Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS

ISBN 978-3-8365-8509-5
Edition: English

The sneaker as a (hyper) object

A making-of of the ten sneaker icons from Virgil Abloh and Nike

In 2016, sporting goods manufacturer Nike and fashion designer Virgil Abloh teamed up for a sneaker collection. With their project “The Ten,” they celebrated ten of the Oregon-based company's most iconic models and reinvigorated the culture of sneakers - from the Air Jordan 1 to the Air Max 90, from the Air Force 1 to the Air Presto.

Virgil Abloh's new designs offer deep insights into technical ingenuity and the emergence of cultural excellence. He played with building blocks of visual language by combining the originality of the original models with slang terms and local idioms of his wearers. Inspired by the sophistication of Dadaism, architectural theory and avant-garde happenings, he analyzed what makes the shoes “iconic” and deconstructed them into artistic assemblages - each new creation is at the same time a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture and a piece of clothing.

ICONS traces this investigative, creative process using documented prototypes, text messages from Abloh to Nike designers, and treasures from the Nike archives. We find Swooshes torn off Air Jordans and reattached using tape or thread, Abloh's signature text fragments scrawled in quotation marks on the Air Force 1s, and All Stars cut into pieces. We take a look behind the scenes and witness Abloh's free DIY concept, which gave each model in the Off-WhiteTM c/o Nike collection its own touch. Abloh's investigative design process is reflected in an artistic Swiss binding that reveals the spine and thus the creation of ICONS.

To document his cooperative way of working, Abloh turned to the printed page. To design the book, Nike and Abloh worked closely with the renowned London design studio Zak Group. Together they created this two-part compendium, which is equal parts catalog and conceptual toolbox. The first part presents the visual culture of the sneaker, while in the second part a lexicon defines key people, places, objects, ideas, materials and scenes from which the project emerged. Texts by Nicholas Schonberger (Nike), the writer Troy Patterson, the curator and historian Glenn Adamson and Virgil Abloh himself situate the joint work within fashion and design history. A foreword by Hiroshi Fujiwara places the project in the historical continuum of Nike's collaborative projects.

The author

Virgil Abloh (1980-2021) was a creative all-rounder. In his work he moved between art, design, culture and political engagement, mentoring and philanthropy. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a degree in civil engineering, he received his master's degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Aloh developed the principles of his broad art practice during the Bauhaus design curriculum developed by Mies van der Rohe at the IIT. In the summer of 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago showed his work in a major traveling exhibition - one of the most visited exhibitions in the museum's history. Abloh was, among other things, artistic director and founder of the Off-White™️ label and men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton from 2018 to 2021.

More details

Hardcover, Swiss binding with open spine, 25.5 x 29.7 cm, 2.09 kg, 352 pages

Weight: 2.09kg