Off-White Opens New Paris Flagship Store

Table Of Content

• Express Takes A Detour Into Bankruptcy Closing Over 100 Stores
• 'Black Widow' Director Teases Upcoming Sequel Without Scarlett Johansson's Character
• Collaborations
• The Success of Off–White Is Anything But Ironic
• The Complete Off-White™ x Nike "The Ten" Set Is Going up for Auction
• An insight into the brand’s growing popularity and an argument for why it may be warranted

The company has been struggling over the past few years to keep up with consumer preferences, differentiating itself in the market with product offerings and fighting off intense competition in an over-stored U.S. market. Now, LVMH and New Guards Group, the Italian fashion conglomerate that operates and produces Off-White, appear set to continue building on Abloh’s vision. In comments published by Business of Fashion this morning, Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke, who has been working with New Guards co-founders Davide De Giglio and Andrea Grilli to steer Off-White, described plans to turn Off-White into an “eternal” brand he compared to Dior. “Off-White is in the position that Dior was in 1957,” Burke told BOF. “Monsieur Dior had only been at the house for 10 years when he died.

Express Takes A Detour Into Bankruptcy Closing Over 100 Stores

Long-term creative advisor to rapper Kanye West, he launched his label, Off-White, in September 2013, which led to him becoming one of the finalists for the prestigious LVMH prize in 2015, which eventually went to the duo Marques’Almeida and the French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus. The world has changed profoundly for the Off-White design studio and the New Guards Group that produces the OW collections. Going forward, their job will be striking a balance between homage and honoring Abloh’s drive for constant forward movement. Designed before his passing, this collection makes good on the “more adult” Off-White, while also celebrating childhood and youthful games. If it were anybody else, that might sound like a post-mortem tweak of former detractors, but that’s not Abloh’s style. A brand rep described it as a playful endorsement of doing your own thing.

'Black Widow' Director Teases Upcoming Sequel Without Scarlett Johansson's Character

Circles have been a recurring motif at Off-White, but these are more orderly than the meteors that bit holes into OW sportswear and accessories in recent seasons. They also appear as closures on men’s jackets made from what looks like bubble wrap, and as cut-outs on women’s knitwear. Abloh is benefiting from larger trends, such as the Instagram-driven return of logos, hip-hop’s ascendancy to be the dominant form of American popular music, and the rise of mass-produced “algorithmic” style — but he’s also spurring them, and capitalizing on them more robustly and quickly than anyone else. Off–White is one of the world’s most popular luxury brands— and its predominant aesthetic appears to be irony. Express will close 95 name brand stores along with all 12 UpWest retail locations (AP Photo/Andrew ... [+] Harnik).

Ib Kamara Is the New Art and Image Director at Off-White - Vogue

Ib Kamara Is the New Art and Image Director at Off-White.

Posted: Sat, 30 Apr 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Collaborations

Who is Ib Kamara, the new Off-White art director to fill Virgil Abloh's shoes? - The National

Who is Ib Kamara, the new Off-White art director to fill Virgil Abloh's shoes?.

Posted: Sun, 08 May 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The company’s losses mounted through last year, and by October of 2023, Express had tripled their losses compared to 2022. The company ended year-to-date in October 2023 with over $154 million in losses for 39 weeks. The company sales at that time were down 5.6% while inventory was up 32%. Gross Margins dropped from 30% in 2022 to 21.5% through October 2023. The company has not filed its fourth quarter and full-year annual financials which usually come out in March or April. Instead, the company has filed for bankruptcy protection and will continue its operations under debtor in possession status which means the company can continue its normal operations of business with the protection of the courts to help the company restructure its financial position.

The Success of Off–White Is Anything But Ironic

It is also fair to say that whether Off-White’s designs are rip-offs will cease to be a very interesting question, as we sit back and watch more and more youth-craving fashion brands attempt to copy everything else about it. In this way, Dapper Dan first popularized the notion of luxury streetwear. Almost two decades later, Virgil Abloh founded Off–White, a luxury brand that catapulted streetwear into the realm of high fashion that Dapper Dan once sought to emulate. Since its founding in 2013, Off–White has amassed popularity at an almost exponential rate.

Designed alongside AMO.

Abloh has said it takes him 10 minutes to come up with many of his designs. He’s also said he wants to help Apple design the next iPhone. His aesthetic interests are simplicity and efficiency, his commercial interests are what could be called economically avant-garde — dramatic, cartoonish, garish markups of basic items marketed primarily to kids, by celebrities, turning unattainability into a sport and pastime. When he introduced Off-White’s “For All” diffusion line, it included four T-shirts and four hoodies that could only be purchased in brick-and-mortar stores in major cities, ranging in price from $95 to $170. Things like “influence” and importance are watery concepts.

The designer decided to work with Ikea last October, unveiling the first images of the interior design collection on his Instagram, including an oriental rug in navy blue with white detailing and “Keep Off” written across it. The rest of the pieces from this exclusive collaboration will be revealed later this year - stay tuned. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

It seems dumb at first glance, and then you end up thinking about the humor in it, and then you end up thinking about society and the rules we live in, and capitalism and norms and wherever that leads you. Because it’s so simple and approachable, a lot of streetwear kids may think it’s deeper than it really is. Similar to Rick and Morty, it makes people feel smart, but is it really saying something about capitalism and society that already hasn’t been said?

An insight into the brand’s growing popularity and an argument for why it may be warranted

But it’s easy to see that the Milan-based fashion brand Off-White has 5.4 million Instagram followers and that founder Virgil Abloh has 3.1 million. It’s easy to see that Rihanna wears these clothes, and that the Nike Air Prestos designed by Abloh and released this summer were mentioned more than 250,000 times on social media and were so hard to buy that they are now available on resale apps at markups of around 450 percent. It is an undeniable tragedy that Abloh wasn’t able to see Off-White break into the most historic and elite and French sartorial category. Abloh was always more enamored with streetwear’s populist possibilities than with its aesthetics, and Off-White was at its core a populist project, a manifesto for how to infiltrate an industry that never really wanted to claim people like him. In his quest to build Off-White into a respected luxury house, couture was Abloh’s final challenge. Last year, LVMH took a 60% stake in Off-White, which meant Abloh had more than one of the top design jobs at the Vuitton parent company.

That was the year that Virgil Abloh — the Illinois-raised then-22-year-old son of two Ghanaian immigrants (his mother was a seamstress) — graduated from the civil engineering program at the University of Wisconsin Madison. It was also the year Abloh met Kanye West and started designing his merchandise and album art.

Much as one might follow an ocean-crossing low-pressure system on radar, we tracked Abloh on one of his recent (and frequent) loops around the Earth. On Monday night, Off-White held its first show since Abloh’s death at the age of 41 in late November. The Fall-Winter 2022 collection is reportedly the final one Abloh oversaw for the brand, and though the question of who—or what group of people—might take over the brand going forward remains unanswered, the presentation provided a strong indication of what Off-White will look like in the post-Abloh era. Off-White is the hottest brand in the world, according to the quarterly ranking released by the fashion and e-commerce platform Lyst.