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If you had wondered when Off-White’s transition from Virgil Abloh would take place publicly, when the designer’s beloved ghost would finally depart and leave only his abundant DNA: it happened in New York on a sunny Sunday afternoon on the busy basketball courts of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Ib Kamara showed his first collection as the official creative director of the Milan-based fashion label, after two-and-a-half years designing it without the title.
The brand’s website still doesn’t mention him, instead offering a founder’s tab titled “Virgil is here”. Kamara’s Wikipedia entry lists his primary occupation as his former role as editor of Dazed magazine, and as a stylist, without mentioning that he has been leading design at Off-White since April 2022.
Yet Kamara on Sunday gently guided Off-White into a future that is more focused on flexing its American roots than in the past, while adding a fresh personal element: subtle references to the African continent, such as traditional mud prints.
Kamara was born in Sierra Leone. And as he visited Ghana this summer, he conceived of the spring 2025 collection, the first that is officially his after he was quietly, and without fanfare, given the title earlier this year
“Now my name is really on it,” Kamara says backstage, with a bright smile.
The brand is attempting an unusual transition, of a sort that is rare in an industry that has become accustomed to putting labels in the hands of one designer after another. Sarah Burton was handed the reins on Monday at Givenchy, after leaving Alexander McQueen last year, making her the label’s seventh designer since its founder, Hubert de Givenchy, left in 1995. But Abloh’s unwanted departure from Off-White, a fresh wound, demanded a waiting period.
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Kamara’s new creative director title signals his control of designs, ad campaigns and how consumers meet the label visually. It comes after more than two years of tiptoeing, as in April 2022, Kamara was given the responsibilities of designing and leading the label with the mysterious title ‘art and image director’, which signified creative involvement without clarity on his powers or responsibilities.
When Kamara and I grabbed a coffee last November in Los Angeles, at the Sunset Tower bar, he conceded that he was wondering whether or not he would attain the creative director title, since he was already doing the job, and said he was feeling ready to wear that mantle. As he repeated my question about the formalisation of the transition (in his soft voice), his eyes wandered to two members of the Off-White team at the time.
An awkward silence followed. Our conversation moved to the delicacy of replacing Abloh, whose death at 41 from a rare cancer in 2021 left the label shocked and well aware that it would be difficult to separate Abloh from Off-White. Kamara stepped into the brink.
It may have been a fitting period of mourning — much longer than Louis Vuitton’s, but Off-White was a product of Abloh’s imagination and passion, as well as the savvy risk-taking that allowed him to pull off basing his label in Milan and showing it in Paris.
While Pharrell Williams brought his own global star power, despite a lack of design training, to the job at Vuitton, Kamara had been largely a behind-the-scenes player with no consumer star power to wield.
Still, Kamara appears to have spotted an anomaly — and is now exploiting it. Off-White was always a bit of an oddity at Paris Fashion Week. Its ultra-American essence was on display when Abloh upended classic cars as sets in a devotion to US car culture, or when he showed in a Paris parking garage in another reminiscence about American car culture. Europeans knew the label was cool, but it was never clear that they could intrinsically relate to the message.
Like Abloh and Williams, Kamara is using his world to take Off-White forward, and he says the Milan-based-Paris-showing label is most at home in New York. What other city would welcome a label that is based in Milan, shows in Paris, built by a Chicago native and led by a London resident?
“We’ve never shown here,” Kamara notes, “I think it’s good for the brand to come home.”
“V really wanted to show here for a very long time,” he says, referring to Abloh by his first initial. “Now that I’m looking at the brand, I feel it’s also my responsibility to honour that vision and bring it to New York and hopefully keep showing it here.”
“It’s me blending my African roots with a very American brand,” Kamara says. “I’m finding myself within Virgil’s incredible universe and exploiting my point of view was well.”
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