Virgil Abloh Is Designing His Own Canon

In the age of collaboration, the brand that works with Virgil Abloh is king. It’s almost a rite of passage: an established company hooks up with the ubiquitous designer, who reorients a thing they’ve been producing for a while, and gives their product a new swath of eyeballs. A new space on the Venn diagram opens, or perhaps a new circle.

This week, Abloh announced another collab. Timed for Braun’s centenary, the two are updating the Wandanlage, a truest-grail-level component stereo system from 1965. Comprising a series of pieces designed by Dieter Rams, the defining industrial designer of his era and Braun’s thirty-year head of design, the original Wandanlage is an assemblage of speakers, a radio tuner and a reel-to-reel tape player set horizontally on a wall, with a turntable and Vitsoe-like shelving below. It is arresting, and novel.

Abloh’s reinterpretation recasts the whole thing in chrome, a sort of tip of the cap to Houston slab culture, with some new fonts on the buttons, but the same stereo intact. Abloh’s piece, which he refers to as “functional art,” comes with a mixtape he made that’s a collaboration with OG Ron C, the epochal Houston DJ, chopping and screwing jazz classics. Abloh’s version is less clinical than Rams’ design, and is brasher. In an era of streaming, pocket-controlled music, shouldn’t a stereo system be something to stare at?

Original Wandanlages are effectively unpurchasable; buying the components is a headache, and the rare mint sets that pop up go in the five figures. So while Abloh’s involvement might not drive vintage prices up, he could bring some out of the woodwork. Either way, it’s a reorientation: a celebrity designer’s take on a legendary designer’s less-heralded project, one that leads us to rethink design canon—there’s no iPhone without Rams—and take a more visual look at history. Abloh talked to GQ about his work with Braun, getting older, tension in design, diversity in art, and what he’s working on next.

I wanna get right to it. Updating the Wandanlage: nuts and bolts, how’d you make it different? What’d you do?

For me, my design process always starts from research and understanding. So even before [making it] there was an impetus to look at the Braun archive and find something that was timeless and, because of its timelessness, related to today in a unique way—a design lesson. This wall unit that I arrived on, to me, is an icon of design. It’s not necessarily obvious to say, “Hey, audio should be on the wall.” And I think that that was a leap. It was radical at its time, and I think it’s radical now. You know, music can fit in the pocket of your jeans, but the idea here… it had this interesting tension. For me, it was about writing a new history on such an icon—and that’s where it became chrome, that’s where the music fits in. I’m making a mixtape for it. It’s truly a functional piece of art; the music that’s being played on it is from a different culture. It gets nuance in that way.

I haven’t seen the photos of it. Have you included the reel-to-reel? It feels like a must, right?

Yeah, that’s what makes it, you know, magical. It’s this archaic piece of technology but still, in a way, romantic, having the reel-to-reel on it. The whole thing is chrome. The reel-to-reel goes chrome, the turntable goes chrome, there’s new typography, but the whole thing is essentially a mirror now. And it was brushed white matte metal before.

More like a car—the Houston slab thing.

Exactly—you know, hip hop’s love affair with chrome.

So it’s functional art, but also feels a bit like a sculpture—it’s for listening, but you can obviously just stare at it. How much of the function is the aesthetic value here?

To me, it’s huge. It’s almost absurd. And that’s what I love, and that’s what’s so daring. This is a real piece of design, it almost doesn’t look [like it was] commercially ever available, it looks like it could’ve been just a pure piece of art. But for the team at Braun, to look at home audio in a radical way, and have it play music, but visually look compelling and not be floor-supported—and not be like other audio companies at the time, focusing on “you can just put that on the floor”—I thought it was a great reminder for design today. We can’t be pigeonholed by function. It can still have tension.

The tension is the jump between aesthetics and making it so simple?

Exactly, aesthetics. We all know what Braun products have influenced: iPhones, and if you go into an electronics store or a home goods store [so many things there]... The influence of modernist design is generational, and I think the power of an aesthetic leads our taste—we like this, we don’t like this. And we happened on this term, “functional art.” Those are guidelines to drive: what’s an artistic quality if you pour it into a mundane object, like home audio, or if you pour it into a pencil sharpener? You end up with a company with 100 years of history and timelessness, because they’ve embedded those logics into their DNA.

Is that what speaks to you about that golden era of Braun, Vitsoe, Rams? Is it up there for you with Le Corbusier or Jeanneret—is it one and the same?

