As Virgil Abloh took his bow after his debut men’s wear show for Louis Vuitton, he embraced his mentor, Kanye West, and the two men openly wept tears of joy.
The designer from Rockford, Ill., who four years ago launched his streetwear label Off-White with the aim of revolutionizing high fashion, had a theory about what it meant for him to reach the top rungs of the industry.

The clothes themselves signaled the dawning of a new era. Neither pure streetwear, nor straightforward luxury, they sat somewhere in between, with all the trial and error that comes with mapping new territory.

In a preview at the Louis Vuitton studio, Abloh said he wanted to start with a blank slate. His color scheme was based on white light hitting a prism and separating into a spectrum of hues, with shades ranging from off-white (naturellement) to the multicolored palette of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Abloh likened himself to the character played by Judy Garland, the “farm girl from the Midwest transported to Oz, a fairy-tale land where she experiences things beyond the reach of her imagination.” Along his yellow brick road, he found transfigured basics: a jacket made of white mink; a camel double-faced cashmere hoodie, and a tie-dye T-shirt in white leather. Continue reading →

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Clare Waight Keller is to dedicate the Givenchy Fall 2018 couture show in Paris on July 1 to house founder Hubert de Givenchy, who died in March at age 91.

Givenchy said the collection would be “an homage to his iconic creations, technique and personal lexicon” and a “celebration of his timeless elegance and grace, imbued with Waight Keller’s fresh take on the Givenchy spirit.” Continue reading →

For his latest Milan tour, Alessandro Sartori at sunset on Friday led the fashion crowd to the Palazzo Mondadori, a monumental Oscar Niemeyer-designed structure rising out of a flat landscape and framed by a series of concrete arches.

Set in a nature reserve on the edge of the Idroscalo Lake, the spectacular waterside building combining concrete and stone was commissioned in 1968, the same year in which Zegna’s ready-to-wear line was launched. And Sartori saw it as the perfect architectural incarnation of the design principles of his spring collection: “graphic and voluminous, but without weight.”

In his quest for weightlessness, Alessandro Sartori in his development of an athletic sartorial journey experimented with performance fabrics to the lightest of nylons

A bridge stretching across the water, with schools of small fish darting through, had been transformed into a mirrored catwalk bordered with benches, giving guests the feeling of walking on water as they took to their seats. Continue reading →