Transcript for:
Exploring Virgil Abloh's Creative Legacy

All right. Like I said, this is what stardom looks like. So it's a fantastic and a great pleasure to introduce Virgil Abloh tonight. Virgil is, as you all know, a Chicago-based designer, a long-time creative consultant. to Kanye West and the founder of the award-winning luxury fashion label Off-White.

But also, I should say, in the spirit of much of what we believe here at GSAP about architectural education and its potential for growth, I would like to thank the board of directors for their support. for an expanded and multifaceted creative practice, Virgil is also an architect. He received his Masters of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and his undergraduate in civil engineering at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. In many ways, Virgil embodies the sense of architecture and design as synthetic practices.

With many more ingredients to work from today, architects and designers as we have seen here with many many of the examples of emerging practices these past few years are also actively designing their practices as multiple. In the case of Virgil, he's a DJ, a fashion designer, a creative director, an architect, in a way the ultimate synthesizer, absorbing ideas and influences and emerging as a leading voice of now. And so it's not a coincidence that Virgil, Abloh and Michael Rock not only intersected but forged a strong connection. Virgil and Michael met at IIT while Michael and his practice two by four were working on the campus center with OMA.

Virgil then introduced Michael to Kanye West in 2010 and they have since collaborated on a number of projects including Kanye's second fashion show in Paris, the multiple screen experience Cruel Summer at the Cannes Film Festival and early concepts for the Yeezus tours as well as the design of the space for the launch of the Yeezy fashion line. Jeezy. See, deans are not cool.

Sorry. And so it was Michael's suggestion to invite Virgil tonight, and I wanted to thank Michael especially for that. Much like Virgil, Michael is also a seminal figure in our expanded field, an incredible creative thinker, critic, and maker who has pushed about... boundaries of graphic design and design thinking and making by embodying the possibility of a lived creative practice. You could say that Michael is a designer of everything, really, if you consider his groundbreaking collaboration with his partners at 2x4, Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout, and all that it has and continues to produce in terms of content, identity, surfaces, objects, environments, architecture, visual access, texture, intelligence, and beauty.

But also, and maybe more importantly for our... time, Michael has brought his sizzling critique to visual representation and images, what they mean, how they're constructed, what they are. And so it's both as an amazing eye, but also as a thoughtful and uniquely knowledgeable critic and a brilliant writer that Michael has most recently reinvented Instagram as a medium for incredible commentary in this time of uncertainty. And so if you haven't yet followed Michael... on Instagram you should.

Michael has taught in many schools, but again, more importantly, has been with us at GSAP for 10 years. And so I want to welcome Michael to introduce Virgil and then respond to his presentation. Welcome, Michael.

Thank you. This is the response to Virgil's talk, which at GSAP means I'm going to introduce him. It's very gratifying to see so many people here tonight for what promises to be a not very conventional architectural lecture. And it's a really great pleasure for me personally because I've been trying to get Virgil to Columbia for the last two or three years. And the fact that we're both actually here together is given the complexity of his.

travels a kind of miracle, so I'm excited as you are to see what he's been up to. My introduction to Virgil was ironically first through a building. As I'm sure he will mention, he was a graduate architecture student at the Illinois Institute of Technology and thus exposed on a daily basis to the work our studio 2x4 had done with OMA on the McCormick Tribune Campus Center there.

That project was one of the first spatial designs that we had actually managed to get beyond the competition phase and was an essential turning point for our practice. IIT was an early attempt at this integration between architecture and design and still, I think, one of our most irrationally interesting projects. So about a decade after the Campus Center opened at IIT, I got an email out of the blue from someone with this amazing-sounding name.

Asking me if I would take a meeting about something called Danda. Well, Danda had the sound of one of those Bond villain organizations that exist in artificial islands in some ocean somewhere. It was, in fact, I learned, a kind of secret cabal that manages all the dreams and aspirations of Virgil's sometimes boss and perpetual collaborator, a music artist who remained unnamed here. Danda was started with very modest aspirations. The original plan was captured in a diagram that listed potential areas to conquer.

Lifestyle, home, consumer finance, medical research, trademarks and patents, transportation, management, protective services, marketing, internet, hospitality, wellness, learning, and alternative sources of energy. So clearly there was no lack of ambition. The opportunities were wide open. And that initial phone call inaugurated several years of intense projects that resulted in a fashion show, an indoor go-kart racing track in a grand Parisian warehouse, a film shoot on top of a massive sand dune south of Doha, a multi-screen movie theater on the waterfront at Cannes, a stripped-down fashion show in a massive illuminated ceiling in a Manhattan studio, temporary exhibition spaces, portable pop-up concert venues, and a dumpster full of wild speculations. To be perfectly honest, working with Danda was not easy.

In the high-octane world of global celebrity, I quickly learned there are lots of voices, opinions, creative collaborators, producers, entourage, agents, hangers-ons, etc. Nothing quite prepares you for the experience of true collective creative chaos. But what I quickly learned was there was really only two voices that mattered.

the guy at the top and Virgil, because Virgil has an amazing ability to maintain a sense of calm and purpose at the center of a hurricane. He has a vision, and he's sticking with it. I think what gives Virgil this fortitude in the face of cacophony is architecture.

Architecture gave him a way to buttress his ideas to withstand constant attempts to overthrow them. A few years back, I interviewed him for a publication, and I asked him, when he first went to IIT, If he really ever imagined making architecture, and he said, I don't think I ever really thought I would practice architecture. I was there to learn how to design. I like the idea of analyzing a program, thinking of a solution, being able to defend it.

But I think I always had a sense of how to internalize that method and apply it somewhere else. That somewhere else is remarkably fluid, eclectic, shape-shifting. The really compelling part of his practice is the freedom from traditional ideas of what a practice is, what it requires to be sustained, and what it needs to achieve to be successful. This is a kind of architecture freed from constraint.

Part of this freedom, I think, comes from his day job of designing spectacle. The set for a huge arena show is a special kind of scenography. It's only on for 120 minutes and then packed into a caravan of semi-trucks and sent to the next city 500 miles away. A music set is a type of total artwork, space, light, sound, heat, all composed to create effect. And it's this affective quality and its essential insubstantiality that makes it liberating.

Even gravity can be defied for a couple of hours. Another influence is his work as a DJ, because here again, the designer is assembling an environment of prefabricated elements to create total immersion, mood, pace, impression. The designer and the audience are tightly interwoven and the plan for the night shifts from moment to moment based on constant micro readings of the crowd. That highly tuned responsiveness is at the heart of so many of the projects that Virgil will show tonight. But it's impossible to limit his body of work to the ephemerality of the event or a DJ set.

It's been fascinating and inspirational for me to watch Virgil as he's developed his own body of work, his own business model, and his own brand. Because Virgil, as much as anyone working today, operates at this intersection between architecture, fashion, and branding. When he was at IIT, he was supplementing his studio work by making graphic T-shirts, the ultimate branded merchandise, on the side.

Architecture supplied an understanding of process and the way that something gets built, but his deep, instinctive knowledge of branding, mixed with his innate feeling for his audience, also gives him insight into the way something core is communicated. The thing that links architecture and branding is this quest for phenomenological coherence, the creation of unified experiences regardless of medium. Brand is often thought of something which is after the fact, applied to existing set of conditions to superimpose order. But what Virgil understood early on was that brand was actually both a set of policies to direct production and a methodology to assure consistently coherent results. So the development of his brand Off-White reversed the conventional process, wherein you make something, then attempt to brand it.

Off-White started first as a brand, an idea that could be extended across multiple platforms. The ascendancy of Off-White has been thrilling because Virgil simply occupies the space he wants to exploit without attempting to define it. In an era where it's somehow banal to be just an architect or just a graphic designer, Virgil is the ultimate multi-hyphenate. He's architect.

musician, scenographer, fashion designer, video artist, creative director, futurist. He can pull that off because he maintains an essential core set of values to which he constantly returns. When you touch on so many different creative activities, none of them can be really seen as central.

To be off, then, is a kind of working philosophy. It means off track, off tune, off message, off balance, off kilter. At the heart of it all, To be off-white is to be off-center, and Virgil proves over and over again we should forget the center. The edge is where the action is.

Thank you. It's a great pleasure to introduce Virgil Adler. Thank you. Okay.

Let me go back to my notes, because as Michael Rock was speaking, I realized I needed to reinvent my whole presentation. Yeah, that was intense, and thank you for that. Literally, I was rewriting it as he was speaking, because a lot of the things that you've sort of gleaned from me just making stuff and posting them on Instagram is... My true intention.

