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Volume 7, Issue 1-2
  • ISSN: 2050-070X
  • E-ISSN: 2050-0718

Abstract

The contemporary global fashion system is at a unique point of convergence between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and across creative disciplines and representational spaces. Fashion designers are no longer confined to the catwalk, nor to the physical object of clothing, but are multi-hyphenate creators bringing together design principles from other fields such as architecture, graphic design and fine art. Within this shifting design landscape, ‘meta’ has entered the millennial colloquial vernacular to describe anything that is self-referential, and has become a trait common to a generation whose cultural production and direct way of communicating is based upon digital social networks such as Instagram and Facebook. The ‘metamodern’ is a nomenclature paradigm proposition for contemporary culture beyond that of postmodernism and proposes an oscillation between principles characteristic of both the modern and postmodern. This new metamodern paradigm will be aligned within this article and mapped against developments in the contemporary popular ‘fashionscape’. This will include the close analysis of multi-hyphenate interdisciplinary design practitioner Virgil Abloh and examples of the global practice he has established including: his streetwear brand Off White™, his collaboration with Nike and the curation of his 2019 exhibition in Chicago, .

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2020-12-01
2024-04-25
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On metamodernism: Virgil Abloh’s borderless fashion practice
Critical Studies in Men's Fashion 7, 73 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1386/csmf_00018_1
/content/journals/10.1386/csmf_00018_1
/content/journals/10.1386/csmf_00018_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): collaboration; democratization; fashion; metamodern; streetwear; theory; Virgil Abloh

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