Fashion Theory
The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
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Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech”
Lauren Downing Peters
To cite this article: Lauren Downing Peters (2019): Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech”, Fashion
Theory, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1655998
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Fashion Theory
DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1655998
# 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Virgil Abloh:
“Figures of Speech”
Reviewed by
Lauren Downing Peters
Lauren Downing Peters is Assistant Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech”. Museum of Contemporary Art
Professor of fashion studies at
Columbia College Chicago. She holds (MCA), Chicago, Illinois, June 10-Septemebr 22, 2019
a PhD in fashion studies from the
Centre for Fashion Studies at
Stockholm University where she
researched the early history of plus- On my short walk home from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s
size fashion in the United States. She
is also the editor-in-chief of The (MCA) new exhibition, Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech,” I passed by
Fashion Studies Journal. no fewer than three streetwear storefronts. Although quiet on that
[email protected] Wednesday afternoon, these spaces are unmistakable in the urban land-
scape on Saturday mornings when throngs of teen boys choke the nar-
row city sidewalks, waiting to get their hands on the latest Supreme or
2 Lauren Downing Peters
Adidas drop. About this show and this moment, the Business of
Fashion, somewhat cynically, suggested that the MCA was cashing in
on both this “hypebeast” phenomenon and the “increasingly intertwined
worlds of fashion and art” (Fernandez 2019); however, a more generous
observer might say that the MCA is simply, and quite adeptly, following
the movements of contemporary youth culture.
Indeed, queuing up to enter “Figures of Speech” outside the muse-
um’s lofty fourth floor galleries felt less like waiting to get into a fashion
exhibition than a sneaker drop. First, I did not immediately see any of
the common trappings of a fashion exhibition (mannequins, archival
ephemera, glass vitrines, etc.). Second, and perhaps more notably, the
audience was not comprised of what one might consider “typical”
museum patrons, but rather of black and brown teen boys, freshly out
of school for the summer and decked out in the latest Supreme and
Nike Off-White gear. As I waited in line, I noted an electricity in the
air that I haven’t experienced in a museum in a long time—probably
not since attending Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Costume
Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011. It was exciting
and, I realized, difficult not to get swept up in the boys’ anxious energy.
According to Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times art critic Holland
Cotter, however, these youthful, somewhat overeager “armies of selfie-
takers-and-sharers” who are more interested in “theatrically installed”
fashion exhibitions than “archival objects” are not the types of patrons
beleaguered art museums should be courting (Cotter 2017). Our
nation’s art museums are in a state of “drift,” Cotter argues, and it’s
therefore no coincidence that the number of blockbuster fashion exhibi-
tions—staged in order to correct attendance imbalances—has soared in
recent years while “worthy scholarly shows” have dwindled in num-
ber (Ibid.).
As deeply problematic and notably dismissive of fashion as Cotter’s
sentiments are, he nevertheless makes an important observation about
the ways that the valuable patronage of Millennials and Gen Z is push-
ing curating, and specifically fashion curating, into uncomfortable new
territory, blurring the (already blurry) line between art and commerce.
In this cultural moment—one in which the issue of what constitutes a
“worthy” art museum exhibition is being fiercely debated—”Figures of
Speech” stands as an exemplary case study that illuminates the suspect
foothold that fashion continues to have in art museums and, in perhaps
the most Ablohian way possible, begs the question, “What is a fashion
retrospective?”
Although it is difficult to argue against the fact that “Figures of
Speech” is a fashion exhibition—it is about a fashion designer after all
and is billed on the museum’ as “the first museum exhibition devoted to
the work of the genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh”—it
nevertheless rejects many of the established conventions of fashion
curating. For instance, fashion designer retrospectives tend to begin in
Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” 3
one of two ways: either with an overview of the designer’s life and train-
ing or with a single, iconic garment (or, as is the case in the Victoria
and Albert Museum’s 2019 staging of Dior: Designer of Dreams, both).
“Figures of Speech” takes a completely different approach in its intro-
ductory gallery by displaying four objects: a black carpet, a pile of
boxes, a video projection and a portrait photograph of Abloh. Notably,
only one of these—the video, which was filmed in 2012 to promote
Abloh’s first label, Pyrex Vision—is attributed to the designer himself.
