The designer Virgil Abloh was two years old when Nike first introduced the Air Force 1 sneaker, in 1982. During his lifetime, the shoe would go on to become a grail of the streetwear culture that Abloh eventually launched into the fashion industry stratosphere, and would also become the basis of one of the designer’s final projects before his death last November.
“It’s completely not a shoe. It’s an art object. It doesn’t even need to be on someone’s feet,” Abloh told the FT’s Anders Christian Madsen last summer. “It distills everything I’m saying into an object. The ‘Air Force 1’ is a basketball shoe, but through hip-hop culture it has energized a representative sculpture. It means a lot to very specific people.”
News that Abloh, who was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear at the time of his death late last year, would be putting his spin on proverbial Nike shoe (with Vuitton as a luxurious third collaborator) arrived last June, and it felt like a full-circle moment for a designer who built his Off-White label by making unauthorized riffs on branded designer goods, in turn riffing on the “knock-ups” legacy of Harlem atelier Dapper Dan. The sneaker, officially referred to as the Louis Vuitton and Nike “Air Force 1” by Virgil Abloh, made its debut earlier this year, in an edition of 200 pairs that sold for a record-breaking $25.3 million in auction at Sotheby’s, with proceeds going to a scholarship fund for Black fashion students in Abloh’s name.
This past weekend, an installation opened at the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse in Brooklyn to showcase 47 iterations of Abloh’s “Air Force 1,” his signature quotation marks outlasting his institutional co-signs that made them necessary in the first place. At the door, attendees (more than a few of whom, on Monday morning, were wearing Off-White Nikes) receive a line sheet of the 47 pairs on display. Inside the exhibition is a maze of mirror-and-concrete structures that reflect the LED-paneled floor of a cloudy blue sky. Some of the structures bear illuminated Abloh-isms: “Are you a tourist or a purist?” “Who did it first? Where did they get the idea? Is it new?” Sneakers appear to be walking across the mirrored walls and ceilings, as though the space were an ethereal, fantastical, purgatorial Foot Locker. The shoes themselves will release in June, with nine iterations going on sale starting at $2,750.
At the back of the exhibition hall is a humongous mossy treehouse, its facade printed in LV’s monogram and its life-sized tree trunk painted in Nike x Off-White University Blue. (It is also surrounded by a Vuitton-monogrammed chain link fence.) The inside channels Abloh’s Rue du Pont Neuf atelier in Paris, equipped with a monogrammed turntable spinning, among other songs, Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” and a cork moodboard of ephemera behind the collaboration. There is a display case of more AF1s, each wilder than the last: a pair in candy-colored patent leather, another covered in shaggy raver fur.
Another thing to notice about the Air Force 1s on display in the exhibition, which runs through May 31, is that the shoes themselves are *big—*bigger than the floor sample pairs you might see up at a shoe store, or on the wall at a Flight Club. They’re all U.S. men’s 12, a docent tells me. Virgil’s shoe size. “They all look big as hell, right?” she adds, laughing.
In a room full of metaphors, this one feels especially poignant. Virgil’s are big shoes to fill.
