Final

Virgil Abloh’s Contribution to Collaborations

In October of 2017, Virgil Abloh, the designer for the streetwear brand “OFF-WHITE” released a collaboration with Nike that would go on to become the biggest collaboration of the decade and win him the Footwear News Achievement Award for ‘Shoe of the Year’ in 2017 for his Air Jordan 1. It was the release of “The Ten”

The idea for “The Ten” collaboration was simple. Take ten Nike shoe models and do something no one has ever seen before. He deconstructed them. For all ten of these pairs, he actually designed them using an X-ACTO knife to carve away key features of the shoe to see if it was still recognizable. 

He divided the collabs into two groups, “ghosting” and “revealing”. The ghosting pack featured translucent patterns that could be seen through and the revealing pack really focused on breaking the shoe apart.

With this collaboration, I believe that he set many new trends that will be continued for years. For one, it looks like Nike has increased collaboration efforts. As of 2017, many new collaborations (Drake, Travis Scott, Parra) have begun and many creators get more than one chance to make a shoe.

I believe he completely changed how collaborations work as he was the first to take away from the shoe and sell it instead of adding more stuff on. Travis Scott’s Dunk Low’s have a secret elephant print design in the shoe that can only be revealed if the upper sole is torn off.

Abloh also made the translucent color popular on shoes again. It was popular in the early 2000’s with one of the most popular Air Force One colorways being translucent but it died down around 2006. Abloh made it cool again with the ghosting half of his “The Ten”. Nike has since released translucent colorways of the React 87’s, Air Max 270’s, Zoom Fly’s and the Air Max 90 to name a few.

Abloh’s greatest contribution to future collaborations though was bringing back sneakers. Abloh customizing a pair of Blazer’s and Presto’s completely brought them out of the 90’s and back into the spotlight. Because of Abloh, we got the Acronym collaboration with Nike with their Air Prestos and Sacai’s collaboration with Nike Blazers. Abloh made it cool to redo old shoes.

I believe Abloh to be the best collaborator with Nike and I believe we’re going to see the effects of his work ripple for the next 5 years of sneakers.

https://create.piktochart.com/output/46408513-untitled-infographic-copy