Yeah. If you’re familiar with my work, I’m interested in the canon. I’m interested in anything that becomes written in stone, especially in design. You get a character like Steve Jobs or Jony Ive that can assert a new canon that’s widely approved. The reason for this project was saying: Hey, me and my tribe of friends, the culture now, the word streetwear is thrown around, it feels like a renaissance, we have these tools, Google and knowledge and school, mixed with our own rules. Do we have the ingredients to insert a new logic of a golden era? Or is this one? And of course, you don’t know when you’re making it. But the only way you can fulfill that is to make things and look at it from a broad scale.

Is that idea is something you’re pushing towards? Is it internalized, or something you’re grasping?

I’m fortunate enough to not be young anymore. Earlier in my life, it was about being 17 forever, and now that I’m 40 and seeing myself as a 17 year old, it’s quite apparent. I’ve been researching the same sort of thing. How can a generation that grew up on the Lower East Side, where taking a Yankees logo and turning it upside down, and putting it on a T-shirt and saying, “That’s ours,” there’s a lot of nuance in that. Or hip hop, and Black culture. When you talk about diversity in design, obviously, if it comes from a different place, what is that?

With this wall unit…my latest work is probably the most developed. And this being made later than fashion shows [I’ve designed] and things like that, describing hip hop’s relationship to the chrome, and to the music it’ll play—I’m doing it with OG Ron C, it’s going to be like, chopped and screwed jazz classics playing from the wall unit. That’s the thesis.

You take a canon of design—of European, almost undisputable modernism—but then take a niche subculture—Black music and its relationship to chrome rims. And the beauty of it is you tell a new story based on a canon that’s from a different point of view.

It’s all part of the same thing, right? Houstonians driving Chevys built in the ‘60s, whose Detroit designers were inhaling the modernism coming from Europe. It’s a beautiful thing...

Yeah, but the loops are rarely made. Those loops just exist between friends in Brooklyn, or architecture students griping about something. But I task myself with trying to do it above ground.

So do you see Rams’ Less but Better approach showing up in your work, consciously or unconsciously? It feels like both of your designs are uncluttered, but are also immediate in a shared way despite the work being in different mediums.

For me, it’s interesting because it’s different. This is going to be a tangent…I was watching Serena Williams vs. Naomi Osaka last night, and an art principle that comes from it is that time is the main factor. You take a girl who’s at the beginning of her career, and she and Serena are competing at the same time and you can’t distinguish time from that equation. One may win, but it’s a different trajectory [for each of them].

It’s the same with Dieter Rams. We will always be compared… I’m looking at the canon like a canvas, because it’s indistinguishable to be a part of our ethos. And that’s like streetwear, this sort of ready-made [thing] as an overriding influence of now. These things have existed in their scenes as fact. I’m interested in how they can take on a new story in a very nuanced but also apparent way.

Your designs, the streetwear in New York in 2001-2, both making up the air we breathe?

Yeah. One of the hypotheses [I have] is about our generation’s way of making. Take the term away, because I don’t like the term streetwear, but I think it describes an art movement of now. Just the same way that in the ‘50s there was this modernist movement, an international idea of design, the distillation of Bauhaus and those sorts of things. I think that we are a generation that’s searching for what rules can you break, or which rules are the real ones, and so I try to manifest all that thinking to within an object.

As part of this project, Braun commissioned a study polling 2500 Gen Z kids on the future of design. What did that study tell you?

The joy of my upbringing has always been half education, half friends exploring the world, trying to make some sort of hypothesis where we’re writing our own book. I don’t like to read too much of other people’s canons because I like to arrive on it [myself]. But obviously, Dieter Rams and the history of Braun and the founding principles are so impactful, because they ring true and sound absolute… Less is More, probably one of the greatest [pieces of] simple logic... And I question those things. I think about my culture, I think about diversity in thought, and how does that manifest itself in objects. It’s kind of like I read everything with one eye open.

The collab feels educational, like a lot of others you’ve done, opening a door to people who maybe have not heard of Jeanneret or Rams outside the old guard design sphere. You’ve said you want the kids who come in after you to do things that wouldn’t have been able to have been done before. What are those things? What do you see being done?

You know, for a long time a lot of these home projects [focused] on the closet. Fashion is one of the more malleable things to iterate on, because you grow up liking a brand, and you wear something, and you might switch your style and wear something else. And now, there’s a generation of fashion designers that’s even more prevalent than when I was coming up. My foundation is in architecture, and if you just look at a floor plan of a house, how much young energy is going into just the closet versus everywhere else in the square footage? I want to see what the next couch is going to be, I want to see what the modern effects of the Internet, and working from home, has on floor plans, furniture, homes. I hope that our generation takes that same rebellious spirit towards self education and putting an idea to all the systems around us, digital and physical.

