In the wake of Abloh’s passing, revisit a conversation between the designer and his friend Shayne Oliver
From left: Cheikh is wearing a ribbed shearling cardigan, sheer knit roll-neck jumper, striped cotton poplin shirt and tie, tailored wool trousers, crushed felt fedora with mixed-stripe ribbon and cotton jersey durag by LOUIS VUITTON
Despite establishment approval – Oliver has taken home the LVMH Special Jury Prize and a CFDA award, and Abloh’s Off-White, bolstered by partnerships with the likes of Nike, has become one of the most coveted brands of the past decade – the two designers, both Black and American, struggled to have their work taken seriously at first, let alone understood.
SO: We met at a time in New York when everyone was crossing paths. Through meeting Matt [Williams], and really just being in the arena where ideas usually flourish, which is downtown. Not because of the cachet of downtown, but because of people just being open to each other’s ideas – everyone was sort of figuring out what they wanted to interact with, and what made sense for their worlds. With fashion, you enter it and it’s like, all for fashion.
VA: Right. Obviously, we’re both Black and American, which are characteristics that are important to our story, as that transcends time. It could be trendy in a moment, it could be at the forefront, then there could be an attempt to unravel it by calling it streetwear or whatever, and the cycle keeps on going.
SO: That’s partially why I took a hiatus, because I want to be able to create a space for myself so that people can have a chance to speak about the world of what I represent in a more serious way than season by season ... I think that, now, I’ll be able to have more of a language and conversation via my work, because people will be educated on it.
“There are multitudes of European designers and there are multitudes of Black conversations. These conversations are valid because they’re continuous, actually, and we’ve been here for a while, trying to create that landscape for those kinds of things to be taken seriously” – Shayne Oliver SO Where we’re coming from, you produce so young – the diamond pressing. We get so used to that high level of producing. Because anything that we present has to be stellar, you know what I mean? What you’re saying with this book is, whether it’s physical or not, it’s very, very important.
SO: In this hiatus, I was like, I need to make this moment work for me. What do I need to know about myself? Back in the day, I would be like, “Oh, it would be great if I can work with this artist.” Now, with this new phase I’m moving into, I can’t wait on that person to exist – I have to be that artist, I have to be that musician. Those years [at HBA] were my youth. People didn’t understand that that was actually my twenties. And I didn’t realise that I was the artist at the time.
SO: What I’m hoping for with Anonymous – and speaking openly about that process – is that the kids can become more comfortable with making mistakes. I think that, right now, with Instagram, it’s just about perfection. Meanwhile, the people they look up to have flip-flopped all over the place throughout their careers.
From left: Ismael is wearing a tailored windowpane wool coat and jacket and striped cotton poplin shirt by LOUIS VUITTON. Kestelmann is wearing a printed leather motorcycle suit byRayan is wearing a cotton trench coat and cotton poplin shirt and tie by LOUIS VUITTON. Ottawa is wearing a sheer knit jumper with intarsia detail by LOUIS VUITTON.
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