CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/30/2022

In 'Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,' a record of genius

Featured spreads are from Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech, the definitive 500-page catalog to the exhibition currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum—curated, in its current incarnation, by the late designer’s equally game-changing colleague and friend, Antwaun Sargent. Born in Chicago to Ghanian parents, Abloh exploded the boundaries between fashion, architecture, graphics, sound, art and entrepreneurialism. His death at the age of forty-one continues to reverberate. “Abloh often references the artist Marcel Duchamp as a hero,” Lou Stoppard writes. “He calls him his ‘lawyer’ as a means of explaining and legitimizing his tendency to borrow, displace, rename and rework. He is attracted to Duchamp’s interest in context and the manner in which anything can be elevated to the status of art at the artist’s whim, simply through the act of selection and designation. In homage, Abloh uses wording widely across Off-White products and outlets. Some are labeled simply as what they are—'Cap,’ ‘Website,’ ‘Runway Show Invite.’ Others are given a new definition—leather bags are ‘Sculpture.’ He has made himself ‘Virgil Abloh,’ an object in this pursuit, aware that how he labels and positions himself—whether at the helm of a luxury house, as the artist at the opening of a gallery exhibition or on the red carpet of fashion’s most-watched event, the Met Ball, wearing Air Jordans—challenges stigmas, conventions and canons and, in one way or another, moves culture onward.”