There are no accidents of timing in history and culture. Whether or not he had prior insight into how yesterday’s Inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden was being planned, Virgil Abloh’s launch of his Louis Vuitton collection today also resounded with the poetry and intellectual purpose of Black consciousness taking its rightful place. His sixth collection, named ‘Ebonics,’ came with a film directed by Josh Johnson that was powerfully centered on spoken word and performance, a call to radical thinking through the lens of menswear.
Amongst the words delivered by Saul Williams and Kai Isiah Jamal were these: “Deconstruct the narratives... make spaces”; “Take down the walls, unravel the mysteries. Make it up to me.” And: “As Black people, as trans people, as marginalized people, the world is here for our taking, for it takes so much from us.”
Abloh has mustered an educational encyclopedia of answers to the ineluctable questions that have been troubling all designers: over the point of fashion, of shows, of making clothes in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement and all the crises that
blew up in humanity’s face last year. “We’re still reeling,” he said, in a telephone call from Chicago, before the film’s release. “We sat through so many heavy conversations in 2020, some so heated that things can’t be discussed anymore. But fashion can do this. Shows can do this.”
There’s lot to unpack, from the Louis Vuitton baggage—some of it in the shape of carrier bags, potato sacks, an LV ‘Keepall’ in the form of a plane—to the symbolic reconfigurations of masculine archetypes, to the challenging of ownership of sources that Abloh built into the clothes. “There are a lot of stories mixing cultures,” he said. “And from that, a new language will be created.” Cool, considered, chic, and flowing with floor-length coats, easy slim tailoring, African draped wraps, kilts, and Western hats—styled by the deft hand of Ibrahim Kamara—it plainly makes for Abloh’s best collection for the house since he arrived in 2018.
And his most autobiographical yet—an exploration of his African heritage and of what it means to be at the pinnacle of a career in Europe as a Black American creative director. “When I grew up, my father wore Kente cloth, with nothing beneath it, to family weddings, funerals, graduations,” he said. “When he went to an American wedding, he wore a suit. I merged those two together, celebrating my Ghanaian culture.” Add LV patterns to the cloth, drape it, then pair and compare it again with tartan checks, and the result is indeed something new. So too, the diagonal green-on-white print on a leather motocross suit. “A memory of the wax print fabric my mom had around the house when I was growing up,” he chuckled. “She was the one who taught me to sew; and she had learned it with a tailor in Ghana.”
Abloh’s belief in clear-eyed boyhood innocence—that grace period before awareness of socio-cultural biases sets in—has always been an inspiration signalled in his Vuitton collections and campaigns. “I start from the wonderment of boys. When you’re a boy there’s one thing that adults ask you: What do you want to be when you grow up? And you say artist, lawyer, doctor, football player, fighter pilot. But then, if I ask what does a doctor look like? There’s a knee-jerk. That’s where we can learn.” His point, spelled out amongst the stack of literature he releases with each collection, is this: “Fashion has the power to de-program these dress codes and impact possibilities.”
The multi-level consciousness, and his ambition to educate, include, and create aspiration is down-to-earth in one direction, and high-flown in many others. “Tourist vs. Purist,” the slogan he wrote when he entered Louis Vuitton in 2018 returned on bags this season. “It’s my organizing principle for my point of view when I make things. A tourist is someone who’s eager to learn, who wants to see the Eiffel Tower when they come to Paris. The purist is the person who knows everything about everything.” Abloh exerts his positionality as both—
the outsider who became the insider; the man with the power to bring young people with him into the former exclusion zone of high fashion.
Part of that is his challenge to the supposed ownership of ideas, art, culture. “Everyday objects—who invented our everyday objects?” At one tangent, that’s a retort to ‘purist’ critics who looked down on Abloh’s importation of generic ‘streetwear’ into high fashion. At a deeper, sharper edge lies the culpability of Eurocentric art and fashion for centuries of stealing from heritages that did not belong to them, and the erasures that stemmed from that. It “Begs the question of who can claim creation? Provenance is reality, while ownership is myth,” go his notes.
A further section deals head-on with those who will ‘Go fish,’ by making accusations of copying the second they see something they think they recognize—he’s suffered from that. Readings and misreadings dangerously depend on who’s looking, he argues. “It’s bigger than ‘What’s ours’? This isn’t a science fair. It’s culture!”
It dovetails into the art-heist sub-narrative of film—the poetic, powerful multi-disciplinary piece made entirely by the diverse crew of talents Abloh has brought to work at Vuitton. Its theme, shot between a gallery-like space and Swiss mountains, is based on James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” the writer’s reflections of how it felt to be looked at in the midst of white culture as a Black American artist in Switzerland.
It’s beautiful, the clothes are great and they will doubtless trigger even more fandom for Abloh’s Louis Vuitton menswear, even amidst the pandemic. As for stepping up to make a bigger statement with fashion in this critically sensitive moment of change? Well, he says: “I have a responsibility. We said we want diversity, didn’t we say that in 2020? Making change means making these changes. I don’t want to look back and say I turned a blind eye. But you know,” he concludes, “I’m an optimist. The future is yet to be decided.”
