Anyone who was a friend or a fan of Virgil Abloh knows that his birthday, September 30, invariably fell during Paris Fashion Week. No matter how the show calendar shifted around, and how low-key he kept the celebrations, the occasion coincided with people being in town from all over, with his latest Off-White collection, with him DJing parties and attending the shows of his peers.
So it feels both meaningful and fitting that this day will mark the opening of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes,” a Paris exhibition that puts a fresh spin on his vast body of work and represents the first major European exhibition devoted to the magnanimous and paradigm-shifting designer.
The show is being developed and produced by the Virgil Abloh Archive™ in partnership with Nike, and will take place at the Grand Palais, which recently unveiled the second phase of a major renovation. Occupying 13,350 square feet of the gallery space, it will showcase prototypes, objects, images, and sketches that attest to Abloh’s incomparable output over two decades. This means all his areas of interest: fashion, architecture, footwear, music, furniture, art, graphics and much more.
Of the approximately 20,000 objects that make up the Virgil Abloh Archive™ (the trademark symbol, a uniquely VA flourish), roughly 5% will be featured, which translates to something like 1,000 traces of the designer in some form or other, and much of it never seen by the public.
What already feels compelling about the framing of the exhibition is that everything on display sheds light on Abloh’s way of creating—how process-oriented he was and what this actually entailed. For every hypebeast product, there would have been any number of decisions and discussions with collaborators.
To wit, the designer famously used WhatsApp as the medium through which brainstorming was brought to life, and apparently there will be photos of various exchanges, along with elements from his personal collection and library.
“We want to showcase all the ways that Virgil thought,” Athiththan Selvendran told Vogue ahead of the announcement. Known as “Athi” since joining Abloh as an assistant in 2016, he now holds multiple roles of Chief Operating Officer of Virgil Abloh Securities, Chief Creative Officer of the Virgil Abloh Foundation, and Director of the Virgil Abloh Archive.
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