Words matter. These are the best Virgil Abloh Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My motivation is, in part, a bit of angst that comes from feeling like I don’t belong, that our generation doesn’t belong.
I started off as a kid who didn’t care what my education was.
From a very young age, as a teenager, I was into hip-hop and skateboarding and all those things that were akin to a kid in the ’90s. All those things are what resulted in clothes.
Fashion and music are two great artistic forms that can be molded by the youth culture – our taste and our passion for evolving things in our limited time on earth allows us to look at things with fresh eyes.
I don’t want to be a celebrity designer. I want to keep my personal life out of it.
I want Off-White to be a graphics-based brand.
My lifestyle doesn’t really account for movies. I can’t even remember what I last saw.
I don’t come up with ideas in a test tube; I come up with ideas by breaking test tubes. That’s how I’ve always been.
I don’t do the vintage thing so much, just because it’s not me. There are some vintage designers I’ll buy things from, but mostly not.
My style is to never say no.
There’s no line between a designer and consumer.
For me, there’s a subtlety in focusing on the right shape of T-shirt and pant. I recognise that it’s boring, but the idea is to catch people off-guard and reward them in some valuable way.
I just wanna start a brand that inspires and is geared towards youth.
I’m mostly into buying art from friends. I like to keep it vague – just whatever I find intriguing.
Collaboration is not a punchline… I only collaborate with the best in each category.
I just wanna start a brand that inspires and is geared towards youth.
DJing is my only peace of mind. When the phone is off, I play my favourite songs really loud for myself, and I’m not talking to anyone; I’m not managing anything. It’s just, like, a time when I can listen to music.
I’d do anything at the right time, and I would also do things at the wrong time if they felt right.
I’m not really into style. I’m more into confidence or having something to say.
I think that, in a digital age, album covers are becoming a lost art.
I’ve always had this in some ways pessimistic and in some ways realistic idea that I’m the lowest rung on the ladder.
From my perspective, I’m trying to stand for a generation. You know, each generation has designers who go along with it.
I was never meant to, like, work and then turn it off and sit on the couch. I just have a vision, and I’m inspired by it. It’s sort of what makes me tick.
I want to put culture on a track so that it becomes more inclusive, more open source.
Ironic things are interesting.
My first degree was in structural engineering, which is super-boring.
As a young designer in tune with culture, I’m interested in the lifeline of trends.
I think my original ambition was to be an artist.
The whole point of collaboration is that you give and take from each other, and that’s how you create things that are totally new.
My place in design history is to sort of interpret youth culture, and I think we’ve seen that done in fashion before – it’s not a new concept – but it hasn’t been done with the same vigour in a modern context.
I interned at Fendi while Michael Burke was overseeing Fendi.
For me, as I was growing up, I studied architecture, I was into music, and I always felt that there was a gap between the things that I loved and consumed and who made them and how they made them.
I look at culture, and I see what the kids around me are wearing, and I see a particular style. I understand the space between fashion and streetwear.
I always live in multiple places. I’m never in the same city for seven days.
Pyrex Vision’s first season was, for me, an expression of myself as an artist first, designer second.
Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it’s coming from, it’s not going to be lasting.
I’m a kid from Chicago. I know what it was like to see Obama become president. We felt the tectonic plates of the world shift.
In my case, everything starts from Marcel Duchamp and the new expressive possibilities he gave us with his ready-mades. I transferred his artistic language into today’s world, choosing, for example, to use pedestrian-crossing stripes as a symbol.
I always joke that, at any given time, I’m supposed to be at two other places.
I oftentimes say that I design my collections off my phone. I’m in a group chat with my team in Milan. I copy and paste. I draw. I look at trends. I don’t really have an assistant. It’s a modern way of working. I don’t know if it’s sustainable, but it’s how I do it.
Growing up, at high school, we all used to wear Champion garments, which, in America, are standard-issue gym uniforms.
What I love about tennis is the gracefulness. It’s an aggressive and powerful game, but it takes touch and finesse.
People, when they say ‘streetwear,’ they miss the central component, which is that it’s real people; it’s clothes that are worn on the street.
I try to talk on the phone as little as possible.
The most important message is to let me just focus on making the most beautiful normcore clothes, but as luxurious as possible.
Music needs a visual element to make it tangible. So, naturally, there’s gonna be a synergy between high-level art direction and high-level albums.
Whenever I’m doing a collection, I’m inspired by the world around us.
My friends and me, we’re the type that don’t care. We’re not into fashion. That’s, like, millennial spirit.
The most valuable thing in culture is to find something first – so everyone is always looking.
Clothing interests me, but it’s not the endpoint of my interest.
All I do all day is think of ideas and implement them. That’s an industry, you know. I’m trying to make art on a commercial scale.
For me, just as a social recorder of 2016, there’s a new girl that emerged that can shop in between Zara and designer and still maintain a sense of her personality and identity.
The amount of random conversations that lead to culture-shifting ideas is insane.
Big teams are absolutely vital if you want to achieve certain results when you’re working on larger scales, both in terms of physical size and productive quantities.
I’m always trying to prove to my 17-year-old self that I can do creative things I thought weren’t possible.
If you look at why people become wack as they get older, it’s because they stop doing the things they did that were formative to their work. You can’t mentally stay still. You can’t not challenge yourself.
The fashion consumer likes a high-low mix – I want to be a brand that represents that.
I like to look at fashion and relate it to the time when it was happening.
Kanye’s the best. He really, really is. He’s cool. And why we’ve always gotten along is because we can just sit down and talk about art.
My graphic design skills are superior to a lot of other things I can do; I use it as a part of my tool kit.