Virgil Abloh never treated an icon as something too sacred to touch. Quite the opposite. An arrow, a hoodie, a sneaker, or even a quotation mark could be questioned, altered, sampled, and sent back into culture with another meaning. Off-White 10x10: Icons Reimagined takes that instinct seriously, handing ten house signatures to ten people who already understand its language and asking them to interfere with it. This Milan Fashion Week, the experiment finally occupies a world of its own.
Ten Icons, Ten Very Different Minds
The casting is what saves 10x10 from becoming an archive exercise. Raul Lopez, founder of Luar, takes on the Jitney bag, filtering it through the New York and Dominican references that inform his own work. Veneda Carter tackles womenswear through Off-White’s punctured Meteor motif. Renell Medrano works with eyewear, while Ava Nirui gets perhaps the most deceptively ordinary object of all: the T-shirt. Her version draws on gender-neutral dressing and the youth culture of the 1990s.
Scott Mescudi, aka Kid Cudi, revisits an Off-White sneaker first seen in 2021 and reconnects it with its sporting origins. Stéphane Ashpool works on the varsity jacket, a particularly intimate assignment considering his friendship with Abloh. Japanese designer Yuta Hosokawa treats the hoodie as a means of communication, while Guillermo Andrade of 424 uses denim with Abloh himself as a creative reference. Photographer and filmmaker Bafic takes Off-White’s typography and fine print, and A$AP Nast turns to objects.
Inside the Imaginary Palace
For Milan Fashion Week, those ten interpretations occupy Imaginary Palace, staged at Off-White’s home at Via Orobia 13. On September 23, the maison hosted an invitation-only evening for its community and friends; on September 24, the space welcomed registered visitors for conversations, workshops, and music.
Off-White’s vocabulary has always been unusually easy to recognize. The arrows, quotation marks, industrial graphics, Jitney, Meteor cutouts, hoodies, sneakers, and utilitarian objects functioned as visual shorthand long before most luxury houses learned how powerful that instant recognition could be.
10x10 asks a more interesting question: once everybody recognizes the code, what happens when someone else is allowed to tamper with it?
