After the tragic loss of the creative genius behind Off-White, Virgil Abloh, many wondered who would be able to carry out his projects.
The designer was much more than “just” a fashion designer. Virgil was an entrepreneur, an artistic director and a revolutionary who contributed to bring streetwear inside the world of fashion, giving voice to that part of the population with which he always identified.
During his career he collaborated with the artists like of Kanye West and Jay Z and, in 2018, he became the artistic director of the Louis Vuitton men’s collection.
Almost a year after his death, however, the brand has still not issued any official statements to indicate who might be his successor.
Michael Burke, CEO of Louis Vuitton, recently declared in an interview that the maison is not in a hurry to make a choice, as it is too big to rely on just one individual. Burke also added that being a fashion designer is not a mandatory feature and that the next creative director could also be specialized in a completely different field.
Despite what has just been said, between the various candidates there is a designer who is a true expert in the field: Jerry Lorenzo.
The founder of Fear of God is among the few American creatives who are carrying on that idea of sophisticated and minimalist sportswear that made Calvin Klein famous in the 90s. What makes Lorenzo an ideal heir is certainly the fact that he has some characteristics in common with Abloh but also other ones that are diametrically the opposite. While the whole Virgil’s work derives directly from American popular culture, that of Jerry Lorenzo belongs to that intellectual part of California rooted in the original counterculture of the 50s of the Beat Generation, which in fact rejects the colorful, caricatural excesses thanks to which Los Angeles is famous, breaking away from it.
The characterizing minimalism of Fear of God embraces an idea of subtraction that comes from a utilitarianism carried to the extreme. Unlike Europe, for the Americans this phenomenon does not have a bourgeois derivation but, on the contrary, it is an integral part of the subculture, of the estrangement, of the rejection of mass industrialization.
It is precisely this sort of alienation that makes Lorenzo’s work interesting, what for Europeans is a symbol of homologation, is seen and used by him as a means of revolution. For this reason the Californian designer could be a worthy substitute for Virgil Abloh in the creative direction of Louis Vuitton man’s collection, because, exactly as Abloh did, he is able to make a change but in a personal way, without risking to look like his copy but contributing to rebuild a universe inviting and understandable to all, carrying forward what the founder of Off-White had started before him.
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