To kick off Paris Fashion Week was Spaceship Earth: an “Imaginary Experience,” –the Off-White F/W 2022 presentation, featuring the last designs by the late Virgil Abloh.
Adjectives that describe its grandeur would pale in comparison to the experience. Abloh may have been a disruptor in fashion, but he never did it for just the sake of spectacle, there was always something more to it.
Take how the show opened with quotes from Pharrell from a 2020 interview. ”Share the codes… share the cheat codes. A lot of us had to figure it out ourselves… that’s where we go wrong. The more of us that learn the codes, the stronger we are.”
Understand how the show features 84 looks, completed through the team Abloh often collaborated with. Focus on the white flag that paraded in the middle of the show that said ‘Question Everything.’
From heavy all-black ensembles to fun bight slip dresses and athleisure pieces, everything carried Abloh’s creative spirit.
In this celebration, everyone who inspired Abloh was present: Instagram favorites Karlie Kloss, Gigi Hadid, and Joan Smalls, Mother-daughter supermodels Cindy Crawford, and Kaia Gerber, tennis star Serena Williams, legends Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Amber Valetta, and Karen Elson also showed up. It was high energy all the way through, messaging only Abloh love for whatever comes up next.
In attendance were also Abloh’s most prominent fellow creatives: Idris and Sabrina Elba, Pharrell Williams, along with Jonathan Anderson, Olivier Rousteing, Matthew Williams, Guram Gvasalia, and Jerry Lorenzo. Carla Bruni, France’s former first lady, was also there.
The show came to a fever-pitch close, and I knew there would be a frenzy, so I stood up immediately, only to see a pile of photographers swarm Rihanna. In attendance with beau ASAP Rocky, she was graceful and kind despite the craziness around.
I couldn’t help but think that the show, from start to finish and with the aftermath that followed, proved that we exist in a fashion world that Virgil Abloh created from his imagination.
