NIKE x OFF-White: Fresh “Air”

NIKE × OFF-WHITE: FRESH “AIR”

Four Days in London with Nike and Virgil Abloh

Day three of Nike and Virgil Abloh’s Off Campus summit in London.

Is streetwear-as-scholarship just the newest mutation of experiential branding? And, even if it is, does that prevent it from providing legitimately meaningful experiences for its participants?





The Off Campus events were multi-day, interactive symposia celebrating the release of The “Ten” collaboration—10 ultra-limited Nike sneakers ranging from foundational totems like the Jordan 1 to future classics like the Vapormax, all reworked by Abloh. Held in New York City and London.





This simple, goofy technique turns out to be particularly effective in exposing the machinations of contemporary branding. Until I saw Abloh’s Jordan 1, it had never exactly occurred to me that Nike owns ‘air’—the result of nearly 30 years of relentless branding, design, and production.




Nike would collaborate on this level with Abloh, the creative who is redefining the terms of engagement between brand and consumer. With his Off-White project, Abloh jumpstarted the era of participatory branding. Just as Nike honed in on something utterly ubiquitous and made it their own, Abloh created Off-White’s visual identity by taking the diagonal hash marks found on infrastructure and institutional signage worldwide and folding them into his own cosmology.

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