So for starters, I'm super excited about this platform like none other. A, because I'm speaking to students, architecture students. Like this, lectures like this is where I formulated my whole plan. And for me... About being a modern designer or creative, I distinctly feel like this generation, our generation, is the first one where we can like unveil the mask, give the kids the tools, let them create, and then we'll have a better existence afterwards.

So that's my overarching like post the unfinished product because it's going to inspire some kid to do something afterwards. So this talk, in a lot of ways, is more gratifying before it even starts than anything that I've ever made because... All the stuff that I just made in sort of like a free form was only to sort of validate one concept. So in the midst of Michael talking, when I just revamped this whole thing, I just made up a sentence that's called, this is the new title of the talk, Young Architects Can Change the World by Not Building Buildings. You know, the world is a crazy place.

Literally the world is a crazy place. You know, 2017 is either a renaissance or it's Armageddon. So, in classic off-white fashion, believe both. And then make a decision on like what the mullion should be or what the graphic for the, you know, whatever you're designing is. So, for starters, it's an interesting bullet point.

You know, I guess I'm an architect. But not guess, I take it with great pride. When someone asks me if I'm a fashion designer, that term doesn't sit well with me because I feel like I'm not. You know, I just think.

And the reason why the projects scale across different platforms is because the idea of putting things in a box just doesn't work for me. It worked for a generation for a type of person that was supposed to be where they are. And I think, you know, my story starts from immigrant parents from Ghana and West Africa. Unlike the will of my dad making it to America, was I afforded the range of options opposite from a third world country.

Like when you go back home, you jump over an open gutter. That sensibility of reality realizes that just by nature of where you were born gives you your access point to make things or think things and the luxuries of the world. So for me...

That is at the source of the DNA of my work. Another critical moment, which I'm sure that kids here can relate to, is day one of architecture school. I walked in, my professor, who will remain unnamed, but was just like a cruel individual, which is a classic, like, older generation to younger generation move that I've recently felt again, was deflate youth and deflate young energy.

right off the bat. You know, like, and it's a good trick. You know, it works.

It works, like, in the military, you know, like boot camp. It works. It's like if you've spent a number of years on a specific spot, like, the person who's eventually going to sort of occupy that space at least normalize them so then you can build up their esteem. But my experience was exactly what Michael referenced was, you know, day one, first exercise, like... He hit us with a fact that was like, hey, only like 3% of you are actually going to build buildings.

And I was like, touche, I didn't come here to learn how to build buildings. So these next three years of getting a graduate degree are going to be a lot more fun for me than everyone else in my class that was like seeking after, you know, a certain acceptance from this brutal field called architecture. So with that, that's sort of like the vibe.

I made all these slides. This is totally unrehearsed, and I'm just going to wing it. So with that, everything in quotes, black, gray, white, you know, why off white?

Another through line that I'm hopefully going to be able to pull off by the end of this is give you all the cheat codes, right? Like, I'm going to try to give you the cliff notes so that everyone out of here can just make their own version. Like there's a slide that's coming up that says like be the 17 year old version of yourself.

Once you do that then all of our ideas won't look the same. So your brand shouldn't look be called like off blue or something. Just make whatever your favorite color was.

But so key jewel number one, go back a slide if you can't it's all good, is irony is a tool for modern creativity. There's a reason why we probably all look at like 60 memes a day. You know, that was an invention of humor. One of my mentors, Peter Saville, a designer who did, like, all the Joy Division covers, I asked him, because I felt like, you know, I'm sort of, like, however many years into this, and I was like, first conversation, I was like, I feel kind of cheap, right?

So if you've studied the Bauhaus, if you've studied Margiela, if you've studied graphic design, and then you and your friends make a fake... DJ group call it Ben Trill put hashtags and drippy fonts on everything and you sell more shirts than you ever had in your life versus the ones that were like the perfectly kerned Helvetica font that said something more serious to like some you know art movement those sell less through that process I was like start and stop that's why Ben Trill ended for me I was like I can't prolificate this idea of bad design but the only thing with that modern culture thrives off the ironic So that's, put that in your notes. I've always wanted to say that.

But literally, like, humor, but taking that a step further, whether you're building or whether you're making a graphic tee or whether you're making a proposal, humor is a entry point for humanity. I think it's essential in modern ideas in the creative space. Like, the world is a different place, so our art and creativity should respond to that. Black, white, gray is the explanation of the brand Off-White.

So for me, classically trained in school or whatever the design practice is, you have to be either this or that. So either it's black or white. I'm a black kid. I identify with white kids. Am I either?

Maybe I'm somewhere in between, but Off-White got created with the idea that gray doesn't define. the middle of those two things, two absolutes. So the construct of Off-White is this, it's that at all times, every Instagram post, every invite for a flyer, every store that I open is juxtaposing two things that are either dissimilar or exactly, like, very much alike. So that's the organizing structure on how I think of, is a design finished or not, is not the absolutes of two things, but the in-between and... making that definition.

So that's the summation of... Where I came up with the name, the name Off-White feels wrong, so that felt right. You know, it felt like a blank canvas that I could defer a meaning onto. And this is early to establish, it's like I didn't make Off-White to sort of build a clothing brand.

Like, it's not a brand. That's another, like, highlight. It's a faux luxury product.

It's a playground that I can build buildings, ironically, that I can make t-shirts, that I can do shows. I can... Sort of make something that moves culturally without it being confined to four walls.

So that's off-weight. That's the meaning. The next slide is the 17-year-old version of herself.

So at this juncture, it's like another design trick that I've sort of had to rise to. It's like we're all born out of thin air. How do you know what your next step is going to be? Your next step is going to be someone's work that you identify with.

and that's your organizing. That's the only way you know if the font is right or not. It's like, did your design idol think the same way?

Or when you're designing a facade or you're thinking about the organizing structure of like a program, whoever you've identified with leading up to then, that is in your back pocket. It's in your DNA. And until the moment that I realized that, I was like, wait, of my idols, They're reinterpreting the 17-year-old version of themselves.

That's a figurative saying for that moment that you don't know, but you just have ambition. You make decisions at 17. You wouldn't be here. You could have made the wrong decision or the right one, and that landed you wherever you're at now.

So that, mixed with your starting point, is going to give you your DNA. The point where we all, all our brands look different or all our buildings look different. They look unique to us.

So for the next slide, this is a statement from Margiela. So throughout this talk, I'm going to hope to like use a few key points from different genres of design to sort of prove my point is that ultimately our young generation of designers with the ambition to build buildings. and make things in the world that it's valid.

You can imagine a person like me, all the while every project I put out, every Instagram post that I put out, I don't know that I'm a designer, because I feel like I'm not, I don't look like what a designer is supposed to look like, I don't come from where I'm supposed to come from, but that little like critique on my shoulder is that I have to prove that this is design, I have to prove that this is art. I have to prove that it's valid. So listen to that voice, but then find other creatives to pin yours on it.

And so for me, if you read this, like, very closely, it's Margiela explaining, you know, like, the basics. So it's like, what is a color? An intensity, a temperature, a clash, a harmony. Or if you skip down to what is clothing? The final layer.

Or what is fashion? A series of propositions. Like, there's a construct. For me, Margiela is as valid as, you know, Rem, in a way where the idea of clothing is only limited to, like, your intentions for it.

So he made an expression of clothing that wasn't simply about fashion, in quotes. It was more to the order about using that medium as an expression. So in my work, Off-White is...

It's the kids on Prince and Mercer. It's the kids that didn't go to fashion school. It's the kids that found value in a screen-printed T-shirt, but it's rooted all the way to Dogtown and Z-Boys, which is called streetwear, that isn't American.

It's a genre of fashion that's rooted in printing on blank garments. Adding a brand to a garment means something. Also, hand-stitching a couture garment means something.

At the essence of both those realms of thinking, like what's high fashion, what's low fashion, slash streetwear, there still can be art in both of those. So for me, without having Margiela to base, like he's a canon of my sort of art school, without having that construct and his legacy, could I not prove the point that Off-White is a valid concept? So moving to the next slide.

A thing that I tell like inspiring... Current creators, there's like a general, like a layer of complacency amongst us. It's so easy to be a critic, you know. It's easier to be a critic than to produce work. The only way to get to the end means is like start your domino effect, which is basically put out bad work.

