ICONS

A Note From Rep Club: Our sincerest condolences to Virgil Abloh's family, friends, and the entire design community. On November 28, 2021, we lost a legend. Reparations Club is so grateful for the support Virgil showed us with this release. He could have partnered with anyone in the world to release this book, but his choice to release it with Black-owned bookstores like ours speaks volumes. Rest in peace, homie. 

Bringing together all the greats--from Air Jordan 1 to Air Presto--Nike and Virgil Abloh reinvent sneaker culture with the collaborative project The Ten and redesign 10 sneaker icons. Experience engineering ingenuity and Abloh's investigative design process: each shoe is a piece of industrial design, a readymade sculpture, and a wearable all at once.

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-WhiteTM 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.

Art directed and designed by Zak Group, ICONS, as an object, honors the industrial DIY aesthetic of The Ten.

The book builds upon Abloh's printed matter practice — archiving, documenting and storytelling through books and ephemera in service of preserving important cultural stories. As an extension of this practice, ICONS will enjoy an initial early release period through select Black-owned bookshops and independent retailers, including Reparations Club, demonstrating a shared belief in the vitality of print and the importance of local bookstores as hubs of community, culture and civic memory.

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(TM)️ and Men's Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton, amongst other endeavors.