During the Covid pandemic’s earliest phase of lockdown, Virgil Abloh decided to use the pause to dive deeper than he ever had into jazz. “I picked up a Miles Davis album, and I picked up jazz,” he told me in June 2020. “It is a black art form, it’s abstraction, it’s freeform… jazz has been my backdrop for learning during this period, and it opened up my learning.”
This immersion inspired Abloh to conceive a jazz-formed articulation of Off-White that never came to pass. Today Ibrahim Kamara, who in 2020 was Off-White’s stylist and after Abloh’s death in 2021 became its creative director, picked up on the founder’s lead and added his own improvised melody.
Before the show Kamara sketched a deep dive of his own that had seen him visit the Miles Davis archive in LA, speak to family members, and view some of Davis’s clothes spanning his beginnings alongside Charlie Parker in the late 1940s to his death aged 65 in 1991. All this, he said, supplied him with some fashion melodies to riff on: “You re cutting and pasting, and then you create a rhythm for yourself.”
Throughout his life Davis’s look metamorphosed as much as his music. With such an enormous catalogue of cool to consider, Kamara narrowed his focus to Davis’s 1970s and ’80s period, starting with Bitches Brew. Some of the womenswear was also inflected by Kamara’s research into Betty Davis, Miles’s creative and influential second wife.
Brown patchwork denim pieces in expressively ’70s shapes featured thought bubbles of differently sized grommet edged circular cut-outs, as a nod to Davis’s fondness for polka dots and Off-White’s history of Swiss cheese cuts. There were more dots and holes in knitwear and on sneakers. Dresses cut nylon against lace, using technical bungee cord as straps. This contrasting material improvisation was expanded into a menswear bomber.
Jackets featured images of Davis’s mid-’80s house in Malibu, while T-shirts came printed with his title “Yesternow” and an image of the man himself. These were part of a capsule created in partnership with the Davis estate. Silky pleated-shoulder blouson coats patterned with more polka dots and a high-shine black vinyl shirt and pant echoed iconic pieces of Davis’s performance wear. This collection cut back and forth as a contemporary tribute to two of the greatest multidisciplinary artists in the cultural canon.
