Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton Debut in Paris: Behind the Alphabet Manual, He's Still Selling Streetwear

"I — Irony: the philosophy of the new era, much like what Virgil Abloh is to Louis Vuitton."

Call him a designer or call him an influencer — either way, you can't deny what it means that Virgil Abloh is the first Black artistic director to run Louis Vuitton, the century-old French fashion house.

The first collection the Off-White founder made for LV opened on the afternoon of June 21 in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris. A 200-meter rainbow runway was lined on both sides by 1,500 students invited to watch in rainbow T-shirts, plus 1,000 celebrities with social-media followings in the millions — the designer's own dazzling contacts list, moved wholesale to the show: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, Naomi Campbell, Takashi Murakami and more, along with a few Chinese celebrities the brand flew to Paris to post on Weibo. Add up everyone's followers and you get more than 200 million.

Louis Vuitton Men's S/S 2019 Fashion Show

The show lasted about 15 minutes. It began with a white section echoing "Off-White," passed through brown, then broke into color — mint green, fluorescent yellow, bright red, cyan, camouflage, denim, tie-dye, florals and patterns drawn from The Wizard of Oz — and ended with futuristic silver fabrics.

In an interview at LV's headquarters, Virgil explained: "White hits a prism and refracts into different colors." White is Off-White, the prism is LV, and the colors stand for every race, identity and generation — the point being that LV is no longer a brand owned by the few, and that it wants the attention of more young consumers.

Before LVMH appointed him this March, Virgil was best known as the founder of the streetwear label Off-White. In six years the brand carried street design into high fashion, winning over a young generation of luxury buyers with text decoration so blunt it was almost meaningless and the cuts you find on any ordinary streetwear label — and drawing plenty of argument in the fashion industry along the way.

Virgil Abloh is 38 and never trained in fashion, though his mother was a seamstress. He was born in a Chicago suburb to Ghanaian immigrants and studied civil engineering as an adult. At 22 he became the long-running creative consultant to the hip-hop artist and pop idol Kanye West; when the two first turned up at Paris Men's Fashion Week in 2009, they were still the sort of outsiders trying to get into the fashion business. The label he started in 2013, Off-White, gave retro streetwear high-end fabrics and high-end positioning — a single printed crewneck sweatshirt can cost more than 4,000 yuan. Its buyers are mostly men who track Virgil on social media the way they track hip-hop artists and NBA players; Virgil himself has 2.6 million Instagram followers.

Plenty of people look down on Virgil and his young customers. His answer, in an interview with the Financial Times: "The boundaries have already been broken. So many T-shirts sold, so many Instagram posts published, have changed the ecosystem — you can't go back."

Virgil knows what whets his customers' appetite. A few days before the LV show he put a spy shot of a sneaker on Instagram — not a single garment — and the picture drew 180,000 likes. "Men buying sneakers now is like women buying handbags," he said.

That is exactly what LVMH needed; its menswear had gone a long time without getting anyone talking. Michael Burke, LV's chairman and chief executive, put it this way when the appointment was announced: "His sensitivity to luxury and his diplomatic touch will help bring Louis Vuitton menswear into the future."

Kering's Gucci had doubled its revenue to 6.2 billion euros over the past three years. Against that, LVMH placed high hopes on Virgil's first show. LV is LVMH's core brand, worth 25% of the group's revenue and 50% of its profit; of its 450 stores worldwide, only a third sell menswear. In a way, handing the menswear division to a newcomer was also an experiment that left LV's core womenswear and handbag business untouched.

LV's shift started last February with its landmark collaboration with the streetwear brand Supreme. By October, Women's Wear Daily reported, the collaboration had sold more than 100 million euros' worth — more revenue than six physical stores and the official website put together. Whether or not the designs broke new ground, the trial proved that street fashion works on an aging luxury brand like a shot of adrenaline for sales. All the brand had left to do was find someone who had both buzz and experience designing high-end streetwear.

Virgil Abloh was the obvious choice. To see how much demand there is for him, look at his calendar. Between his announcement as LV's menswear artistic director this March and this S/S 2019 show, Virgil also put out a World Cup-themed football collaboration with Nike, announced a run of projects with IKEA, mounted a joint art exhibition with Takashi Murakami, and kept running Off-White. LV came first, of course: Virgil called this debut "the culmination of my life's work."

