Virgil Abloh Goes for Baroque With a New Line of Caravaggio-Inspired Handbags for His MCA Chicago Show

Last week, designer Virgil
Abloh’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, a
multidisciplinary presentation of his work, from fashion and
interior design to art, was extended through the month of
September—an unsurprising move, considering that “Figures of
Speech” is the museum’s third most highly visited show ever, behind
retrospectives of David Bowie and Takashi Murakami.

But not only that: yesterday, Abloh also released three capsule-collection
bags inspired by art that has shaped his creative ethos, to be sold
exclusively through the museum. The bags, in his words, offer
a unique opportunity to “literally wear the
exhibition.” 

The designer has also
filled the museum’s gift shop full of other items for the duration
of the exhibition. The space,
decked out in cool grey and silver tones and flanked by photographs
by Juergen Teller, offers limited-edition pieces by
Abloh’s fashion brand, Off White, as well as his design
collaborations with artists such as Tom Sachs, Cali Thornhill
DeWitt, Brendan Fowler, and Simon Brown.

But the exclusive bags are the main showpieces, with two of the
three prominently featuring images from Caravaggio’s The
Entombment of Christ. “Caravaggio has been a longstanding
touchstone for Virgil,” says Michael Darling, the MCA’s chief
curator. “He was an artist Virgil discovered as an
undergraduate and connected to his story, especially to his
innovations with chiaroscuro and how that could change the
direction of painting.”

Though this isn’t the first time
the MCA has ventured into selling “merch” for its more popular
artists—such as Bowie, but not Murakami, which the museum cites as
a real missed opportunity—they’ve doubled down for Abloh, realizing
the show’s take-home value.

“We knew Virgil’s audience would
be expecting products that would mark their visit,” Darling says.
“It was an easy conversation with Virgil and a commonsensical
decision for the museum to pursue it as well. Then he stepped in to
really design the look and feel of the space, not to mention the
exact merchandise, which is very typical for him and his attention
to detail and presentation.” 

In many ways, the show’s success
speaks to the increasingly close relationship between the worlds of
art, design, and fashion, each of which Abloh seems to navigate
especially deftly. A
self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, he began his career as an
architect in Chicago, where he also studied art before going on to
design and revolutionize streetwear for Kanye West and Nike. Aside
from running Off White, Abloh was also recently named the creative director
of men’s fashion for Louis Vuitton—the first African American
designer to assume a head role for the Paris-based
house. 

Abloh, it seems, is a generation-defining visionary who has somehow
managed to earn respect in three once-distinct
fields. “The art [on the bags] is a form of signage,
and the clothes are fragments of that signage, a way to further
blur the distinctions between the exhibition and the merchandise,”
Darling says. “It forms, together, a visual identity.”

Darling says he’s curious to see how relationships between art,
design, and fashion unfold and each becomes markedly less
purist.

“I see artists more interested
in the space of fashion to extend the audiences for their ideas,
while fashion designers are inspired by the freedom and
individualism that fine artists have been able to carve out for
themselves,” he says. “The art world seems more willing to envision
artists moving into fashion without losing integrity.”

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Caravaggio-Inspired Handbags for His MCA Chicago Show appeared
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