Off-White Spring 2023 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Virgil Abloh would have turned 42 tomorrow. After tonight’s show for Off-White, the brand Abloh founded, Ibrahim Kamara said: “It’s about celebrating him and his legacy.” Nobody has succeeded Abloh in his role at Off-White—because who could?—but Kamara was named the Image and Art Director of the brand by CEO Andrea Grilli in April to help pilot it forward. Asked to characterize his role, especially in relation to this collection, Kamara said: “The beauty of Off-White is that you are involved in every single detail of the brand. And although my role is image based I was able to investigate with the team as they built this collection. It’s a broader role than I expected when I stepped into it, and it’s a beautiful role, and I am very lucky.”

This collection was, at its earliest stages, conceived and started by Abloh before his death in 2021. Kamara said the team had taken the original brief—an exploration of the human body—and built on it. “Virgil was always thinking ahead,” he added. “He was almost in another universe.”

The show, of course, was hypey. There were crowds outside and celebrities within. Jonathan Anderson and Maximilian Davis came along for the ride too. The collection was prefaced and accompanied by a group of dancers, mostly from Paris, who were brought together by choreographer Nicolas Huchard and performed to music by Faty Sy Savanet wearing hole-puckered blue body suits on a carpet of the same particular shade. I’d thought maybe the color was a subtle tribute to Marcelo Burlon’s role in the Off-White story but it was also a particular contribution of Kamara’s.

The collection followed the brief imaginatively, while re-emphasizing the founder’s codes. The holes were used to expose the navel on patched leather dresses and workwear, feminized tailoring, shirt-dresses, and the knitwear that was a highlight of the collection. Stitching was used to trace a contour map of the muscles and organs beneath on suiting, and later printed x-rays repeated the trick on more suiting and denim: the clothes were wearing an imprint of the body within. On that knitwear, thin braided ropelets were precisely applied on top of fine-gauge shells to create more reefs of contour that mapped out the bodies beneath. There was also a great knit menswear suit, unadorned, that reflected the sartorial expression of form but also allowed for free and elastic movement.

The very Off-White, unfinished, “work in progress” concept was expressed via tailoring with slashed and apparently half-constructed elements plus puffer jackets and Out Of Office sneakers with trailing lines of stitching at their seams. The most worn womenswear family of shoes all shared heels based on slinky springs: funny, but also connected to another subject of the show that Kamara shared. All of the models were new faces, something Kamara said reflected the doors in the set design. He explained: “The show is a celebration, and it’s also about hope. Hope is opening doors, and that is something Virgil did beautifully until the very end.” Hope springs eternal.

This Off-White collection contained easily enough elastic potential energy to convince you that a brand that was also one man’s conceptual body of work remains very much alive, attuned and engaged with progression. The Jenny Holzer print staff T-shirts that were also given to guests and which continued an Abloh-initiated 2017 project to support Planned Parenthood only added to that conviction.