Our very own Ghanaian original Virgil Abloh, who presides over as creative director for Louis Vuitton, has unveiled his ad campaign for the fashion house, intended to foreground his visual intent for the menswear department as creative director.
Abloh, well known for not following trends and making the unusual happen with cloths, debuted his campaign with kidz and teenagers ranging from age 3-16. The campaign comes in three different sections with each shot by different photographers and having a sense of inclusivity, regardless of color and age.
The first features a three-year-old playing with paper boats wearing an oversized jumper from Abloh’s Wizard of Oz-themed spring/summer 2019 collection and seven-year-old child actor Leo James Davis with his eyes closed as he basks against a rainbow backdrop, and 16-year-old actor Luke Parel wearing a poppy-print jacket. The chapter is titled ‘infancy, childhood and adolescent’, and is used to represent different stages in a person’s upbringing.
In the second part is named ‘The Painter’s studio’ and it captures, Abloh as the artists in the centre styling one of the many around him from his own camp. The image represents three themes that revolves around Abloh’s work at Louis Vuitton, listed as ‘diversity, inclusivity and unity’.
The last, which is the third of the campaign pictures teenage student wearing different colors of T-shirts designed by Abloh himself. The T-shirts doubles as the gifts he gave to the 1500 young students he invited to his Spring/Summer 2019 show.
Sharing an insight of the campaign’s motive with Vogue, Abloh disclosed, “I wanted to make something that is universal and human at the core. Inclusive and dense, something that has gravity. So I decided I was going to focus the campaign on boyhood, not menswear. What makes men? The different stages in one’s life, from infancy all the way through teenager, adolescent, young adult to adult.”
Image credits to Louis Vuitton