The carpet, titled The Reality (2006), was created by Canadian artist
Joe Jones as a commentary on the overnight success of Pyrex Vision
and, aesthetically, nods to Abloh’s signature graphic style and ironic use
of quotation marks around the text, which reads, “It’s highly possible
Pyrex simply bought a bunch of Rugby flannels, slapped ‘PYREX 23’
on the back, and re-sold them for an astonishing markup of about
700%.” Also nodding to Abloh’s early work, the boxes, which are hap-
hazardly piled in one corner, are filled with T-shirts from a 2012 collab-
oration with Hood by Air creative director, Shayne Oliver. Rather than
functioning as documentary evidence of Abloh’s unconventional rise to
fashion superstardom, these objects are presented as standalone works
of art that testify to Abloh’s vast cultural reach, but offer only a frag-
mented understanding of the designer’s upbringing and training through
the creative lens of others.
Different from conventional fashion retrospectives, “Figures of
Speech” is not precious with the past. In fact, at times, it feels like
Abloh and Michael Darling, the James W. Aldorf Chief Curator at the
MCA (who in the exhibition catalog is listed as the “organizer”) are
engaging in an act of actively rewriting (or consciously forgetting)
Abloh’s past as a fashion designer in an attempt to re-brand him as an
artist. In the catalogue, Darling writes about his first meeting with
Abloh in which he learned about the designer’s aspirations to break into
the world of fine art (2019, 15). From this initial conversation, Darling
became keenly interested in the “measured vision” that emerged from
the “buzzy, frothy context of luxury fashion, celebrity mannequins, and
hip-hop one-upmanship” (Darling 2019, 9). Rather than staging a
canonical designer retrospective, Darling decided to instead give Abloh
free reign to create an entirely new body of work for which his designs
for Pyrex Vision, Off-White and Louis Vuitton serve as little more than
a preface or footnote.
Photographer Juergen Teller’s portrait of Abloh, titled What is
Abloh? No. 7 (2017), seems to further enforce this idea. Described by
Teller as a “biography” of the designer through the arrangement of vari-
ous symbolic objects—from an inflatable dinosaur to an EU flag—the
portrait nevertheless tells only a recent history of Abloh’s career, begin-
ning with his entrance into the rarefied world of European fashion with
his brand Off-White to his more recent ascension to the role of Men’s
Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton. Visitors are therefore left to consult
4 Lauren Downing Peters
the hefty exhibition catalogue to learn about Abloh’s Catholic school
beginnings, his undergraduate education in civil engineering at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Master of Architecture he
received from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. Abloh only
began to dabble in fashion toward the end of his MA when he began
screen printing T-shirts and had a chance encounter with fellow
Chicagoan Kanye West that sent his career into the stratosphere.
The exhibition’s overall neglect of the details of Abloh’s recent past
comes into starker relief in the second gallery: the first and only of
which to present Abloh’s clothing design to any significant extent.
Titled “FASHION,” this gallery purports to show highlights from
Abloh’s fashion design career and his eclectic sources of inspiration—
from paparazzi photos of Princess Diana, to the paintings of
Caravaggio, to Jenny Holzer’s video projections about the plight of refu-
gees. These influences, according to the label text, manifest in Abloh’s
use of ironic quotation marks, the diagonal black and white stripes that
have become a hallmark of his second label, Off-White, and his pen-
chant for deconstructed silhouettes. Unfortunately, however, it is diffi-
cult to see how, exactly these influences translate into his clothing.
This is due to the manner in which the garments are rather uncere-
moniously confined to seven industrial garment racks along the
restricted easternmost third of the gallery (Figure 1). Displayed on silver
wire hangers as though in a secondhand shop, the socio-political and
artistic references in Abloh’s individual garments are all but impossible
to interpret. Rather than seeing the garments in their three dimensional
entirety, visitors are only afforded a frustrating profile view. On the first
rack, Abloh’s early Pyrex Vision screen prints bleed into one another
across a series of worn flannel shirting. In the proceeding four racks, his
most notable Off-White collections are only discernable by color palette,
and evidence a designer who, as he rose in popularity, arguably became
more establishment. Indeed, the most recent, monochromatic Off-White
collections could, as far as I could tell, be those of any contemporary
avant-garde or minimalist designer.
The final garment rack contains garments from both Abloh’s
Nike Off-White collaborations and a few interesting Louis Vuitton
prototypes onto which Abloh pinned and taped pieces of printer paper
with his signature slogans and playful misspellings of the brand name
(“LEWIS VUITTON”). Given the manner in which they are displayed,
however, it is next-to-impossible to appreciate the way that Abloh deftly
combines street wear and high fashion references in his work for Nike.
Even so, savvy visitors will quickly recognize one iconic dress amid the
chaos: the custom one-shouldered, black tutu tennis dress Abloh created
for Serena Williams for the 2018 U.S. Open. Images of Williams power-
fully bounding and leaping in the controversial (to some) ensemble
quickly became symbols of Williams’ resilience in the face of adversity
after suffering complications during birth of her daughter, Olympia.
Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” 5
Figure 1
Installation view, Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech,” MCA Chicago June 10 – September 22, 2019 Photo: Nathan Keay, # MCA Chicago.
Hanging limply on the industrial garment rack in the MCA’s cavernous
white galleries among a number of other Nike Off-White garments,
however, the garment is devoid of Williams’ tremendous power and
presence. Williams deserved better than this.
The impulse to touch is a documented and confounding problem for
fashion curators. Indeed, fashion is a tactile medium and oftentimes it
can be difficult for even the most sophisticated of museum patrons to
resist the urge to reach out and run their fingers over a soft expanse of
cashmere or a frothy puff of tulle. Fashion curators have therefore
devised a number of strategies to quell this desire—from displaying
objects just out of reach or behind glass; however, in “Figures of
Speech,” it appears Michael Darling made little to no effort to protect
the garments, nor to save unwitting patrons the embarrassment of being
reprimanded by the hyper-vigilant guards. In spite of the guards’ loom-
ing presence, over the course of ten minutes, I saw no fewer than 15 vis-
itors reach out to slide the garments along the rail in an effort to, quite
literally, read Abloh’s text-heavy designs. The physical and visual boun-
daries that are typically erected to protect garments in fashion exhibi-
tions were absent, but the visitors’ consumer instincts remained intact.
To display the garments on a retail scale was a somewhat provocative
decision—one that aimed, perhaps, to collapse the established
6 Lauren Downing Peters
Figure 2
Virgil Abloh, Pink Panther:
Scales of Justice, 2019.
Courtesy of the artist. #
MCA Chicago.
conventions of museum display, and which tracks well with Abloh’s
Duchampian interest in subversion and play.1 In practice, however, the
joke (if that’s what this decision boiled down to) was ultimately on the
throngs of humiliated, sulking visitors who dared reach out to touch.
The proceeding galleries shift the visitor’s focus away from fashion
and are presented in the following order, with the requisite quotes
around the titles: “MUSIC,” “INTERMEZZO,” “BLACK GAZE,”
“DESIGN” and “THE END.” Dominated by recent sculptural works—
such as a foam mobile titled Pink Panther: Scales of Justice (2019) that
appears in “INTERMEZZO” or a neon sign titled “You’re Obviously
in the Wrong Place” (2019) in “BLACK GAZE”—it is in these galleries
that Abloh attempts to reconcile his varied interests in architecture, fur-
niture design, photography and sculpture (Figure 2). His sources of
inspiration here are many and obvious and include Alexander Calder,
Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, among others. As a result, fashion
takes a backseat, rendering the “FASHION” gallery little more than a
footnote in this new, unvetted chapter of his career in which Abloh
seems to be actively distancing himself from the fashion world, even as
he occupies one of its most its powerful positions at the helm Louis
Vuitton menswear.
Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” 7
Figure 3
Installation view, Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech,” MCA Chicago June 10 – September 22, 2019. Photo: Nathan Keay, # MCA Chicago.
It is through his fashion design and, specifically, sneaker design, how-
ever, that that Abloh has arguably had the greatest impact on popular
culture and the reason that teen boys queue up for both his drops and
for this exhibition. That is why it is somewhat unfortunate that his
sneaker prototypes for Nike are installed, seemingly as an afterthought,
on a low platform in the “DESIGN” gallery. Here, Darling takes no
pains to discuss Abloh’s process or ideation. Rather, the shoes them-
selves become a sculptural installation titled An Array of Air (2019) in
which dozens of pairs are aesthetically arranged in a regular grid
(Figure 3). Displayed a less than a foot off the ground, the low vantage
point renders it impossible (unless one assumes an awkward, low squat)
to appreciate Abloh’s hands-on approach in which he oftentimes writes
directly on the sneakers or deconstructs them to reveal their foamy
innards. While the attempt here might have been to elevate the sneaker
to the status of high art, much like the clothing in the first gallery, the
display has the cumulative effect of flattening his many collections and
collaborations into one indistinguishable mass.
While designer retrospectives exist comfortably within the canon of
fashion exhibition-making, those that focus on a single living designer
have always drawn the ire of critics. As Valerie Steele writes, Diana
8 Lauren Downing Peters
Figure 4
Virgil Abloh MCA pop-up store, “Church & State,” MCA Chicago. Photo: Peter McCullough, # MCA Chicago.
