“QUESTION EVERYTHING” reads the black and white flag waving in front of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, coyly relabeled “City Hall” for the duration of Virgil Abloh’s new exhibition, Figures of Speech, which opens Monday.
Abloh has certainly faced his share of questions, starting with how a first-gen Ghanaian-American from Rockford, Ill., rose to the heights of the fashion world within less than a decade of launching his own line. Or whether his tongue-in-cheek, often utilitarian and “meta” design trademarks are more gimmick than genius—and too derivative, at that. And most recently, do the predominantly white design and production team behind Abloh’s Off-White belie our expectations of one of the few black designers to make it to worldwide recognition and influence?
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Speaking with an auditorium of assembled press on Friday, Abloh didn’t apologize for the demographics of his design team—instead, he scoffed, “I show my office for two seconds, and then I get in trouble for that…I’m not going to pretend that Off-White is just me, doing the work of 80 people in Italy.” Neither did Abloh attempt to qualify his aesthetics or the role consumerism plays in his success.
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