Is Virgil Abloh the Karl Lagerfeld for Millennials?

Mens wear, forget it. Want to look like you purchased yoiur clothes at H & M? L V does leather and womans clothes. Their mens clothes have never stood off the page and do not now stand off the page. He is a casual clothes designer, street wear. Hedi Slimane is a man, a designer who can design mens clothes and have fabric cut a very certain particular way. His mens clothes are superb. For classic mens clothes there are many tailors that can make an outstanding suit or jacket. Kiton, Loro Piana, Dunhill, Charvet, Chifonelli, Holland and Sherry and Dormeuil and there ae many others. In addition to a collection of fabric that will force you to sit down, the construction and fitting of their clothes is excellent. He will never design clothes like a K-50 suit. He will never design clothes with Loro Piana's cashmere vicuna blend fabric. His customers can not afford to spend that. He designs for a mass market. Kiton makes 50 K-50 suits each year. He will never approach that. All I can say is that I am glad he does not design much for their womans line.

It is self-evident that Mr Abloh is quite talented: It takes a lot of talent to self-promote to get the type of publicity and hype that he has managed in such short time. To have so many writers gushing over one’s work like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread takes a lot of charisma. His actual output? I am not too impressed. Certainly does not compare with Karl.

Art and fashion: two worlds where some people are arbitrarily christened as “geniuses,” because reasons. Who needs skill, practice, education, and craftsmanship, when one can just stroke the right egos instead? On the bright side, at least we know who’s making the emperor’s new clothes.

The comparisons to Warhol and Koons are correct. Vapid, not especially original, skating across the surface of pop culture fleecing unsuspecting consumers of cash with the promise of belonging to the in-group. At least Lagerfeld had a sense of craft.

The fashion world needs to say things like this to keep things moving along. It's about making "nutshell" statements that bestow some kind of importance on one designer over another, or one look, or one trend. Then, as this article makes evident, they get repeated, until the point that it blossoms into a non-story. This is the fodder that fashion thrives on and it's just that, fodder. It would be great if the NYTimes rose about this and gave its readers fashion coverage that rises above this.

We live in an era of disguised poverty... the amount of labor that would have gone into a couture garment a century ago is unsustainable for the fashion industry today.. so it is concepts and re/concepts logo-ed in vinyl, denim, cotton and canvas sold at the same prices of the finely crafted, We can’t afford Steak and Sushi, let’s get high priced Burgers and Ramen.

Vanessa Friedman’s pointed article makes many valid points and I find it to be refreshingly honest. However, I wonder what the fashion industry will do to address the growing obesity epidemic in the US, the world’s largest consumer market. This week The NY Times predicted that by 2030, one out of two Americans will be obese and one out of four morbidly obese. This situation demonstrates a very sick society and one that will have an impact on the workplace and the fashion industry as a whole. Even if you have millions of Instagram followers, that does not make a viable long term business model.

Karl Lagerfeld is still the Karl Lagerfeld for millennials. As a young person, I hope I am not alone in saying that, especially fashion, beauty, skill, knowledge, and originality are still more important than a cool concept, which seems to be Abloh's talent.

I don’t think the comparison is really a good one but future history will decide that. It’s sort of like comparing Kanye West to the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Creativity wise they are not really in the same league. I worked with Virgil on a project a few years ago and he is a really nice guy and obviously smart. I don’t think he’s a design mastermind or genius, though, like many of his young fans seem to think. I’m more old school and fear that hype gets in front of real quality these days. That’s just my opinion, of course.

Truly the age of decadence, turning a respected and centuries-old profession into a knock-off reality show. Sad!

Show me his hand sketches and I’ll tell you if he is a good designer or not. Almost all of these new young designers can’t even draw a straight line to save their lives.

I never followed the late Karl Lagerfeld's style of all funereal black, a wide black tie that looked like a napkin tucked into the shirt collar, and black leather gloves with cut fingers that mede his hands look like those of a strangler. I liked much more his attire in light gray that suited him very well. As to his presumed replacements, the less said, the better ...

Why does he have to be the next anyone? Abloh is just himself, and he is very much a product of the times. He’s a self promoter and natural salesman. A trendsetter and performance artist. He’s all about the bigger image, not the details. No one who buys his clothing is going to notice or care how beautifully an inside seam is stitched, or how a bodice is pieced. His fashion is just part of his bigger con. Because, yes, I do think he is playing the fashion and art worlds for fools.

I don't think Lagerfeld used "cheat codes."

Lol. "He is the Andy Warhol for our times” (The Guardian), he is “Jeff Koons (the editor Stefano Tonchi)." Seriously? A cartoonist and a balloon sculpturist are hardly the comparisons I'd want in order to be taken seriously as a men's wear designer. To say nothing of Mr. Lagerfeld. I know, I know. I just don't get how fantastic and earth-shaking the Warhol-Koons-Lagerfeld "art" troika is. I don't.

