VIRGIL ABLOH. NIKE. ICONS

In 2016, sportswear giant Nike and fashion designer Virgil Abloh combined their talents to compose a sneaker collection featuring 10 of the Oregon-based brand's most iconic designs. This project, dubbed The Ten, which reinvented icons such as the Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Air Force 1 and Air Presto, galvanized sneaker culture.

Virgil Abloh's creations, whose cultural cachet leaps off the page, exploit treasures of ingenuity and engineering. Starting from the original genius of the shoe, through lettering, collage and shaping techniques, Abloh played with vocabulary and structural elements to elaborate new meaning, not without irony. Inspired by the mischievousness of Dadaism, architectural theory and avant-garde happenings, he analyzed the elements of a model that made it instantly recognizable, then deconstructed it to form an artistic assemblage in which each shoe became a piece of industrial design, a portable readymade sculpture.

ICONS traces Abloh's artistic approach as both creator and investigator, through prototype schematics, message exchanges between Abloh and Nike designers and treasures from the Nike archives. The commas on a pair of Air Jordans are cut out and reapplied with ribbon or thread, Abloh's typical bits of text in quotation marks are found on the Air Force 1s, and the All Stars are cut to pieces. The book takes you behind the scenes, revealing the empirical approach of Abloh's DIY genius, who gave a unique look to every model in his Off-WhiteTM c/o Nike collection. This lexicon of deconstruction is reflected in the Swiss-style binding, which exposes the spines of the sections, revealing the bookmaking process.

The book describes the collaborative work put in place by Abloh and reaffirms the strength of print. Nike and Abloh teamed up with the renowned London design studio Zak Group for the design. Together, they imagined a collection in two equal parts: a catalog on the one hand, and a conceptual toolbox on the other. The first introduces the visual culture associated with the sports shoe, while the second defines the people, places, objects, ideas, materials and contexts that made this project possible. Texts by Nike's Nicholas Schonberger, author Troy Patterson, historian and curator Glenn Adamson and Virgil Abloh himself set this collaboration in the history of fashion and design, while Hiroshi Fujiwara's foreword places the project in the continuity of Nike's prized collaborations.