Virgil Abloh: the red-hot renaissance man shaking up fashion

Virgil Abloh is fashion’s hottest designer. His latest creation is an orange brick. People queue round the block to buy one. Would you?

On an early summer’s evening on the outskirts of Basel – a city almost certainly in Switzerland, but sometimes in France and occasionally Germany – hundreds of well-heeled men and women stand in line, giddily, champagne flutes in hand, waiting to buy a £140 brick. It is, naturally, no ordinary brick. It’s flag-down-a-passing-aircraft orange, and prominently branded in an edition of just 999. But, crucially, the brick – or “ceramic block” as its parents have christened it – has been designed by Virgil Abloh, a 38-year-old from Chicago, in conjunction with the timeless Swiss furniture company Vitra. Right now, Abloh is an alchemist: anything he touches in the worlds of fashion and design turns to gold (or often orange). The people jostling in this queue know that they could buy a brick and own a cherished piece of design history – or walk out and resell it immediately for at least double what they paid.

And yet, it really does look like a brick. Abloh, whose day job is artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, makes no wild claims for its utility. “It is sort of reminiscent of a cinder block, which is obviously a building unit to build structures such as we’re in,” he says, at the launch at Vitra’s headquarters. “But we decided to make that a ceramic household accessory. It gets adapted to your living space as an object itself, or it can be a paperweight, or it can hold objects within it.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FIAATa