Virgil Abloh bought his family a horse. As with anything he commits to—and these days, the list is superhumanly long—deep research ensued. This led him down an equestrian wormhole that subsequently permeated this collection. The season’s recurring “Off-White pattern” was a sporting tapestry, quite lovely in pale blue, that he tagged as stealthily as a watermark. When Kaia Gerber appeared in an instantly covetable toile denim version three looks in, it felt as though Abloh had already jumped a high-scoring obstacle. Gutsy riffs on riding boots and dressy tailored jackets added an aristocratic sillage to resolutely sexy jumpsuits and spliced dresses that spanned from après-Spin class to cocktail party. “It’s juxtaposing formality,” Abloh said before the show as two seamstresses tacked more tulle onto a frothy Champagne-hued dress that he decided to add on a whim just a day earlier. Whether consciously or not, his usual echoes of Raf and Margiela were replaced by a faint homage to Alaïa; see the croc-stamped jackets and clingy dresses. Actually, this worked to his favor.
But then what of the collection’s title, West Village? The moment Abloh mentioned Sex and the City, a contemporary Carrie Bradshaw crystallized as his muse. It would take someone of her stylistic sprezzatura to strut down Greenwich Street in the hybridized blazers-to-boy shorts. But it was interesting to consider how the series has been as formative to Abloh’s feminine vernacular as the Pretty Woman, Working Girl, and Princess Diana references of recent collections. And amid such accessible culture, he buried two wonderfully esoteric Easter eggs: The recorded voice that opened the show belonged to Susan Sontag in conversation with John Berger on storytelling mediated by images. All the horse imagery nodded to Sir Alfred Munnings, a master equine and sporting painter who was fiercely opposed to modernism. “To hell with him. He never was a good artist,” Munnings famously wrote of Picasso. “What is the world coming to?” Abloh’s critics might say the irony was all too rich.
And yet, he perseveres, ambitiously collaborating on a series of artworks with Takashi Murakami on view at the Gagosian Gallery in London. Abloh’s template of rewriting familiar codes as fresh ideas is now proving universally successful: He generated yet another sneaker phenomenon for Nike, launched a scent with Byredo, and introduced herbal water in the shade of International Klein Blue (for a pop-up of the Parisian café Wild and the Moon, at Le Bon Marché). Amazingly, none of this seems to be distracting him from achieving a higher level of fashion legitimacy. That said, if the maelstrom outside tonight’s show was any indication, Off-White’s well-earned hype is at risk of turning into a beast. Samantha Jones would never have let that happen; but boy, would she have loved the one-shouldered dress covered in rectangular silver sequins.
