Here’s a headline for the hypebeasts: Virgil Abloh and Nigo have reunited for a second round of their LV² collaboration. The capsule collection brought together the luxury streetwear OG and his most successful disciple. “Me being at Louis Vuitton is directly attributable to work Nigo’s done in the past,” Abloh said at the time. “A collab project with him—it puts his work in the right context.” But when it launched last year in the early days of the pandemic, it was unclear if it’d be a one-off or a regular thing.
In the interim, Abloh and Nigo decided they had more to say. “Being authentic to yourself, you can’t acquire it,” Abloh said on a call. “These are things you get with age and maturity. We’re not the youngest kids in fashion design in our space. As you get older and wiser, what does that look like in terms of fashion design? That’s why I wanted to do this project.”
Abloh turned 40 last September, but even still there’s a young, playful spirit to this drop, with its more obvious nods to Nigo’s Human Made iconography and its sampling of Vuitton’s own famous monogram. The new LV Made logo replicates Human Made’s font, and the menagerie of wild animals—from the tiger rug detailing on totes and briefcases to the duck-shaped monogram bags—are riffs on the Japanese designer’s home codes. “The first season we did the unexpected by not employing a graphic look and feel,” Abloh said. “But since both of our careers have been championing this strain with fashion design, those graphic motifs take a more prominent space in this collection.”
The Vuitton monogram gets a real workout here, most often in denim that's been camouflaged in the drippy shapes that are a signature of another of Nigo’s lines, Icecream. The familiar damier check, meanwhile, has been supersized and given the scalloped edges of postage stamps in a reference to the manner in which the collection came together between Tokyo, Paris, and Abloh’s Chicago homebase. “Nigo shipped his archive of cherished items to my studio and we worked on it basically by FedEx and Zoom.” The silhouettes are classic and straightforward, a mix of American workwear, English schoolboy tailoring, and Japanese kimonos, with the odd poncho thrown in, a trending shape.
So, are Abloh and Nigo going to make this a regular thing? “Nigo’s a legend, to be able to create collections not as a one-off but as an evolving set of ideas it’s gratifying on a different level,” Abloh said. “But we don’t plan that far ahead. As a purveyor of ‘how do you make things interesting’—that’s sort of my PhD.—it’s not a marketing event. This isn’t that. What I like is this artist-in-residence type of thing. I have friends, they can come to my studio, and if they see something they want to make, let’s do it.”