So I, for one of them, not a perfectionist, and it's such a gratifying concept. Like I have these Nike shoes on that I made that I really like, and the swoosh is falling off, and I like them even more. So, but for me, you'll see through the next slide, a project that was very pivotal is this film that I had made, if you go back.

and hit play. It was an idea called Pyrex Vision. So at this point I might have been like creative directing with Kanye for like eight, six, eight years.

This was literally like the first piece of art or any concept that I decided on anything myself. Like 100% like, what's my favorite color? What's the, what do I want to see? The after effect of this like piece was, you know, for me Off-White doesn't exist without this, but just in context, and I'll always make a cultural reference, this is like the era when Baria and ASAP Rock make it down to the Rock Owens store with palace on.

You know, I saw this cultural moment happening in the streets that we were all participating in, and I felt like something needed to be created to mark that. So this is a 10-minute... film that I made to be boring.

The artist in the background who helped me shoot this is Jim Joe. He's a, to me, he's my Basquiat. You know, he's a particular, he uses words and phrases in a particular way that are part of his artist statement.

And he has no identity. You know, he's two different people. He's like a grad art school student that's like on the rise. And that is an indication of creating a cultural sphere. This is my artwork, but it's made by the personalities that are amongst it.

And so this was only meant to be for the film. Pyrex, the brand, lo and behold, wasn't made... to be a clothing line that's why it stopped like i would have never imagine if i was up here and i was like my name my clothing brand is tyrex vision there's not that much taste in that but this is the domino effect for me So I want everyone who has ambition to find the domino effect, you know, create the project that's latent with Intention and then see what happens after it the last thing on this is the the branding on the clothes is a unique point of view it's basically in like Pop impoverished black areas of the world or the US mainly Chicago There's like an adage that the only way to make it out is either be as good as Michael Jordan, like a star basketball player, or sell drugs. So the reference that seemingly is arbitrary is what the back of the garment says. So it's like Pyrex is the utensil to cook crack.

And Jordan 23 is obviously the sort of epitome of basketball. So it's a key bullet point in my work is that not to alienate by being... so far advanced that the demographic can't understand it. I think it's easy to make work that is very intellectual.

This is the era of irony. This is the era of democracy in design. I think us as designers have a larger duty to sort of make the conversation more holistic.

You know, look at the world we're living, look at the first 30 days that have existed of this new version of 2017. It's not. not us sort of designing for ourselves. And that's where my phrase of, like, let's not build buildings. Let's look for outlets. So we can go to the next slide, which is, you know, the term street wear.

And here I can speak about everything in quotes. It's like... everything being in quotes like basically allows me to off-white a situation because it's I'm talking about the term but then I'm talking about the sort of like tongue-in-cheek idea of other people using that term so streetwear as it's used is like it's how a generation can understand why a printed t-shirt is valid I, on the other hand, I think of that term streetwear as like a name for a new art movement that is seemingly undefined. So that's my goal is to define it. I often liken it to the term disco.

Like when disco was invented, or it was the sign of the times, it was jazzy, it had a feel to it, it felt like it was valid. But then as that term ages, it sort of has like a non-lasting sort of energy to it. And so I think Streetwear is basically a code name for people without resources creating to make something that resonates to their demographic and not necessarily the one above it. So it's a mainstay in my work. I used to run from the term, but since it got used in reference to my work, I've embraced it because I want to define it.

So the next slide. It's generational design. I think it's also important to note that with social media, with this idea of our work sort of spreading out, we're all designing it together.

This universe is no longer the singularity of like one great mind thinking of something that doesn't exist. Like our generation is thumbs upping and thumbs downing rock t-shirts just the same way, you know, Goyard, the brand, just the same way as... fashion in general.

So it brings to question a lot of new ideas on ownership and millennials sort of concept of what's new. And it also challenges the demographic above ours to say, hey, that's mine. You can't use that. I think there's a tremendous amount of freedom right now to be free and to design a better world. So it's important to think about the interconnectedness between designers and thinkers instead of trying to find a...

space that you can occupy by yourself. The next, you can go back here, we killed that. Of the body of work that I worked on that I feel like helped me like prove this point of you know, architects not focusing on building buildings, but making things, is this album here, Yeezus.

Again, talking to Peter Saville, who's basically 30 years different, he designed those Joy Division covers. And through our conversations, since we're 30 years apart, we had the epiphany that we accidentally designed the Coca-Cola can. In our most infant eras of design, straight out of school basically, being able to brand content that shapes a generation is not a small thing. It's actually... Very hard.

So for an artist like Kanye West, which, you know, raised a generation based on art and music and being progressive, me having that ability to be able to work on those projects was, you know, insane, and I'm forever grateful for that. But this piece here, often him and I both say, was like, we kind of like outdid ourselves in a way. Like we weren't supposed to come up with something this clean. Like something happened, we don't know what it was, but we both like looked at it in the end and we're like, damn, like it's as if we went to design school, you know, like or whatever.

Like what, like did, you know, like did Dieter Rams like come visit us in a dream and we finally like did something good? But it's metaphorical as a way it's actual. Like think about the era that when this came out, you know, it's two hip hop kids. that are obsessed with design and progressing forward. Of course, this cover didn't look like this.

It had a million iterations. But for us, it represented the death of a CD. This might be, we thought, like, this might be the last time someone ever even sees this. It's an open casket for a format of music that we were raised off of that'll never be seen.

What is the orange sticker? Like, what are the 30 versions of the orange sticker that came out? The cover looked different when we released it than when we... had a two-hour conversation about how the stickers should just be clean. So this was an insane moment to feeling like a designer, but it's also, it's not the feedback from your, it wasn't the feedback from an industry, it was the feedback to yourself, that there was a purity, there's layers to it.

You know, great design doesn't, it's not one note, and that's where streetwear gets its, like, gets its, its bad. connotation. It's that there has to be layers underneath it and it has to be abstracted and has to represent some larger idea.

So until this moment, you know, this is like a Pyrex moment for me and for, I feel like, our design culture. Moving to the next. Again, I kind of touched on it, but you know, Democratic Duty just came from a panel speaking about diversity.

We feel like we owe something to current culture, so just respond to it. You know, everyone do it in your own way. My idea is to use Off-White as like a, it's a theory about if kids on Prince and Mercer, just figuratively the kids that hang out in front of Supreme or whatever, If they see someone do it, then they'll be able to do it too.

You know, that our generation is based on sort of like, you know, like a skateboarding YouTube. So if a kid does like a trick that's never been done before, so like a, you know, the first kickflip, had that been sort of videoed, within 24 hours, a kid's, six kids all over the world could do it just because they've seen it. You know, that is a huge realization of our modern world. is that our influence amongst each other is at a heightened experience now, and I feel like that's central to my work. It has to be open source in a way.

It's pointless if it's about me. It's more to a generation so that it looks different. You can move to the next. So this project here is... You know, my guilt for being in architecture and not building buildings but having very specific reference points.

So Mies van der Rohe is like the beginning and end for me just because it's so emotional, the work. You know, the day that I walked into Crown Hall, it's the building that he designed to study architecture in, changed me forever because, A, I didn't know that that was an important building, but I walked in, yeah, I was like, okay, where's the architecture building? You know, walk in and then like out of breath, you know, like not by a, not by literally being out of breath. It was that the design itself transplanted me and had an emotional effect.

So it's, yeah, that's humor. So it's with Off-White that I'm able to do my sort of reverse education trick, which is my reference points. I'm using clothing, graphic design, music to sort of highlight the attention on great designers and great moments in architecture that wouldn't spread. It's that kickflip that ends up six kids doing the trick all over the world.

It's like my idea of building buildings is to educate and shine light on great works of architecture while creating things that are in response to that atmosphere. So I've long since You know, every year of Off-White, I do, I visit one of my reference points as architecture buildings, and I make a book. All these books, these images have never been seen yet. The concept behind it was, in large part, it's about race. In large part, it's about what's the, what's your, who would have lived here, you know?

Like, that's what's great about Off-White, the project. It's like... There's no medium, so I'm making this film that's like trying to have a dialogue with me's, but also have a dialogue with the kids on Prince and Mercer, the kids outside of Supreme, to say like, you know, like what are these clothes, what story are they telling? I think that fashion can lose its strength when it doesn't mean anything behind it. So the only way for me to add meaning is to do these projects, just so that the content exists.