Are these things you’re working on yourself, or is it a torch that’s being passed off to a 23 year old who’s maybe not as indoctrinated?

I have Alaska Alaska—that’s my art studio, and I mentor kids. They’re younger, they’re half my age, but they work with me on these projects. The idea is to be a steward. When you come from left field—I’m a kid from Chicago, it wasn’t a given, I couldn’t just assume, “Oh, I can call up Braun and mess with Dieter Rams.” That’s few and far between, so I can understand my privilege. The work that I do [is] to hypothesize, and also to literally and figuratively open the door for younger kids like me. The kids in my studios, they’re the ones who’ll be doing that work [you mentioned]. I’m curious. I’ll do one project but inspire them to do 10 more.

How can we make design more inclusive? Are the doors open enough? Is the change grassroots?

It’s a hard question for me to answer. It’s a big question for the industry. I’m 40 now, so I’ve just been head down, laser focused on working at a crazy pace. To believe that the world, that these systems could be… you have to be optimistic to do what I do. I never harp on the things and doors that I can’t walk through. And I pick my head up, in a year like last year, and now even, I now have a tremendous platform to ensure those things are done, and more so leading by example. It’s a part of my practice, diversity, to the point where it’s on my skin. So I think for the industry to be receptive to the world climate, and understanding of how history makes our “now,” [is the question].

It’s quite optimistic where we can go. If you look at this project with Braun, for example: I come from a different background, but I respect the heritage and DNA, and we both make something better than we would have separate. For companies or institutions—it can be a museum—looking to say, How do we update, how do we modernize? Tell new stories, put it in the hands of someone who’s young and respects the past, and we’ll end up with better institutions. And so that’s my M.O.

Rams designed for years, making everything, and then dropped his 10 design principles well into his career. I’m curious: is that a path you see for yourself? Is there gonna be a codex you’re conscious of, not conscious of, that’s laying out what’s been going on behind the grand scheme of your work—shoes, design, fashion, everything?

You’re onto it exactly. When COVID hit, I was already slowing my pace, and once you hit an age marker, like 40, shit starts to look different. I like this tension between terms that I don’t like, like streetwear, and the ecosystem. So I’ve always been arcing towards writing it in stone, exactly. I often refer to my career as a Trojan Horse. That’s like my internal speak.

What are you breaking into?

Well, that’s the question. It’s better for you, for a writer to summarize. It needs a longer lens, basically. Like, in 30 years. If you look at Rams’ work, and look at where we are now, you can actually see it more high-res. So for me, you have to do work to make a hypothesis. If you were to look inside the Trojan Horse, obviously there are all sorts of rules—all sorts of in-progress things, ways of making and understanding culture. There’s a hypothesis. And an industry and world that’s not so diverse—art with a capital A, design with a capital D. Figuratively, that’s the wall.

But how to write it down so that others can do it and understand it, so that others could break down the wall and so others don’t have to run through the wall? That’s where I come in. It’s for the betterment of time and of our culture. How do you become a proponent of change? I think Dieter Rams did that. He summarized his findings. And I’m trying. It’s things I toy around with: new texts to release, or a book. It doesn’t even have to manifest itself like that.

So it’s out there a bit, but not in the same way as Rams’ 10.

Yeah. What I’m finding is that it’s organically creeping into the work. I started COVID, the quarantine period, writing this book, making a studio book. It’s called Black Canon, it doesn’t have any text yet, it’s a compilation of ideas, but not meant to release. It’s just meant to sit there.

It’s your studio book.

Yeah, and so that has informed, say, when you dial in the Braun project, or when you look at the last Louis Vuitton show, or when you look at whatever I start in the next coming weeks for the rest of the year. It’s like I have a guiding principle of how to do what we’ve done with the Braun project. Two different things.

That’s the time you’re talking about. The tennis match is contained in the book.

[Laughing] Yeah, exactly.

What’s next that you’re excited about?

What’s so weird is, it’s the new year, but it seems we’re still, like, in limbo. We all had this feeling that once 2021 hit, you’d see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I’m such an overproducer that I’m stopping myself. I’m waiting for other friends to go. I need a new Drake album, I need Rocky to do something, I need Rihanna. Just to sit back and be an enjoyer of culture. That’s what’s on my to-do list.

But producing less for you—that’s what, third lane of the Autobahn?

[Laughs] Yeah, that’s the problem. In between interviews, I’ve got some crazy stuff going. It just means making stuff and putting it under wraps. Like, I have an Instagram post that I have to do in two minutes that’s, like, a good one.

Originally Appeared on GQ