In 2016, sportswear manufacturer Nike and fashion designer Virgil Abloh joined forces to create a sneaker collection honoring 10 of the Oregon-based company's most iconic shoes. With their project The Ten - which reshapes icons such as Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Air Force 1 and Air Presto - they revitalized sneaker culture.
Virgil Abloh's new designs offer a deep insight into technical ingenuity and burst with cultural cachet. Building on the genius of the original shoe using lettering, ironic labels, collage and sculptural techniques, Abloh plays with language and sculptural elements to construct new meaning. Inspired by the wit of Dadaism, architectural theory and avant-garde events, he analyzes what makes each shoe iconic and deconstructs it into an artistic assemblage, making each shoe 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 cut away from Air Jordans and reapplied with tape or wire, Abloh's signature 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 collaborative way of working and reaffirms the power of print. For the design, Nike and Abloh collaborated with renowned London design studio Zak Group. Together they designed a two-part compendium, part catalog and part conceptual toolkit. 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 emerged. 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.
Specifications
Author: Virgil Abloh
Publisher: Taschen
Size: 255 × 297 mm
Size: 352 pages
Weight: 2335 grams
Language: English
Format: hardcover