I haven't released it. I don't know if it's going to be financially viable or was it worth that for like everyone's flight out here, but it doesn't matter. I think it's my democratic duty as a designer to sort of draw links between current culture and important moments in design.

So each project is filmed, they're plates, so the camera doesn't move, actions happen in them, there's photos, but that's what I'm really happy about. So the next slide. In large part, you know, abstraction again.

Have a loaded message. I feel like there's enough complacency and hollowness in design. There's a lot of just gestures made to make gestures. The idea, which I won't like delve all the way into, is the messaging on my clothing.

It's very distinct, you know. Oh yeah, no, I'm giving up all tricks. I'll give it up.

I'm not holding anything. Like the brand name's Off-White, on the back of the shirt it says white. What's wrong with the word white? Is there anything? There's nothing.

It's public opinion, or it's your own... It's your own ideas embedded on a word, which is actually just a color, which sometimes isn't even written in white. It's written in black or it's red.

You know, that to me was like I was like high fiving myself. I was like I made art, you know, but that was also juvenile. That was in the early phase.

That was like that's that's what I wanted out of the back. But then if you notice, this is the trick that I'm giving up. And this is like.

I was going to use someone's name, but I'm not going to use that because I'll get in trouble again, surely. One of my favorite fashion designers. Basically, his vintage clothes are worth an insane amount of money.

There's a rationale behind that. You know, something that meant something at a time, it'll age really well. So, Pyrex. Like, if you have that, because I stopped making it, I felt like that was cheap. So, it's not a commercial item.

To me, it's art. they didn't get made anymore. But the early pieces of Off-White, like soon it'll never say white on the back. And the design theory that I had behind that was that I'm going to move from these words and phrases that common opinion can add like different racial undertones and then as the brand evolves, like those will be discarded and then it's just eventually going to say man or woman.

Or it can say... different terms that are evolving the question in between what humans like overlay and divide themselves with all the way to just cores of humanity. So you see it in my women's wear now it's like a it's a probably badly kerned italics font that I made but I like it so it's right. It just says woman and there's something that it's not forced in that. I love the idea of Luca Sabbat.

wearing the woman crew neck from Off-White. Like, that to me is, it makes it valid, my concept, but it's that feedback loop of that fashion, trends, coolness can sort of erase prejudice. That, to me, is walking into Crown Hall losing your breath and not knowing that that building was supposed to be important.

So, you know. loaded message in disguise. That's that trick.

We can skip. This is another still from the project in Barcelona. You know, it's about photographing the sky's black. There's undertones of me wanting this to be like a spaceship that was inhabited by, you know, a different culture.

I don't know what I was on, but I like the images. Yeah, it's like a book that's coming out later. It's like about not trying to make fashion images, just trying to make images of what I was thinking when I made the clothes.

You know, it's important. Next. It's like, oh yeah, I'll use this slide or whatever. Like, I love the fact that Off-White could be questioned.

That's another thing. I love critical feedback. You know, it's important to making good work. Is Off-White Ed Hardy?

I can critique my own, you know, who knows? It might be. Ed Hardy's cool. Not like, but... I should get in trouble.

This is all going to go south very fast. But, no, it's great. It's like, what are clothes?

Like, you can't be in the conversation and not make conversation. So it's important to make. And the reason...

why it's not and why I think it's valid is because I make things and then I reinforce it. You know, like these images aren't about the clothes. It's about a people and it's about a space.

If our whole existence is basically whittled down into that square image you put on Instagram, this is what I see that should be out. You know, it's not commerce. It's an idea.

So next, you know, it's a storyline. It's forced me to think in other mediums. It's like this is one of the greatest buildings on earth. How can I add my story to it?

It's kind of like highly irrational to think that I could make something in a Mies building. But it's like, fuck it. It's go time, you know? Like, no complacency. I want to see more images.

And that's why Off-White, the idea is that it inspires other kids to do it too. That's why I'm excited about this talk, is because I'm unveiling things that don't fit on Instagram. And they'll have time. It's like...

There's so much content. Only like sacred walls like Columbia during architecture talk can you get like over intellectualized about a bad image but it's cool. Next we'll like hop into the next mint slide.

But I love it, there's like this car and there's undertones and ideas under it all, but you can go to the next. Ah, the Bible. Wait, this is a good, by a show of hands, are kids still way into REM?

REM Koolhaas? You like super fans or not really? Who's like the ill...

This is something... I'm getting back into the world of architecture. It's my first year back in a long time.

Who is like student favorite right now? Because he was mine in my whole era. Just yell some names.

Who? Oh yeah, they've been around. They've been on top for a minute. Who? Where?

Oh, sick. Still around. Oh yeah, yeah. Yes, that makes me happy. I was like, wait, I'm getting old.

But, nah, of course, like this is life changing. Michael Rock's like totally underselling it. He changed my life by like graphics on a building.

It's his fault that Off-White exists. Like, I basically didn't have enough time to wait for me to decide a building. So I just put it on a wall.

put them on clothes with the same rationale. You know, if you look at the IIT Student Center, like the glass doors open and it's like a face of me. It's like so direct. You know, Rem's detail for like at the Prada Foundation, it's like the construction orange fence that's on like the stairs.

That's street wear. You know, I'm not as intellectual as him. I probably couldn't even like hang in a conversation. But I know what my youthful approach to the world is in line with what I can glean from this text and everything that's that practice. So the domino effect is that.

But I think if we go to the next side, one of the sort of pillars that's cornerstone in my work that I would sort of like defines something distinctly is this idea of this like generic cities. You know, this gets into like. Why I travel so much?

It's like the internet is enough. You have to like go and touch different cultures. People live differently in different places in the world. They have different ideas.

There's different subcultures. Right now it's like places look the same. Like you can go to Tokyo without even going to Tokyo.

You can see the cool matcha spot in New York without even going to Chacha Matcha. Like what is... Like, what are we doing as designers to add character? All airports look the same. All clothing brands can look the same.

All coffee shops can be, you know, like... To me, in this text here, it's about designing into difference. Like, my greatest design tool, personally, is to look what that genre's doing and make it 3% to 5% different.

So, it's... It's in a way trolling, you know? But what happens when you obsess with Rem, you like love Mies van der Rohe and you've studied the Bauhaus and you have humor embedded in your work.

I think it can get to a higher place. So Rem's thought of the generic city is something that, you know, I think foretold our current atmosphere. Next.

Oh, I made a building. This I did with Family New York with Dong. Dong and Awana are doing like a, they're doing a class, right?

Who has them as professors? You guys are lucky. Your stock just went up. What's great too is like often I talk about not building anything.

Of course, I'm like that scorned architecture student from that one moment that professor told me I was never going to make anything. And I finally figured out a loophole to how to make a building, and it was through a printed t-shirt. You know, the title, the new title of this talk that I regave it, it's tongue-in-cheek with everything in Off-White. It's done to be provocative.

It's done to be, to think and to see. So, this project is great. It basically, they gave me, I don't know, it's like 2,000 square foot space.

And my... young idea was like, I don't want to do retail. I hate stores.

Stores are corny. It's a fact. Who wants to be sold anything?

It should just be cool and speak on its own. So what I did was took the first third of the space and was like, nothing can be sold here. Made it a jungle. And then in my street, this is streetwear, BTW.

Streetwear is just question asking, being provocative and trying to like. What I'm trying to do is between Supreme and Celine. That's my idea of like, you know, like chic, but like so authentically real.

And so that's what Off-White attempts to be. I talked to James so it's cool. I think Phoebe's cool with that too.

The idea is like this is streetwear element. This is my approach. So it's like all this jazz that I'm trying to spill to you that like clothing is architecture.

It's probably not like I don't think so. But when it comes to me and built spaces, my brain goes to the senses. So what happens is when you walk through the first third of the space, like it's motion-censored and it rains.

The idea is that this is Hong Kong. The things that I learned in architecture school that I found the most profound is obviously the context. So, busy Hong Kong, crazy amounts of traffic, super concrete city, everything stacked on top of each other.

How refreshing would it be if you just walked past green space that was framed? And then when you walked in there, it rained, and it wasn't raining before. And then I nerded out on the sound design, so there's a bird chirping.

in this like first third of the space. And then the next slide, the model that Dong and Oana made, crushed it. You basically get to see the second part of the space.

I was on a vibe of like a quarry. Like I wanted to juxtapose like the root of construction and the root of nature. So the walls obviously like double-purpose, use themselves as shelving, there's ways to hang and display product, all with just one gesture.

