The designer, who grew up in Rockford, Illinois, before studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by a master’s in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, began to think about our relationship with nature and the way we interact and go on adventures in the great outdoors. “I look for a leap forward and I always want to discover the unexpected twist,” says Abloh approvingly. The vehicle secured Maybach’s reputation as an aspirational, innovative automotive brand. “The Maybach is the epitome of luxury with 100 years of history,” says Abloh of the W3 car that Karl Maybach and his father Wilhelm conceived. Virgil Abloh (left) and Gorden Wagener (right), pictured while they were working on the Project MAYBACH collaboration © Courtesy Mercedes-Benz | Virgil Abloh and Gorden Wagener On 30 November, he will also stage a spin-off Louis Vuitton show in the metropolis, presenting its SS22 menswear collection with 14 extra looks he’s designed specifically for the occasion.
In fact, Abloh is planning a creative blitz on Miami. The art-world intervention is a jump from the car-boffin audience of a motor show. Gallerists, collectors and artists will be admiring the Maybach’s surprisingly sturdy silhouette and signature two-tone panelling that segues from earth tones to black under the palm trees, to the rhythm of ocean waves. Their second, which the pair have been working on for the past year, is Project Maybach: an electric show car that will make its world debut on 1 December to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach. The duo’s first collaboration in 2020 was the radical reworking of the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (the first model dates from 1979) as a stripped-back, monolithic racetrack car with analogue speedometer and dials. So we met and thought, ‘Let’s do something here.’” We are both reporting to big systems of design but we are both still captivated by the small stuff and what we don’t know. In fashion, I aim to do that too, to demystify the operation of a fashion house: that big daunting building with no way to get in! Everyone knows where the door to ‘buy’ is but not the people behind the brand. “With industries like car design, you often get a feeling there’s nothing human there, but with Wagener’s feed I could follow different projects. Wagener has nearly half a million followers, while Abloh has so far clocked up 6.4m. “He has a great profile,” he says of Wagener’s glossy feed of silhouetted cars and fetishist details. Like many creative unions today, Abloh first encountered Wagener via Instagram. The Maybach W3 presented in September 1921 at the Berlin Autoshow Virgil Abloh (right) and Gorden Wagener (left) working on Project MAYBACH designs © Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz He now helps launch new brands and will collaborate with existing ones, adding creative magic to its interests in areas such as wines and spirits and hospitality. In July, its owner LVMH took a 60 per cent stake in Off-White and extended Abloh’s remit at the company.
Polymath designer-architect Abloh, founder of Off-White, has been at Vuitton since 2018. You know within the first five seconds if you are going to connect with someone and those first impressions are never wrong. That meeting two years ago was the start of a great friendship and collaboration.” “The space was nothing that I would have expected – there were DJ mixing decks, pieces of furniture and clothing in a bright open space.
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“It was a Saturday, and I was in front of this huge building but there was no doorbell,” says Wagener, who eventually gained entrance, via a series of phone calls, security gates and an elevator, to the studio of the men’s artistic director for Louis Vuitton. When Gorden Wagener, chief design officer of Mercedes-Benz, first paid a visit to Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton’s headquarters in Paris there was a small hitch.