500 years after his death, Leonardo da Vinci is getting into the fashion game. To celebrate an exhibit of the artist’s work at the Louvre, Virgil Abloh has designed a special Off-White capsule collection featuring his paintings and drawings. “I was fascinated with da Vinci early on — I was in my senior year at Wisconsin, taking an art class,” Abloh says. “I was super interested not only by his artworks but also by the influence he had in many disciplines besides art: science, engineering, architecture… To me, he symbolizes everything the Renaissance was.”
The collection features t-shirts and hoodies baring Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks and Saint Anne paintings, as well as some of his sketches.
It’s clear how Da Vinci’s broad output is paralleled by Abloh. From fashion, to art, to architecture, to music, and even civil engineering, the Off-White designer is a modern renaissance man. The Louvre could not have picked a more appropriate choice for a collaborator.
“I want to crash together these two worlds that are seemingly different: fashion and high art. It’s a crucial part of my overall body of work to prove that any place, no matter how exclusive it seems, is accessible to everyone,” he added. “That you can be interested in expressing yourself through more than one practice and that creativity does not have to be tied to just one discipline. I think that Leonardo da Vinci was maybe the first artist to live by that principle, and I am trying to as well.”
The collection is available in stores, online, and at the Louvre gift shop now.
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