This to me is like Yeezus album packaging. Ideas, loaded message, refined, put back with purpose. So once you go to the backspace, the sound design changes to construction noise.

Never, that's it, like design done, but go to the next slide. Like, this is sort of like images of how it turns into, you know, a retail space. But to me, going back to what Rem decided, in my practice, since Off-White is mine 100%, that this was my first store, but it made me think.

And then I thought about, what do stores look like in the rest of the world? And I was like, why do all McDonald's look the same? Why do all Starbucks look the same? Why does all luxury brands, you know, look the same?

And I thought, each store... should be completely different, never duplicating one concept. So this is like filled my first question and first bullet point was that I don't want stores.

Retail and commerce is not funny. There's no there's nothing modern about that. You should buy something if it speaks to you. Otherwise, you should go for the experience.

So the next slide we can like this is video from my next store. that I had done in Tokyo. Again, I hate stories, you know the spiel by now.

First space that I had found was weird, and Dong and Awana and I couldn't figure it out, and it was like super by chance. This other space that was twice as big, it looked like an office, and we were still attempting to make some cool gesture. We were looking at Judd furniture, which we fan out about. We're like, what would that look like if the whole thing was a cubicle? But it just looked like an office, so I was like, bingo.

We're not even going to call it a flagship. It's not even a store whatsoever. It's an office called Something and Associates.

And I was like, literally, I was like, Post-it notes, water cooler. This like mid-century chair. And I was like, what more does someone who's traveling these generic cities want?

Like, especially if you're in Tokyo and you're like, your phone bill is too high. So you're like cruising on airplane mode. You just want Wi-Fi. You know, you want to find where you're going.

I was like, that is what the hierarchy of the space is going to be. The retail is going to be pushed away. And the moment that we figured out those doors in the back, which are actually like dressing rooms.

But if we just put like... bathroom signs on them, that they totally reoriented the space. That's design to me.

That's this modern version of design that I'm trying to prove. So what I'm showing you guys is a through line, but trying to express that all the way down to the branding of a bathroom that's really a changing room. You know, the water cooler, the everything in quotes, like the plastic cups. So it says plastic cup on the plastic cup. People steal them all the time.

It's fine, you know. But to me, it's another cool thing. It's like, what's better than making a store that's not a store? There's stuff that you can steal. So, yeah, and then, of course, like, I nerded out super with the ticker.

Like, we had it before, and it took months to get from somewhere in Asia, and I was like... This is the Off-White stamp. The same reason why there's diagonal... I'll get to the diagonal lines in a bit, but the construction belt that I took from a photo outside the Americano, 27th and 10th, becoming one of the biggest items that I've ever made, was just an iPhone photo of a tie-down on an industrial truck. And I just re-Photoshopped the words, found the hardware the same.

It's the same reason why this ticker's here. So the ticker, which is like the store to me, it's... Link to the internet, it's like the real Tokyo stock exchange. And this gives us this feeling of like, buy. Ironically, I don't want to sell anything.

I was like, it just adds a cool energy to the space, and it's a non-traditional tool to give this whole place an identity. So the staff there, they have something in associate, like full office supplies, the branding. It's specific to there in the world, and so now I have two stores. each with their own identity, each with a reason to go visit, super in response to generic cities. So we can go to the next.

Modernism, you guys know what that is. But that's like, it's a funny thing. So I think about my architecture school time, and often I know when I talk to Michael Rock or someone that's like a pro, I'm probably like reinterpreting these classic terms wrong, but what I got out of it was that...

You know, like international style. So post-industrial revolution, Mies is like glass and steel. Like how can I make a skyscraper that's equally at home in Chicago, as Shanghai, as London.

It's like I can resolve it all into one, you know. And for me that's how I think of modernism. It's like what's this resolution and how can it work in this international sort of scape.

And obviously like in this post-Trump vibe of what these lines in the sand mean. They're literally lines in the sand and because if you're on this side or that side, prejudice and everything else can come with it. Design is the only thing that I think can solve that now. So for me, what is branding? What is an iconography that works in Tokyo, that works in Chicago, that works in Paris, that works in London?

And let me use that. So the next slide, I think, are stripes on the street. Yeah, sick.

Didn't rehearse and knew that was there. But the idea that it's not by accident, you know, that these are international symbols that communicate things while people speak different languages. I honestly came up with the diagonal lines for Off-White by crossing out the Pyrex 23, because, like, after that idea, then there was, like, a million brands with, like, names and numbers on the back.

So that, you know... context forced me to proceed. But this idea, what I resolved here, was just purely like, you know, the idea to brand something. And I tried to come up with a monogram.

The only problem when you try to design a monogram is that in two seconds,.2 seconds, it looks like Louis Vuitton. It's like the hardest design trick in the, I'm convinced. Designing a monogram that looks that doesn't look like a brand, it's like polka dots, it's like Comme des Garcons.

Some geometric thing, it's like Goyard. It's a repeating pattern that no one else thought of. I was like, I figured out.

The repeating pattern that everyone thought of, no one used. It's this. So the next slide, you know, it's like this is weirdo design kid that sits on my laptop.

Like the type of things that I think of. But the next, you know, even like the next slide. Like, which is like, again, everything in quotes.

My rationale was like, everyone uses Instagram, everyone uses comments. Like, in the keyboard, everyone has commas. If you overuse them, that becomes my brand.

Or if I put a trademark symbol on a rectangle, then all of a sudden, I've just used something in plain sight, and I'll get to it in my sort of art context. But I'm trying to use ready-made things to make people see them. And so when people send me these images, it's like that's the feedback loop. It's like you don't have to consume off-white. If you can just draw the link between the work that I'm doing and trying to use these ready-made construction things to articulate an idea, then that's half the battle.

I often think about my background being, you know, the torturous years of five years of engineering calculus classes and all that jazz, and then getting to the safe haven of architecture. After like humanities class that learned about Caravaggio, which is what Pyrex was about, I realized that my design aesthetic is one part freezing. the construction process.

You know, I love how an engineer or construction worker's goal is to, like, trash and make a site, you know, make the building stand up, and then the architecture goal is to sort of make it look like there's nothing under there, you know, make, to hide everything. And, of course, that tension gave me my design aesthetic. So, all things construction are sort of rooted in that.

So, the next slide. You can breathe through, but obviously you've seen it before. We're talking about architecture.

This is, literally, this is architecture in quotes. Next. Next slide. Oh, yeah, another building that I made with Dong and Awana.

My favorite one. I always say that about everything, but... This was like a temporary showroom. And I was asked to do it.

We had like three weeks, you know, like no time whatsoever. And I just hate offensive architecture, you know, like a beautiful city like Milan. Like what could you possibly put in this space that I have like that pays respect? And obviously our idea was to reflect that. So, you know, like standing feet away from it, you couldn't even see it.

You can go to the next slide. And it's... It's just a way to sort of define space that's off-white.

And like these are things that I never even get to speak of because the collections move so fast. This is the stuff that I care about. What I love about this, it doesn't look like Ed Hardy.

Or, I'm cool with that, but a critique of this brand couldn't be as long-winded as it is if it was just based on, oh, he just took the lines from the street. You know, these walls that we're speaking in are when I can intellectualize. the hours and hours of thinking that goes behind my work into a built form that you know serves its purpose.

So super love the space, the next images, you know what it looked like at night, this pristine box, then the next my favorite nothing just ends there I have to be streetwear somewhere. So it's like phrases that this is where This is like, at the end of the day, this is my showroom. So I was like, this space isn't done, it's too refined. It's not, it doesn't have my thumbprint on it. And what I've joked about, and what you'll see later, I'm literally trying to like re, I'm trying to, it's a play on words, but I'm trying to have my signature be Helvetica.

Like if I could actually write in Helvetica, which I'm going to try to learn how to do. That's my, but as a figurative saying, that's, I've taken something that's obviously existing, that obviously means something, but my repetitive use of it can make my signature gesture. Then it becomes about the phrase, you know, then it becomes about the messaging, then it becomes about the space.

So buy now, cry later is the first message that buyers see when they walk into my showroom to buy off white. You know, it just, again, it's like, it's a way to communicate that. There's something underneath these garments that are seemingly fashion.

So the next, traditional education, I love it. You know, I'm speaking to the choir literally, but, you know, it's like I'm friends with Ian Conner, or I don't even know if Luca, he's like 19 or something if he will go to college, but the importance of this curriculum that you guys are in is at its all-time high. You know, I'm on the fringe and a lot of kids that look at my work feel like they're educating themselves from my open source nature.