Can’t everybody just be themselves, rather than being somebody dead and buried? These are designers after all, I would hope that they could be seen as individuals rather than a shadow of somebody else. Also the catty off-the-record comments are just repellent and hint at how vicious the industry is.

It seems blasphemous only when you consider that in the era of Lagerfeld and others of the older generation of couturiers, you had to actually know how to make clothes. You needed to know about fabric, construction, techniques and the artistry of crafting clothes with excruciating attention to detail. It took years and years of training. Nowadays, all you need is an Instagram following and voila, you’re a genius. Some of us who took this craft seriously and really worked at it, sigh at the Kanye Westation of fashion. ... sigh!

I think a single circus clown brings more intelligence, abstract thought , discipline, integrity to his job that all of the fashion designers put together

I love fashion. I really do. But getting excited about fashion consumerism, while the nation teeters on a precipice about to fall into the abyss at any minute, has turned me off shopping for now. Not feeling it.

One is not better than the other. Mr Lagerfeld came from a time where consumers acquired physical objects as a goal in itself. Mr Abloh is of a time where consuming experience is the object. While Mr Abloh has neither the attention span or skill to make anything extraordinary by the standards of the past his awareness of a generation's need for a constant new moments should not be underestimated.

Virgil Abloh's exhibit at the MCA was remarkable for the variety of art forms on display. His clothing lines were part of the show, but by no means the bulk of it. There was an enormous stabile created by Virgil as an homage to Calder, several large sculptures made to look like concrete blocks used by skateboarders spray painted with grafitti and a huge billboard as an art object painted black on the front with wording on the back. The theme of the MCA show was "Question Everything" which Abloh did brilliantly with the pieces he chose to exhibit and the way each work was a part of the whole. Young people flocked to the MCA to see Abloh's show and his shoes, priced at $250 and designed for the exhibit sold out in a matter of hours. Love him or hate him, Virgil Abloh is changing what it means to be a designer and an artist.

Designing for French maison— many had diverse interesting backgrounds, including Galliano, McQueen, Marc Jacobs, etc., whose individual endeavors came with mixed results. This is a strange comparison. I am also not sure if Virgil actually really loves fashion as much as these designers did.

“There’s a suspicion, somehow, that he is scamming the industry” But the fashion industry is a scam! The clothes the fashion industry promotes are not worth the value the industry and it’s followers put on them. This season’s must-have $2,000.00 jacket from Louis Vuitton is not that much better than a $100.00 jacket from H&M. The both do the same job. If the LV version has better materials and workmanship, it may be worth 100% more. But 2000%? Not a chance. They are both off-the-rack items. It is only in the minds of the fashion obsessed that one has so much more value than the other. And four seasons later, the same obsesses fashionistas will turn their nose up at the jacket. What is the reasoning behind the inflated value of an item with such a short usable life? Why bother with the better materials and workmanship on an item that will be so quickly discarded? As detailed in article in the NYTimes not so long ago, most fashion obsessed young women will only wear an item in public once. Once an item has been showcased on Instagram once, they abandon it. Fashion is totally in the eye of the beholder. There is no intrinsic value in one garment over the other.

Comparing Abloh with Lagerfeld seems a huge stretch. Sort of like the comment comparing Maya Angelo and Shakespeare. Both are talented for sure , but on the same level? NO.

I have no comment on whether he is the Millennial Lagerfeld. Unless he's licensed the artwork from one of those t-shirts from the artist Futura, I'm already not a fan. That print/character is lifted from album artwork he created for UNKLE in 1998.

The idea of "wrong" never stopped anyone from wearing something with a designer label.

It is a trick to see this not as clothing but as art. As art and craft okay. But if there was nothing but posing, the world would be dangerously static. Maybe this is a comment about people who do see this as clothing. You will never see it on the street. Nor do I think that you want to.

Good to hear that irony is back as an explicit practice. Irony was detectable and foregrounded in the nineties, but it became an invisible and omnipresent precondition in our digital, endless-war, meme era. One assumes now that contrary or double meanings are at work. You Know Who is an epitome of baked-in irony: "don't take him literally." So for someone to practice irony -- rather than fantasy, or romanticism, or futurism -- is interesting. Whether or not it's "good" (and those "this is a product" sneakers aren't) may be less important than whether there is a market for it. If there is, it suggests a simultaneous return of the earnest and straightforward. Both are welcome.

I'm afraid articles like this, dripping with obsequiousness and self importance of those involved, making enormous amounts of money off those who feel they must purchase, does little to endear them to us ordinary folks. Few will buy or wear the clothing that is designed, not for comfort or function, but to be different and identified as 'theirs' rather than for the good of the purchaser.