IKEA announced last year that it was working on a “living environment for a millennial” with Virgil Abloh, founder of fashion brand Off-White, and Henrik Most, a creative leader at IKEA Range and Supply, unveiled a selection of prototypes in a live-stream broadcast from New York late last month – that you might have seen by now. Why is this important? Or does it even matter (DIEM)? And why IKEA? Yes, we at Style No Chaser think so based on how Virgil, who is also a trained architect, approach to design and fashion is more about creating “Art.” He explains, “by the end of my career, I want streetwear to be perceived like an art movement. I often say that streetwear
in its present state is like disco. It’s such a jazzy thing. It’s so perfectly of its time. You thought disco might have aged well, but it aged poorly, because it didn’t have depth. It was missing something credible—like punk. It’s about participating in a cultural flow that has shifted. It used to be top-down—with brands, which were holier than thou, debuting ideas that would go down into the stream. They would be accepted, then consumed, and then more would come. In the last five years, there’s been a sense of empowerment to reverse that flow and send things back up. It’s a consumer revolt. And at the center of this is the Internet and social media.”
IKEA is expected to reveal more details about Markerad during annual Democratic Design Day event, which takes place in Sweden on 7 June 2018. The collection set to launch in 2019.
Read more on how Virgil ‘use other factories and suppliers to make art‘ here.
