The essential volume on the great fashion designer, entrepreneur and Louis Vuitton artistic director, back in print.

This authoritative Virgil Abloh compendium, created by the designer himself, accompanies his acclaimed landmark 2019–23 touring exhibition and offers in-depth analysis of his career and his inspirations. More than a catalog, Figures of Speech is a 500-page user’s manual to Abloh’s genre-bending work in art, fashion and design.

The first section features essays and an interview that examine Abloh’s oeuvre through the lenses of contemporary art history, architecture, streetwear, high fashion and race, to provide insight into a prolific and impactful career that cuts across mediums, connecting visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, major brands and architects. The book also contains a massive archive of images culled from Abloh’s personal files on major projects, revealing behind-the-scenes snapshots, prototypes, inspirations and more — accompanied by intimate commentary from the artist. Finally, a gorgeous full-color plate section offers a detailed view of Abloh’s work across disciplines.

Virgil Abloh (1980–2021) was a fashion designer and entrepreneur, and the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear collection from 2018 to 2021. He was also CEO of the Milan-based label Off-White, a fashion house he founded in 2013. Born in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian parents, he entered the world of fashion with an internship at Fendi in 2009 alongside rapper Kanye West. The two began an artistic collaboration that would launch Abloh’s career with the founding of Off-White. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2018.

The first and much-anticipated book by visual artist, club creator, and nightlife impresario André Saraiva presents his wide range of works, from street art and contemporary art to graphic design, photography, and his influences on fashion and nightlife.

Street-cool visual artist-cum-nightlife guru, André Saraiva, whose life dovetails into graffiti subculture, chic jet-setting, and the fashion world, presents an autobiographical visual diary of sorts, a revealing window into the worlds he inhabits. This visual journey is an interactive and striking object itself, with either a vibrant pink cloth- or blue cloth-cover (randomly selected), Saraiva’s distinctive handwriting in foil, and seven pop-ups he designed. 

Chances are that while you’ve been strolling through the streets of Paris, London, New York, or Los Angeles, you may have caught a glimpse of Saraiva’s signature graffiti of Mr. A on a random street wall. Or you may have seen him in the Banksy film, Exit Through the Gift Shop; spied him in the front rows of the Paris Fashion Week shows; or seen him at one of his many chic nightclubs. Graffiti Life is a never-before-seen look at the artist’s many spheres through which he effortlessly moves: street culture, contemporary art, graphic design, photography, fashion, and nightlife. It follows Saraiva’s art/life trajectory, and includes his Instagram-worthy tags on the streets of Paris; countless silk-screened posters; paintings and sculpture; creative collaborations with Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Colette, and more.

About the Author:

André Saraiva is an artist, hotelier, and entrepreneur. Virgil Abloh is an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, and designer. Magda Danysz is a French art curator and art dealer. Glenn O’Brien (1947–2017) was a writer who focused largely on the subjects of art, music, and fashion. Jeffrey Deitch is an American art dealer and curator. 

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Пролистать книгу Andre Saraiva: Curated Chaos: Graffiti Life

The most in-depth and comprehensive survey of the life and career of one of the pioneering artists of the original graffiti generation.

Having forged his graphic style painting subways in New York in the late 1970s, Futura was among the first graffiti artists to be shown in contemporary galleries in the early 1980s, where his paintings shared space with works by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. As the commercialization of street culture in the 1990s inspired collaborations with fashion and lifestyle brands, Futura's work moved toward a more refined expression of his abstract graffiti style. Commissions from era-defining brands such as A Bathing Ape, Stüssy, Supreme, and Mo' Wax saw his artwork canonized as an elemental component of the street aesthetic.

Collected here, among never-before-published reproductions of earlier paintings and drawings, is an archive of personal photography and ephemera that reveals how integral Futura has been to the evolution of street art and culture. Guided through more than forty years of work, and with interviews with key players in Futura's career, this is at once a definitive monograph of a legend of contemporary art and an indispensable chapter in the history of graffiti.