They want to be a creative director, they want to do graphic t-shirts, and they think that they don't need this sort of dialogue with a traditional train of thought. I think it's more important now than ever to have a basis. You know, I love the vigor of a young generation that's defining its own path, but... For me, I'm sure like every third word is about something that I learned in those like eight years of my life that I'm sort of like carrying on to the end so it's my thoughts on that. Next slide.

Another project that I made. This is the first one that I was like, hey, Villasua, I've never been, I want to like explore this space and I want to make, I want to have a dialogue again. And What's cool, it's like a 400 page book that I shot in one day. The root of it is like surrealism.

There's so many pages that I wanted it to, I wanted you to never find the visual tricks that were in it. And so this is a book that I don't know if it's going to come out. This year, next year, but the one page where you notice that I've like altered the space is this car burning underneath. Next, you can just zip through these slides, I'll pick up the pace. But, you know, storytelling, something that I learned from my friend Heron.

at Nike, but it's like, you know, like these need, all our projects need to tell stories, your own as well. Like, it gives them life. These things can't be arbitrary. They have to be rooted in some A to Z. So that's my thoughts on storytelling.

The next, next slide. Oh yeah, last. Two weeks ago in Paris, this is my fashion show. Because, like, another thing not to, like, harp on.

Like, with Off-White, I do everything. Behind its image is God. Oh, listen to this. It's good.

Before it, believers close their eyes. They do not need to go on looking at it. They know that it marks the place of meaning.

Now it belongs to no place. And you can see such an icon in your home. The images come to you.

You do not go to them. The days of pilgrimage are over. It is the image of the painting which travels now. just as the image of me standing here in this studio travels to you and appears on your screen.

The meaning of a painting no longer resides in its unique painted surface, which it is only possible to see in one place at one time. Its meaning, or a large part of it, has become transmittable. It comes to you, this meaning, like the news of an event. It has become information of a sort. The faces of paintings become messages, pieces of information to be used, even used to persuade us to help purchase more of the originals, which these very reproductions have in many ways replaced.

But, you may say, original paintings are still unique. They look different from how they look on a television screen or on postcards. Reproductions distort.

Only a few facsimiles don't. So every fashion show that I do since I've started I use another artist that was Joe Mercer speaking about seeing things ways of seeing art to sort of explain what I can't explain in a world that I feel like I don't belong in. Not like as like a downer I'm like that's the motivation is like supposedly this is uninspirational vibes that I think you know, taking it all the way back to Pyrex Vision, which is on like 80 Varick Street, in a white space, spray painting on a wall with clothes that I just found.

The idea is that in four years it could trend, it could go on a trajectory that is, you know, these clothing items, but to me again it's like the through line of like... Having it come from a storytelling point of view about the ways of seeing art. So this theme of this collection was about surrealism, that art movement, and how does that look within a garment? You know, a girl wearing a man's coat, the color palette, using like those buttons are from shaved pieces of birch trees which are in the space.

Oh yeah, this is cool. Playing Migos at Columbia. We're gonna let this go all the way through.

Can we turn the volume up? We almost told you. 17, 5, same color t-shirt 1995, 2005 Seen it with my eyes Dope, still alive Real mob ties Real frog eyes Real ho pies, all time high Do it for the culture, they gon'bite like vultures Way back when, I was trippin'on Toyotas I'ma hit the gas, 12 can't pull me over Space coupe, Quavo Yoda, pourin'drinkin'sodas I get high on my own, sir, heard you gon'close, sir Stop all that flexin', young nigga don't wanna go there Never been a gopher, but I always been a soldier Y'all niggas in the cut, postin' Like a road trip Diving off the stage In the crowd It's a mosh pit Yeah I shot it bad But she broke And she don't own shit Mama asked me son when the trapping gon quit I been riding round to the city in my new bitch Young nigga poppin'with a pocket full of cottage Whoa, Kimo Sabe choppa, aimin'at your noggin Had to cut the eye Then the top I had to chop it Niggas pocket watchin'So I gotta keep the rocket Mama told me Not to sell work 17-5, same color t-shirt Mama told me Not to sell work Word mama 75 say color t-shirt Mama told you Mama told you So yeah life goal complete Amigos Literally it is that though, that you could, that like Migos are like, are the Beatles or whatever. But like, you know, the next Zaha Hadid might be like this girl designer Wales Conner from London, you know, that.

Heron is, you know, as important as Drake's next album. Maybe, you know, like, I believe that. The stuff that interests youth culture is important.

The stuff that we make is important. Like, who's to say we can't start cross-referencing and have these things? Have a larger meaning.

And that's just sort of the freedom that I create. If I like varied things, that's the whole off-weight, taking inspiration off of things that are so dissimilar, but making a space where they both can exist. I showed this to Awana Wintour and the fact that she listened to the whole song and was into it is awesome that that happened in 2006. The bright sides of 2017 exist. So we can go to the next.

That's the vibe of the show. Social media, you guys get that. I'll pick up the pace because I want to get towards the end. Keep going.

This you can see on the website. It's a documentary. Like, it's super long. I wanted...

This is a version of this talk. I want people who are into the end product to be able to see what goes behind the scenes. So, with a friend of mine, we shot this like super paint dry, long documentary of the making of a whole women's collection.

Just because I knew one day I would get a critique that Off-White is uninspirational. So, I just, I just was like, this content needs to exist. It's not for promotion. It's so that the kids on Prince and Mercer can see what designers don't show you. You know, how is there supposed to be a new generation of designers if, you know, they're not in fashion school, if they're not, you know, no one's showing them how to transform from a printed t-shirt to like a couture gown that's made by hand.

Yeah. So this content exists on my website. Just regularly dropping content that I feel like is important and not sort of like commerce. You can go to the next.

You get the gist. Another going back into sort of the pillars, the canons of artists that make the foundation of Off-White that hopefully prove my case is, is it valid or not, is the concept of ready-made art. You can already see it through the work of like where I use it in a way to sort of make people see things in a different context and sort of my palette, but the next is like a Duchamp. quote, I think, next slide. Oh yeah.

It's, I joke and say like Duchamp is my lawyer. So if you ever see, if you see a reference, like if you see a Nebraska hoodie, I took it from Nebraska the school. Do you know what I mean? That's streetwear.

Like look at it font for font, it's the same. I'll probably get a cease and desist now but I already stopped printing it. That's off-white. There's rules. to be broken, you know, like the world isn't as literal as it needs to be, you know.

Ask Duchamp about this urinal. And we'll explain to you, you know, this is a breakthrough too. What excites me the most is why the Pyrex hoodies have Caravaggio on the front.

My mind, like I was an engineer, would have been an engineer had I not had to take one humanities class that was on the Remaissance. So coming across Caravaggio's artwork, the idea that he invented a style of painting, carascuo, like people painted and then he invented a new, it was like that's iPhone 6 level. Painting, source of light, cracks everything. So until this being an engineer, I didn't know that that genre existed. I thought art was just something that like rich people had, you know?

And I'm like five years into engineering, it was like art, I've dedicated my life to it, but art wasn't something that I saw myself in, like art in quotes, you know, the big four walls of art. But the idea that Duchamp like through a case of proving his point, like made this valid. And so what I'm using is I'm using that text the same way as Ram's Generic City, the same way as Margiela as an overarching concept to sort of add validity to how I see and how I decide if a product is done or not. The next, yeah, off-white product that's not t-shirts. You know, this is my booth in Miami, Art Basel at Design Miami.

It's the table is a table in so this is what my this is architecture again in the built form what is off-white so obviously that's a table in quotes those are chairs in quotes and there's that sign on the back is a painting in quotes so those are the official titles but if I'm gonna go around saying that everything is in quotes like I better have that's why I love architecture at the end of the day it's like you have to build it you have to make it in order for it to resonate. It doesn't come from words. It can come from words, but it has to manifest itself and it has to result in an aha moment for me.

And so this is like, hey, you have four weeks to exhibit your furniture. So all my furniture is sort of rooted in this sort of like palette of questioning and answering. What excites me the most is like those cubes which are off-white chairs are 200 bucks.

Or like a hundred or something maybe. Two hundred sounds like too much. I was gonna just brag about how it wasn't that expensive, but this is college vibe. But I like the idea of off-white.

