community-building in our cultural space.”