Vreeland’s theatrical 1983 Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at the
Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the first of a liv-
ing designer—“caused a tremendous amount of controversy, because it
was so closely tied to the economic interests of that particular designer”
(Steele 2008, 12). Indeed, the Metropolitan Museum of Art would not
stage another retrospective of a living designer until Rei Kawakubo/
Comme des Garçons: The Art of the In-Between in 2017. Today, critics
might still tend to be extra-critical of living designer retrospectives, but
they are less likely to send institutions into a public relations tailspin.
Even so, the old concerns about the mixing of art and commerce resur-
face with a new urgency in “Figures of Speech.”
The exclusive, ticketed pop-up, called “Church and State,” is located dir-
ectly outside the gallery and features re-issues of some of Abloh’s most popu-
lar sneaker designs, his best-selling Off-White merchandise and his early
Pyrex Vision screen prints are striking manifestations of this sticky relation-
ship (Figure 4). While popular with visitors, “Church and State” awkwardly
reinscribes the hierarchy of the sneaker drop, complete with clear plastic
shopping bags (to prevent theft) and imposing black-shirted security guards
not affiliated with the MCA, thereby problematizing the notion that muse-
ums should exist as civic spaces. Another is the fact that the exhibition
contains only one object from his recent Louis Vuitton collections: his re-
interpretation of a coated canvas “Keepall” bag featuring orange shackles
dangling from one end. It is curious to me that that this was the last object
Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” 9
in the exhibition—one that hints at Abloh’s most recent fashion design
work, while also beckoning visitors to visit the Louis Vuitton menswear
pop-up in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood. Featuring a limited-edition
collection of ready-to-wear and accessories rendered in his signature vibrant
orange, the store is branded as an immersive extension of the MCA retro-
spective, but also a teaser of his F/W 2019 menswear collection. For Abloh
and Louis Vuitton, the pop-up was an exceedingly clever, Instagram-friendly
and well-timed marketing strategy, even if it lacked real substance.
Returning to a question I posed earlier in this review, “What is a fash-
ion retrospective?” I also have come to wonder if a fashion retrospective
even has to contain fashion, or is it enough that it be about a fashion
designer? Likewise, I wonder what really is at stake when the lines
between art and commerce are so obviously blurred as they are with the
MCA show and the Vuitton pop-up. After spending time in “Figures of
Speech,” I’m not so sure about the answers to either question, and I’d ven-
ture to guess that Abloh would revel in this irony and ambiguity. It is not
the lack of fashion, nor the blurring of art and commerce, however, that
are the essential problems with “Figures of Speech.” Rather, it is the cura-
torial handling of garments (or lack thereof) and overall neglect of facts
and context that will likely draw the ire of critics and scholars.
In the end, one of the most compelling elements of the exhibition
was not the actual exhibition at all: it was seeing visitors dress for the
occasion in Nike Off-White and Pyrex Vision gear. While Abloh’s
design work fell flat in the lackluster displays, it was brought to life on
the bodies of those in the galleries who inventively mixed his decon-
structed sneakers with high and low fashion. In seeing the dialogue that
was inadvertently created between that which was on display and that
which was worn, it occurred to me that the greatest failing of the exhib-
ition was its cursory consideration of the social significance of his work
and its neglect of the throngs of young men who have buoyed his career.
In his critical assessment of the Met’s handling of blockbuster fashion
exhibitions, Holland Cotter notes that, in order to remain relevant, art
museums have to “connect art to life” (Cotter 2017). Darling and
Abloh missed a huge opportunity to connect Abloh’s art to life by, for
instance, investigating the hypebeast phenomenon at which Abloh is at
the center and to meaningfully connect Abloh’s work to the corrupt and
highly segregated Chicago streets from which it first emerged. The gar-
ments, of course, deserved better, but so too did Chicago.
Note
1. Abloh has famously stated, “Duchamp is my lawyer,” and, as
Michael Darling writes in the exhibition catalogue, he is “keenly
interested in pushing the boundaries of intellectual property
ownership and what should or could be in the open-sourced hands
of the public domain” (2019, 9).
10 Lauren Downing Peters
References
Cotter, Holland. 2017. “How to Fix the Met: Connect Art to Life.”
New York Times March 1. Accessed 12 June 2019 https://www.
nytimes.com/2017/03/01/arts/design/how-to-fix-the-met-connect-art-
to-life.html.
Darling, Michael. 2019. “Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech.” In Virgil
Abloh, edited by Michael Darling, 9–17. New York: DelMonico
Books.
Fernandez, Chantal. 2019. “Chicago Cashes in on Virgil Abloh.”
Business of Fashion June 12. Accessed 12 June 2019. https://www.
businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/chicago-cashes-in-on-vir-
gil-abloh.
Steele, Valerie. 2008. “Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion
Exhibition.” Fashion Theory 12(1): 7–30.