I love the idea in a college dorm that there could be an off-white object and it'd be this as a chair and it'd be somewhat affordable. You know, like why, I'm not limited, ah, I was gonna announce a crazy collab. Imagine a super awesome Design furniture company? I'm doing a collab with them. And it started on this response like Off-White is super expensive and it's like dude, in order for me, independent brand, to compete with fashion houses, I have to pay my 32 employees and I make it all in Italy.

It's really expensive. Imagine how much it costs to buy, imagine how much it costs to make. So...

I was like, as a part of my democratic civic duty, it's like, I have all this education in architecture. I believe in the social responsibility that architects play to their environment that they build things in. I don't want to sell another hoodie unless I'm also selling some object of design that can exist in the same space. Like, I think in 30 years, if a kid had one of these cubes, that's like, of course, there's like frays on it.

There's a whole rationale. Long-winded is everything else I'm talking about. The idea is that the brand offers things like this is super important to me.

So you can go to the next slide just to catch a vibe of, you know, I was really happy with how this turned out. I'm doing in 2019 at the MCA in Chicago, super big museum show of all the furniture that I have projects. Showcasing, like this was just sort of the first.

There's a series of these, there's a series of whole other things. Gallery show in the year before that. This is like a preview. You can keep going through. We're almost done.

Next. Yeah. The drywall, it's like, same thing, it's reworded.

It says foundation in quotes on it. It's, you know... You can go.

You get the gist. You guys are architects. You don't have to over-explain this.

Oh, this was after the election. It's like if it's blue state, I was like, if you're in a blue state, you can, you'll buy that this is a chair. That's the best I could come up with.

It's like, hey, on to the next thing that I have to design off my iPhone. Irony, we nailed that. That's what the whole chair thing was. Next. Oh, one of my favorite, this is a singular favorite piece of artwork that I own.

I commissioned it from Jim Joe, which is super. Funny. So there's this blog that's just demeaning and beats down young kids that are trying to be creative and just critiques them.

It's called the Internet. And I was like, of course, when I started my brand, imagine the time in between Pyrex and Off-White, which is like, hey, I did this project. I don't want to do Pyrex anymore.

I want to do a real brand. Some kids try to deflate that whole concept. and was just like hating on the fact that I, because what I had done is rugby, a polo brand was going out of business.

I knew that. I bought up all the stock in the country. Because I was like, when I made the champion sweatshirts, I was like, damn, I wanted to make a flannel and I forgot. Like, how can I get a flannel quick? And I was like, wait, this brand is about to go out of business.

So if I buy it all up, no more exists. And of course, I paid like the sale price on it. And I was like.

I'm just gonna print on it and I'll like look at it and I was like how much does this look like it's worth? 500 bucks. Like that's what it was that was what it's worth to me I was like no one thought to do this. It's a really nice flannel you know it's like 500 let's go you know like I got cost it cost to make up and so of course like an attempt to deflate a young creative kids vision they put out this And mind you, I'm telling you all this backstory. It's just like that little thing that you read on the Internet that you're like, damn, like, my brand is over.

I literally, when this era was, I was like, dang, that was fun while it lasted. Jim Joe, the artist that I keep bringing up, who's like, you know, my sort of like, you know, his brain is super on point. What he does, he's a graffiti artist and fine artist, but what he does is he just takes screen grabs of, like, interesting things on the Internet and puts them in folders. And he has a super distinct hand style, like you saw it from the spray paint. And so I was like, hey, I'm doing a showroom, can we collaborate on a rug?

And I was like, hey, I'm going to be the only person in the world that has a Jim Joe rug. You know, Jim Joe did the Drake cover, Thank Me Later, something like that. Or, you know, I don't know. Wait, what was it called? Yeah, if you're reading this, it's too late.

In his classic handwriting that's written upside down and backwards. So I was like, hey, I want something in your handwriting. you know, like, let's do this.

And what he sent me back was this out of thin air. I was like, nah, I wanted something that was like, awesome. I was like, you must have got it wrong.

And he was like the one, and he didn't even know the story. He didn't know, but it's something that he had saved. And I thought, what better rug for my showroom to have buyers come in and stand on top of this rug that explains my whole premise. It's, you know, who has the last word or whatever. But next slide, I think we can skip over that.

I just want to get to the good stuff. I have a Nike shoe that's dropping, and I have it behind that chair. You can go.

Oh, that's not even it. These are the ones I'm wearing. Look at these.

Somebody look at these. Oh! Pass them around, look at the design.

So, when this Columbia talk came to be, I had one vision in mind, is when Steve Joe dropped the Nano. Do you remember? He had it in his fifth pocket the whole time.

So, thankful to the visionaries that exist within larger companies that let young kids get their ideas out through their iconic product. Nike has been like just a great creative support system to let me sort of like tinker with their product and when I get that shoot back I'll kind of like talk you through it but these images sort of show they show you my design aesthetic and so this is where the talk pretty much ends but I wanted to like drop something new in the project that I'm doing it's a design language you know I've had started off these design meetings by questioning Sneaker design, questioning product, questioning commerce and art. Why is it one of my sort of thoughts with my critique two weeks ago was I feel like I'm catching a Molotov cocktail because things that are commercial aren't considered art. I think that that premise doesn't necessarily exist in my street wear as an art movement. It's a way to sort of make product feel artful that are also multiplied.

And a lot of that for me is branding, of course. It's like that series of text is literally putting the shoe in quotes. It's defining itself as it exists, where it came from, shoes made in China, but then also designed in its place and it's marked as such. Like the swoosh here is replaced, put back.

The tongue is replaced, put back. Like, these are, this is what I'm attempting to do with street wear, is, like, nudge it forward past, you know, if I had said, close your eyes, imagine an off-white Air Force One. In your brain, you would have imagined, like, diagonal line stripes all over the whole thing.

That, to me, is, like, great, because then it's like I'm just reverting against, that's exactly what I won't do. And what that shoe that's... I don't see getting passed around anymore.

Is what I see with an opportunity to sort of create is make new languages, new vocabularies that extend themselves over different silhouettes. So, you know, I'm not going to speak about that shoe anymore because I feel like I'll get in trouble, but I'm really happy to sort of, in my design career, like have no chill. I'm sort of about trying to debut new ideas by doing. So this is the domino effect.

If you make a printed t-shirt, if you're an architect, sure school, like force yourself to think outside the box now. Don't think you're going to wait until later. Your practice already started. You know, it started when you were 17 years old. The, like I said, the importance of our profession is never, has never more been absolute.

I think that the future architects look different. I made a career off sort of displaying that, and the only gratification is bringing it back to places like this to explain it and hopefully inspire you guys to do more. So with that, this is over.

So I know it's late, but I think we'll jump right to a few questions if you have some. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It seems that street wear... Yeah....wear, so... Yeah, yeah, that's real.

No, that's a very presiding argument, and it's a great critique. It's a really hard question to answer because there's multiple layers of it. I usually respond first with the cost of goods.

is related to where they come from, right? You know, like, if you see an H&M ad for a shirt, you know, my favorite shirt from Uniqlo is $4.50. Try shipping this napkin from Colombia to Tokyo for $4.50. Like, if that, and then add in like the fabric cost, the packaging, plus the person who sewed it.

You know, it's really hard. to make things at that price when you're looking at difference in scale. You know, like Off-White is, it's made in the same factories as Louis Vuitton, it's just made with a different spirit. For me, a part of my whole arc, a part of this whole photo shoot of the Barcelona Pavilion, it changes the cost of goods.

Like, I think that doesn't take me out of the conversation of making things. that are inspired by the youth, affordable by the youth. So what do I do instead? I make other pieces of content that fill that void.

It's not enough for me to take that critique and be like, hey, man. But a shirt that I do with Babylon in LA, $30. Or I look for ways to do that.

But it's two different conversations. I also don't want to be the brand in XYZ store. In the XYZ department, that's lower than the brands that I'm intellectually trying to have a conversation with. Because that's, we all know what that looks like.

It looks like we're not here at Columbia and I'm selling like street wear. You know, I'm trying to, like that fashion show that I showed, it's a communication with a different sect of fashion. You know, I'm responsible to the youth, but also I'm trying to educate that.

upper layer of fashion that's looking at your Instagram, taking your ideas and making those expensive clothes. So it's like, it would be cool if someone from our layer of culture got to play in that field. I know you have to pay your employees, but, um, You talked a lot about democratizing design and I wonder how you would feel about like counterfeits and I guess like I don't know if you just like threw the cat up for your furniture online does it have to be made by you to be off-white?

