What is Virgil Abloh?

And then the next transition happens.

Yes. I was working and then all of a sudden, I got a call from Kanye West. He said: ‘Hey, I heard about this kid in Chicago who can design and understands music and culture.’ So after two years of work practising architecture, building homes and working in various small firms, I went on to be his creative director for 14 years. It was a great experience to apply the things I knew. Kanye used to say that when you become that famous, you’re the janitor with the keys to the world.

People told him there was this new kid?

Yes, like, ‘Hey, there is somebody who thinks like you’. Chicago is a big small town. People you grew up with are always telling you what’s happening back home. I had one very young professor who taught me all the digital things, like Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD, 3D rendering, 3D Studio Max. I just applied those skillsets to fashion. Kanye said, ‘Hey I need you to design this’, and I thought if I can design a building, I can think that through. And when he said, ‘Hey we’re going to build a pavilion for a lm in Cannes’, I said, ‘Let’s call OMA; let’s call Rem’, and that was how we started.

What exactly was your title?

My title was creative director, but I called myself an assistant. He was the spearhead and I would follow through. Or I would do research to add an underpinning of art and architecture to his equation. I had 14 years of running around the world taking meetings.

And you were creative director not only of him, but also of his brand?

Exactly. Which I credit him as innovating because he’s an artist. He used to make fun of me and call me Steve Jobs because I always had such a long, precise explanation for every small thing. And that added a lot of rigour to what he was doing. We are still close to this day. I’d still be studying architecture if I had not met him.

It was a decisive encounter?

Yes. I am four years younger than him. I am a part of this generation that’s the tail end of the millennials and interested in a wide range of things. I chose to focus on my own project, which doesn’t look at art, architecture, music and fashion as separate disciplines, but draws zigzag lines between them all. So I work with Kanye West, Beyoncé, George Condo, Vanessa Beecroft, Jenny Holzer. And I started Off-White™.

But you had your own fashion label before that, Pyrex 23…

I had never done anything that was completely mine to the end for 10 years, so I decided to shoot a film in New York. It’s called A Team With No Sport. I took kids from Harlem to downtown SoHo and made this brand with clothes that weren’t mine. I took Ralph Lauren and screen-printed over it. Caravaggio on the front, ‘Pyrex 23’ on the back. ‘Pyrex 23’ is a two-line poem about being in the hood. The only way to make it out is to be great at basketball – and 23 is Michael Jordan’s number – or through Pyrex, which is the cookware in which you make crack cocaine. I made it as an art piece, and on the wall is writing by my artist friend Jim Jones who’s pixelated in the video. He is like a modern Basquiat. The music is ‘Heart and Soul’ by Joy Division. It’s a juxtaposition. Being black, people would assume I’d use hip- hop, but I always use niche European music references that I crash together for a different result. It creates a wider audience. That six-minute video I shot with a friend went through-the-roof viral. Sold from colette. I didn’t even produce the clothes, they were other people’s brands. It turned out to be a seminal piece of work.

And was there a manifesto?

Yes there is. It exists online. It’s about luxury, because my clothes are placed at a luxury price point. Off-White™ behaves like a luxury brand, but the spirit and everything underneath it relates to issues of race, youth culture, and globalization.

Is it what David Adjaye would call ‘new moral luxury’?

In a way. I believe that there is a generation gap, a younger generation that the presiding generation is trying to understand. Certain fashion brands no longer speak to a younger generation.

What’s the average age of people who would buy your stuff?

From 18 to Celine Dion’s age, so around 50. I have invested in this group that the hierarchy is trying to relate to. I invested in the kids and their knowledge base. I have this tremendous base of information that I am very particular about, that I have absorbed. Off-White™ is me being a black artist in disguise as a fashion brand in disguise as a DJ, or however people choose to describe me. I chart my course by using my brand to do special projects.

Can you describe a few examples of that to me?

The diagonal lines of my brand’s logo are very similar to the work of Peter Saville and Ben Kelly, the architect who did the Haçienda club in Manchester. I’ve commissioned him to do
a mobile version of the Haçienda. It’s an Off-White™-owned piece, but whenever it is activated with music, we do it together. We debuted it in Miami at the end of last year, it got commissioned at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, and it is coming to Somerset House in London in November. Another example is Jenny Holzer, just two weeks ago. I’m from Chicago, the land of Black Panthers, real social consciousness. And on the back of Off-White™ jackets is the word ‘white’, just like ‘Pyrex’ – another five-letter word in the same font. I use thi