Virgil Abloh's Iconic Products

Nike and Virgil Abloh have teamed up to reinvent sneaker culture with their collaborative project, The Ten, which redesigns 10 iconic sneakers from Air Jordan 1 to Air Presto. Each shoe is a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture, and a wearable, showcasing Abloh’s engineering ingenuity and investigative design process.

Virgil Abloh, a multi-hyphenate creative figure, operated in the realms of Art, Design, and Culture and was known for rejecting classification on creativity. After earning a degree in Civil Engineering and a master’s degree in Architecture, he began crafting the principles of his broader art practice. He was the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White and served as the Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton from 2018 to 2021.

The collaboration between Nike and Abloh reinvigorated sneaker culture, offering deep insights into engineering ingenuity and cultural cachet. Abloh's designs draw on the genius of the original shoe and utilize lettering, labels, collage, and sculpting techniques to construct new meaning, inspired by Dadaism, architectural theory, and avant-garde happenings.

Through documentation of the prototypes, original text messages from Abloh to Nike designers, and treasures from the Nike archives, the book "Icons" traces Abloh’s investigative, creative process. It showcases Swooshes sliced away from Air Jordans and reapplied with tape or thread, text fragments in quotation marks on Air Force 1, and All Stars cut into pieces, all as part of Abloh’s DIY approach.

The book, designed in partnership with the acclaimed London-based design studio Zak Group, is a two-part compendium featuring a visual culture of sneakers and a lexicon that defines the key people, places, objects, ideas, materials, and scenes from which the project grew. Texts by Nike’s Nicholas Schonberger, writer Troy Patterson, curator and historian Glenn Adamson, and a foreword by Hiroshi Fujiwara place the project within the historical continuum of Nike collaborators.

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