No exactly That's what Off-White is different. Like, I love counterfeits. It's the best feedback.

It's better than, like, a great review on Vogue. Like, if it's working to the point where someone else can profit off that, that means it's really working. You know, you're not taking anything away from me.

You're actually just advertising more. I love the open source, like maybe I'll put up the CADs of the furniture. You know, one project that I have coming out is like releasing the pattern, like a collab that teaches people about fashion, so it's releasing the pattern with the product. Like, you can make it yourself. But that's like a Margiela idea.

Everything's been done, by the way. But if you have to know that it's been done, you have to, like, be educated about the process. But I feel that's what off-white... honed in on is what Off-White is.

Off-White isn't, and what you sort of touched on is like it's expensive. It's also not a fashion brand. Of course it is, but it's only, see how Off-White came to be?

It's two things at once. It's to inspire kids. If you think Off-White's too expensive, that's great. You're supposed to make your own t-shirt brand. I have no, same thing to your counterfeit question.

This product, this project that was made, was made to inspire. To people that can't see it, it looks like something else. It's targeted towards the demographic that can afford it.

But for the demographic that can afford it, it's meant so that you start the competing brand that's better than Off-White. Okay. Another one? I understand. Oops.

Dude. No, we're talking. I knew we were having a conversation. I knew there was someone that was catching away.

That's why I said, this is architecture. This is 2017. Is my mic cutting out? But this is 2017 architecture. That some kid would just have a physical reaction to these ideas means that we've moved the needle and he's got an affirmation that these ideas, I don't even think, are radical or new. They just need to be out in the world.

Yeah, in the front with the gray. Can someone show throw that shoe back up here too? Look at that.

Should have went to play basketball instead of architecture school. Yeah, go ahead. The sacred term like youth culture, it's real.

It might be more important now than ever before. Like, they are influential, but they're not just like hangers. There's people that decide the cultural climate. So for these two kids that he named...

Like they're so young but they're at the forefront of thumbs-upping and thumbs-downing if XYZ brand is cool or not. You know, I have a social responsive democratic duty to them to like help them progress. Everyone needs a mentor.

Like without Michael Rock or without Peter Saville, without Frazier Cook, you know, I'm just a kid that doesn't have any reaffirmation that my ideas are on a right track. Like my biggest fear that keeps me awake is that off-white... Isn't credible and the only way to get credibility is to cosign So what I do is I cosign Ian Conner cosign Bariaa cosign Rock, I don't it doesn't matter because that's super important if someone needs to cosign it in the right light.

You know, you don't have to be a designer to be a designer. And in my lens, that's the culture is the more important part than the perfectionism of it, of like an idea. First of all, awesome talk.

Thank you and appreciate that. You mention a lot about being a 17-year-old and making decisions like that, and just now you even reference yourself as a kid. Supreme old kid. 36-year-old kid.

How do you find that balance between having that childlike creativity and perception of life and still being mature enough to follow and execute on your dreams and passions? I think, to me, you have to learn and then unlearn. That's it's just simply that like Everything that you learn is like you're just accruing Somebody else's DNA to you know like they make something But it's important for yours to be unique that you have to go back to what your raw emotion was you know that's why Pyrex was champion and Sweatshirts is because that's what I had in high school. That was my gym uniform so that thing was called a team with no sport and Otherwise, I would have just been another kid making another streetwear brand with a random name that had no point of reference. It being personal to me made it something that resonated somewhere else.

And I think it's important to foster that in different fields. You know, like if you're focused on being an architect, you know, in your work, I would love to see it reference the 17 year old version of what you thought of as a house as well as what you think of it is now. You know. I just feel like it removes arbitrariness with like, hey, draw a line and make it cool.

Like, that's the root of it. Like, you know, that's why I love like forcing people to make things. It's like skip your opinion and proposition. Like, I put something on the table, you put something on the table.

So, yeah. Thank you. Just a couple more. Hi, thank you so much for the great talk. It's on.

This is a difficult question, but I was just wondering if you've thought about how design can start to communicate with the part of the country that voted for... someone who is promoting xenophobia and misogyny and just i imagine it's been on your mind no 100 i think for me i hate design that doesn't relate to anything You know, that's like a, like that as a statement, like I don't really hate anything, but I'm using that as like a, just a manifesto to say that all of our expressions should be, should be spirited, you know, like it doesn't matter either way, like you can, you know, difference in opinion is a good thing, but I think when it relates to design. I only can speak about what I do and that's really about the man-woman thing on the back of clothing.

But it's also about making garments that like Celine Dion can have in her closet and also like her teenage son and then being two different things. You know, like design brands have a tremendous ability to communicate a larger message without even bringing it to the forefront. You know, that's why I sort of like leaned off into clothing and fashion rather than just sticking purely.

Because it's like architecture's buildings, but then what are the people inside clothed in? Or what are the other things that they're interacting with? So, I don't know, I think, more to your question, it's also not things. I think what makes us great as architects is we're thinkers. I once heard, it might be a misquote, who was it, like Vanessa Beecroft or somebody was like, in some thought of governments being like organized, like in the cabinet would be an artist.

Like, that just blew my mind as a concept, that there could be like practical things, but then, hey, we're just going to put someone in the mix that... Doesn't think about practical things but can help you find a solution. That's what architects are You know and that's what my hope my story sort of communicates like hire an architect to do an album cover You know hire an architect to come up with oh, this is a good one Like one of the things that I want to do is rebrand charity Because I think charity is one of the things that hasn't been updated. It has like a crazy connotation, but like have an architect rethink Charity.

You'll come, I do it all the time and I come up with like the craziest more fun ideas that are like, hey, this can actually help people. And like Heron Preston with his DSNY project, my friend was swimming on a beach and trash rubbed up against him. And he, I call him the Elia street wear because he's like, comes up with potent ideas and never would see them through.

That's not the link with Elia, he's just that good. But I was like, you... And the project that he finally launched was...

To highlight how the Department of Sanitation in New York, you know, that they keep the city clean, you know, like they're a legion of people, not like FDNY or the police department that are often celebrated, that through clothing he could draw attention in the work that they do across the globe. So you have like a Vogue event and everyone's wearing Department of Sanitation. That is insane to me, you know. And of course, that's specific to a civic duty, but imagine if you did the same thing with red and blue states.

I think a group of architects could solve that within a year. Let's take one more. Right here in the black hat.

You both have black hats. When creating visions. I got a question. Right here. Oh, okay.

I'll answer them both fast. How was the battle when creating the visions between public opinion and through your personal belief of... knowing when to say, I'm going to move on to the next design, or I'm going to stick to this because these people are saying that they love this design, they love this idea, and they want to continue it, or just versus your own battle. The root of any architect designer is you have to have a point of view. You know, Off-White came because I forgot what my own favorite color was.

you know it's a it's a diary it's a it's a string of projects that i do at a crazy pace that's it's for me in a way but i'm trying to represent a larger idea so If I make an invite, if I'm thinking of it, it's not... Obviously, I have critique voice always in my head being like, is this good or not? But I'm a decision maker. I make them fast. On to the next.

The idea of iterating is more important than dwelling. Is this good or not? I always say that the world moves as fast as Instagram scrolls up.

So it's like there's no time for that. Let's do one more. Good question.

Maybe talk about Paris. Yeah, Paris. Oh yeah, a good question is why Paris? You know, it's like, I just felt that some kid that truly understands streetwear in New York should be exhibiting on that stage, not limited to the stage. It makes the whole project in a way uninteresting to me.

You know, off-white I want it to be a dialogue with contemporary high fashion. You know, that was like... rule number one after Pyrex, because it was like that's, you could discount that by calling it streetwear, because that's what it was.

Off-white was a challenge to make something that could be on a Parisian runway. That changes everything from the fabric, it changes the font, it changes. You know, that's where fashion home court is. And I wanted to show that there is a new presiding voice growing that is one part forged by influence, which is in Ian Conner, which is A$AP Rock wears this.

It's selling out. You know, these are new celebs. You know, the poster childs are different. So the market should change. And so I thought that something should represent that shift.

And that's why I get a large amount of gratification to seeing the fashion show schedule say, like, Mason Margiela, Margiela, Off-White, Rock Owens. That happened in a lifetime. To me, again, it's a kickflip for you guys to be able to do, like, upon seeing it, you know, cool.

It was worth the wait, Virgil. Sorry for the delay. Thank you.

Thanks.