Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS

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

The sneaker as (hyper)object

A making-of of the ten sneaker icons by 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 legendary models and revived the culture of the sneaker - from the Air Jordan 1 to the Air Max 90, from the Air Force 1 to the Air Presto.

Virgil Abloh's redesigns offer deep insights into technical ingenuity and the creation of cultural goodness. He played with building blocks of visual language, combining the originality of the original models with slang terms and local idioms of its wearers. Inspired by the sophistication of Dadaism, architectural theory and avant-garde happenings, he analyzed what makes each shoe "iconic" and deconstructed them into artful assemblages - each new creation is at once a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture and a garment.

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

To document his collaborative approach, Abloh relied on the printed page. For the design of 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 a lexicon in the second part 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 the history of fashion and design. A foreword by Hiroshi Fujiwara places the project in the historical continuum of Nike's joint projects.

The author

Virgil Abloh (1980-2021) was a creative multi-talent. In his work, he moved between art, design, culture and political engagement, mentoring and philanthropy. After graduating with a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a master's degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Aloh developed the principles of his broad-based art practice during the Bauhaus design curriculum developed by Mies van der Rohe at IIT. In the summer of 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented his work in a major traveling exhibition - one of the most visited exhibitions in the museum's history. Abloh was Artistic Director and founder of the label Off-White™️ 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