PARIS — It took just four years for Virgil Abloh to go from staging his first showroom presentation in Paris for his streetwear label Off-White to being named men’s wear designer for Louis Vuitton, the world’s biggest luxury brand.
But as far as the Chicago-born designer is concerned, his debut for the label on Thursday will mark year zero in terms of his fashion career. “To me, this is like my first show. Everything was sort of leading up to this,” Abloh said in an interview at the Vuitton studio on Tuesday.
“This is ‘life’s work’ territory, to distill, to be metaphoric in a poetic way,” he added, comparing it to Martin Margiela’s debut, when the Belgian designer laid out his groundbreaking design aesthetic. “For me it’s the same, but I gotta find myself, so this is myself on display and it’s simply about letting people see my silhouette.”
That might sound presumptuous, but Abloh is right about the scale of the task. His debut collection for Vuitton, the largest and most profitable brand in the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton conglomerate, is being hyped as the beginning of a new chapter in fashion history: the moment when streetwear crashed the hallowed halls

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