Virgil Abloh Teams Up With the Louvre to Create a Leonardo da Vinci Collection, Continuing His Quest for Art-World Domination

Silk ties, heavy scholarly tomes, and postcards are standard
museum shop fare for blockbuster exhibitions. At the Louvre, where
a current solo exhibition devoted to original Renaissance man
Leonardo da Vinci marks the 500th anniversary of the artist’s
death, the retail inventory includes Da Vinci-themed cake dishes,
Vitruvian Man earrings, and kits for making miniature models of his
outlandish inventions (such as a self-propelling cart, catapult,
and flying machine ornithopter).

As of today, the Louvre gift shop will also stock a capsule
collection of t-shirts and hoodies custom-designed by multihyphenate
creative powerhouse Virgil Abloh. The line is a collaboration
between Abloh’s luxury ready-to-wear label, Off-White, and the
Musée du Louvre, and incorporates graphic mash-ups of Da Vinci
paintings with the Off-White brand logo.

Abloh first became fascinated with Da Vinci during his senior
year art class in college. “I was super interested not only by his
artworks but also by the influence he had in many disciplines
besides art: science, engineering, architecture,” he said in a
statement.

The same could be said of Abloh himself, whose flurry of
activity over the past couple of years has touched a broad swatch
of disciplines and, in many cases, overlapped with both the revered
Renaissance artist and the Parisian museum. Abloh incorporated
graphic images of the Mona Lisa into shirts and iPhone
cases for Off-White’s Spring/Summer 2018 collection, and presented
an Off-White collection beneath the Louvre during Paris Fashion
Week in January of this year. Last month he released a houseware
collection designed in collaboration with IKEA, which notably
includes a $99 lightbox of the Mona Lisa (it’s twice the
size of the original, and fitted with a USB port so
that La Gioconde can charge your phone).

“We are thrilled to see how the palace and museum collections
have inspired Virgil Abloh,” said Adel Ziane, director of external
relations at the Louvre. “Our collaboration with Off-White and this
multitalented artist also gives us the opportunity to reach out to
a new audience and encourage them to take interest in the
Louvre.”

Abloh’s collection—photographed inside the Louvre’s Grande
Galerie—comes a year and a half after the release of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s viral music video, Apes**t, also
filmed at the Louvre. The clip challenged notions of who has
traditionally belonged at the hallowed institution, and included
scenes of the musical couple in front of the Da Vinci painting for
which the Louvre is known best—the Mona Lisa. Apes**t
caused the museum’s attendance numbers to surge, bringing
new visitors to its galleries.

“It’s a crucial part of my overall body of work to prove that
any place, no matter how exclusive it seems, is accessible to
everyone,” says Abloh. “That you can be interested in expressing
yourself through more than one practice and that creativity does
not have to be tied to just one discipline.”

The post Virgil Abloh Teams Up With the Louvre to Create a
Leonardo da Vinci Collection, Continuing His Quest for Art-World
Domination appeared first on artnet News.