About the Author:

Futura is a street artist born and raised in New York. His career began in the 1970s under the moniker Futura 2000; in the decades since, his work has expanded from subway cars into fine art and commercial collaborations with brands from Nike to Supreme, Undercover, and Virgil Abloh. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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Пролистать книгу Futura: The Artist's Monograph

The long-anticipated monograph on OMA New York by Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long is sure to be the design and architecture book of the season. Presenting more than 20 radical architectural projects from a new generation of the firm, this mammoth volume is the first compendium by OMA, since Content and Rem Koolhaas’s S, M, L, XL.

Well into its fourth decade, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975, remains one of the most influential and successful practices of its kind. OMA describes itself as “a firm operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism that applies architectural thinking to domains beyond.” OMA New York, has grown from an American outpost to a full-fledged operation with its own attitudes, contributing to the evolution of the globally acclaimed office. Through a diversity of projects, the firm has transformed our understanding of the city and our evolving relationship with art, fashion, food, sustainability, and other quintessentially twenty-first-century preoccupations.

The works presented here elaborate on OMA’s philosophy even as they expand its portfolio geographically. Featured projects (led by partners Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long) include residential skyscrapers in New York, Miami, and San Francisco, mixed-use developments in cities from Tokyo to Houston, and projects like 11th Street Bridge Park in the public realm, alongside more intimate spaces such as the studio for renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Permanent structures, such as Milstein Hall at Cornell University, the new galleries of Quebec’s Musée National des Beaux-Arts, a cultural forum and neighborhood for Faena in Miami, and the expansion of museums such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the New Museum in Manhattan, contrast vividly with temporary interventions such as the Manus x Machina exhibition at the Met Costume Institute and the sculptural installation of soaring concrete columns for An Occupation of Loss.

In between projects are dialogues with leading policymakers, museum directors, artists, fashion designers, musicians, chefs, and curators — Christopher Hawthorne, Lisa Phillips and Massimiliano Gioni, Taryn Simon, Iris van Herpen, Virgil Abloh, David Byrne, Alice Waters, and Cecilia Alemani — who provide insight onto areas of the firm’s interests and preoccupations beyond the realm of architecture. 

About the Authors:

Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long are partners at OMA, based out of the New York office. Virgil Abloh is an American fashion designer and founder of Off White. David Byrne is an American musician & artist. Alice Waters is an American chef and author.

The Sneaker as (Hyper)Object. Nike and Virgil Abloh reinvigorate 10 icons of sneaker history

In 2016, sportswear manufacturer Nike and fashion designer Virgil Abloh joined forces to create a sneaker collection celebrating 10 of the Oregon-based company’s most iconic shoes. With their project The Ten — which reimagines icons like Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Air Force 1, and Air Presto, among others — they reinvigorated sneaker culture.

Virgil Abloh’s new designs offer deep insights into engineering ingenuity and burst with cultural cachet. Drawing on the genius of the original shoe using lettering, ironic labels, collage, and sculpting techniques, Abloh plays with language and sculptural elements to construct new meaning. Inspired by the wit of Dadaism, architectural theory, and avant-garde happenings, he analyzes what makes each shoe iconic and deconstructs it into an artistic assemblage, making each shoe into a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture, and a wearable all at once.

Icons traces Abloh’s investigative, creative process through documentation of the prototypes, original text messages from Abloh to Nike designers, and treasures from the Nike archives. We find Swooshes sliced away from Air Jordans and reapplied with tape or thread, Abloh’s typical text fragments in quotation marks on Air Force 1, and All Stars cut into pieces. We take a look behind the scenes and witness Abloh’s DIY approach, which gives each model in the Off-White^TM c/o Nike collection its own unique touch.

The book documents Abloh’s cooperative way of working and reaffirms the power of print. For its design Nike and Abloh partnered with the acclaimed London-based design studio Zak Group. Together they conceived a two-part compendium, equal parts catalog and conceptual toolbox. The first part of the book presents a visual culture of sneakers while a lexicon in the second part 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 Virgil Abloh himself frame the collaborative work within fashion and design history. A foreword by Hiroshi Fujiwara places the project within the historical continuum of Nike collaborators.

The author:

Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh is a multi-hyphenate creative that often rejects classification on creativity. He operates in the realms of Art, Design, and Culture in conjunction with advocacy, mentoring, and philanthropy in the spaces he occupies. After earning a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a master’s degree in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a Bauhaus design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his broader art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019 — one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Currently, Abloh is the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™️ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton, amongst other endeavors.