From Virgil with Love

We talked about quite for a long time and finally - after months of leak and sneak peek - the Swoosh officially presented the Nike x Off-White collection "Football, Mon Amour", which will drop on 14th of July in conjunction with the inauguration of the 2018 World Cup The collaboration was presented as part of "Expressions of Football", a project in which Virgil Abloh and Kim Jones approached the beautiful game from two different perspectives. As for the founder of Off-White, this collaboration was an opportunity to take a step back in time and return to the hip-hop sound of high school games, and his obsession to mix lifestyle and sport branding.

“The great thing about the vocabulary and history of football is that aesthetically it has its own look. I was always inspired by the way European teams have a sponsor printed over the chest. When I was working on this collection, I wanted to celebrate the different variants of typography"
Virgil Abloh

All the numbers on the jerseys reference those the ones Abloh wore during the years when he played on his team at Boylan Catholic High School. The team’s logo - a lion juggling dots - pays homage to ubiquitous crests and the pattern of dots Abloh formed when thinking about how to explain, at the most basic level, the optimal place on the foot to strike a ball.

"I wanted to communicate where a player strikes the ball. So, I put dots on the boot; if you’re going to strike the ball, your foot/eye coordination is basically the only variance of chance. That's what the collection started with, these running shoes that mimic the same as your actual boot on the pitch so that you started subconsciously training all the time. Then I just applied that aesthetic from the bottom up"
Virgil Abloh