THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Emotional, poignant, moving – words to describe Virgil Abloh’s final collection for Louis Vuitton, re-staged in a spin-off show earlier this year in Thailand. Abloh’s recurring notes of youth, imagination, wonder and possibility coalesced in a swansong for one of fashion’s greatest and most dearly-missed game changers. Gordon Ng reviews from Bangkok.

- Gordon Ng

In just eight seasons, the late menswear artistic director Virgil Abloh has left an indelible and hugely influential imprint on Louis Vuitton. His final collection, dubbed Louis Dreamhouse, was recently re-staged in a spin-off show in Bangkok – the first of its kind for Vuitton’s men’s collections (topped off with nine newly shown looks on the runway), and perhaps the largest such event by the French luxury brand in Southeast Asia.

The rendition in Bangkok built particularly on the “Boyhood Ideology”, a central tenet of Abloh’s work. Essentially, it’s a position of naivete and openness; the idea that the precipice of coming-of-age happens to be the most creatively fertile. In the running list of terms and definitions that Abloh introduced as a way of recording his expanding creative vocabulary each season, this ideology is described as the sensibility of a child “yet to be affected by the preconceived ideas of society.”