Virgil Abloh

Every idea that comes to mind I execute, or I look for outlets to put out ideas.

For me, I analyze the modern girl, the girl that I'm friends with, and they're empowered: They pay their own bills. They have their own style. They wear clothes - the clothes don't wear them.

From a very young age, as a teenager, I was into hip-hop and skateboarding and all those things that were akin to a kid in the '90s. All those things are what resulted in clothes.

Graphic tees are vibes. And I think they're the basis of a lot of wardrobes, but that makes it challenging to distill what you're brand means within a T-shirt.

I have this overriding principle that streetwear could end up like disco: that it will be perceived well at the time but doesn't age well at all.

If you look at why people become wack as they get older, it's because they stop doing the things they did that were formative to their work. You can't mentally stay still. You can't not challenge yourself.

Music needs a visual element to make it tangible. So, naturally, there's gonna be a synergy between high-level art direction and high-level albums.

All the skateboarding brands that I was into had graphic T-shirts. In the '90s, there were different styles that went along with the different influences in skateboarding, whether that be hip-hop or rock and roll and grunge. And that's what I was into, so I was following all that.

Big teams are absolutely vital if you want to achieve certain results when you're working on larger scales, both in terms of physical size and productive quantities.

From my perspective, I'm trying to stand for a generation. You know, each generation has designers who go along with it.

All I do all day is think of ideas and implement them. That's an industry, you know. I'm trying to make art on a commercial scale.

For me, there's a subtlety in focusing on the right shape of T-shirt and pant. I recognise that it's boring, but the idea is to catch people off-guard and reward them in some valuable way.

To me, graphic T-shirts are the most important and most expressive format for a designer or a person. Your taste in graphic tees says a lot about your point of view.

DJing is like a great tasteful art form.

The blue-collar culture, it's not really a buttoned-up aesthetic. It's a heavy-labor thing because you're, like, sweating.

People that are able to think in terms of concepts and offer us valuable forms of art are very exciting to me.

In my case, everything starts from Marcel Duchamp and the new expressive possibilities he gave us with his ready-mades. I transferred his artistic language into today's world, choosing, for example, to use pedestrian-crossing stripes as a symbol.

There's no line between a designer and consumer.

My friends and me, we're the type that don't care. We're not into fashion. That's, like, millennial spirit.

I think the reason why Off-White exists is to modernize fashion.