If you have even the slightest interest in fashion, you’ve probably heard of Virgil Abloh. He’s the phenom designer behind Off-White™, the men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton, as well as an artist, DJ, architect, engineer, university lecturer, and entrepreneur. Abloh is brilliantly pivoting again and this time into an experimental collaboration with Swiss design brand, Vitra. On June 12th, his TWENTYTHIRTYFIVE installation opened in the Zaha Hadid-designed Fire Station on the Vitra Campus displaying “the interaction between an adolescent and his home surroundings.”
Abloh developed a fictitious teenage character from the year 2019 (‘Past/Present’) and took them through to 2035 (‘Tomorrow’), exploring how design can bridge the past with the future. For the first part of the installation, he dipped into the Vitra archives and curated a collection of classic pieces that resemble the feeling of memories through a dream-like filter. The second section looks to the future and visualizes how the character might be living in the year 2035. “The teenager has become a creative “doer” who transforms his memories and experiences, all of the cultural and social influences, into his own products, thereby finding a personal field of activity,” says Nora Fehlbaum, CEO of Vitra.