As for the idea behind the debut: "In any case, the biggest goal of a first collection is to 'begin' — to let people understand a new vocabulary." Every invited guest found an A-to-Z alphabet on their seat, written by Virgil himself. The dense table used fashion terms and the designer's own private keywords to build a context for describing the LV, and the luxury, he has in mind.

C is both Collar and Collaboration; D is both Denim and DJ; F is Fandom; I is Irony ("the philosophy of the new era, much like what Virgil Abloh is to Louis Vuitton"); K is Kanye West ("Virgil Abloh's mentor and best friend") ...

The most interesting letters are M and N.

M is Millennial, Model, Motto ("Good style is often uncomfortable") and Margielaism. After outsiders pointed out, again and again, that Virgil Abloh's designs resemble the work of Martin Margiela, the former womenswear creative director at Hermès, he took up "Margielaism" as a shield. The definition he wrote: a term applicable to clothing and accessories, reflecting the tribute that Virgil Abloh's generation of young designers pays to Margiela's.

Before the show, Virgil spoke to several fashion publications about the question he most wanted to settle in the six months he spent talking to LV and then signing with it: "Why does Louis Vuitton make clothes?" LV began as a maker of trunks, and unlike Yves Saint Laurent or Balenciaga it never invented a new silhouette. Finding a link between LV and clothing, and making it hold, was the hardest part of the job he had taken. But he worked at the question from his target customer's side rather than from the side of clothing design itself — which is one reason his designs make such an easy target for critics who care about heritage and originality.

You can still find plenty of hoodies and sportswear in the collection, but Virgil doesn't call it streetwear. "Why does a successful 30-year-old professional today like to wear sneakers and a hoodie?" he asked, and answered himself, in the interview. "Because enough real people think a hoodie matters — that's feedback, that's culture." He was careful to add that the reversible hoodies in the collection are sewn with the same techniques as a hand-tailored suit.

"N - Normcore: an irony of the age of luxury, its sensibility intensified through continuation and reinterpretation."

He didn't drop LV's tradition of trunks, bags and accessories either: he used mini and oversized versions of classic shapes such as the Keepall and the Petite Malle, hung with colored metal chains for a street note.

Another answer to "why does LV make clothes" was a piece of functional clothing named Accessomorphosis — the letter A in the alphabet. It looks something like a rider's shoulder holster: a small bag stitched onto a piece of leather. By Virgil's account it came out of thinking about how men dress now — "We all carry a crossbody bag like this; it's a modern way of dressing." So he simply turned the accessory into a garment.

There were 12 of these accessory-garments in all, dotted across models of different skin tones. When The Business of Fashion noted that the Austrian designer Helmut Lang had done it first, in the '90s, Virgil shrugged: "Someone's done it before, right? You know my style — what I care about most is why you'd do it at all."

Fashion is a storytelling business first and a clothing business second. The old houses that used to rule it have said nothing on social media, and that silence gave people like Virgil room to tell new stories. Words and images now count for more than silhouette and cut. In a digital age where every fashion figure runs an online self, the act of buying stands in for that virtual person more than it ever did — as the 25-year-old influencer Ian Connor said this year: "Even if I'm homeless, even if I sleep on the floor, I have to make sure I have clothes to wear."

All these definitions were spelled out plainly in Virgil Abloh's Glossary. It is the same move he has always made with the quoted words printed on his clothes: strip the mystique away, and in doing so teach and flatter the young people who have no time for luxury culture. Pew Research Center puts the potential of the millennial luxury market at 400 million people in China and 385 million in India, with Asia accounting for 19% of the global total and South Africa 13%.

The clothes are no longer the point; the people are. That is why they let 1,500 design students into the show, every one of them filming on a phone to post on social media.

By the end, this season's designs mattered less and less.

"The show looked great, but it still felt more like an Off-White presentation wearing a Louis Vuitton face," the fashion blogger Heaven Raven told the streetwear site Hypebeast after watching it. "I think Louis Vuitton handled this in a way that was too obviously about the numbers, because I've always felt a luxury brand should be elegant, so it shouldn't rush." Jerry Lorenzo, who runs the streetwear label Fear of God, posted on Instagram: "The walls are coming down."

The moment the show ended it led every major fashion and streetwear site — not with a reading of the collection, but with this: "Virgil cried, he and Kanye West hugged and sobbed."

Cover image from elle