Multi-hyphenate Virgil Abloh is the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton, the creator of the highly successful clothing label Off-White, a practicing visual artist, a music producer, a DJ, and a sneaker designer for Nike, and yet he still manages to find time to collaborate with Swedish furniture giant IKEA. For their collection, named Markerad after a Swedish word meaning "clear-cut; crisp; pronounced," Abloh and team are throwing out tradition and re-thinking the approach to traditional pieces, like door stops, rugs, display cabinets, and more. The finished collection will not be ready until 2019, but Abloh and IKEA's creative lead, Henrik Most, took to YouTube to livestream an informal conversation and present a few prototypes. "It's a powerful tool to educate and to get more people into design, and appreciate design, if they can simply see the process that we do in our meetings, in our design sessions," said Abloh. "For me, when I was growing up, I studied architecture and was into music. I always felt there was a gap between the things I loved and consumed, and who made them, how they made them, so it's a premise I gave to my design process from the beginning."
Abloh and Most's livestream didn't just pull back the curtain on a few of their prototypes, like a show-and-tell presentation. It served as a masterclass for designers, architects, and enthusiasts alike. The duo explained their design philosophy, and took viewers through their lines of thought in reimagining what they call no-name, anonymous designs—like a doorstop. "They're so pure in a way; they don't have a designer. They were born out of necessity. They're these silent, invisible objects we use in our daily life but we don't really notice them," explained Abloh. With a hole designed in the middle, he wants the doorstop to feel more artful and beautiful than strictly functional—though it will certainly serve its purpose in holding open a door. He calls it his "tool" within furniture and objects, a sort of signature that metaphorically means something when it's paired with other pieces.
The doorstop is designed to interact specifically with another item from their collection: a contemporary reimagination of the standard, wooden chair. The hole in the center is meant to anchor one of the chair's legs, to "interrupt" its design, so that there are three legs of equal length and then one that is making use of the doorstop in an unexpected way. Originally conceived by the Swedes and the Amish, the basic wooden chair is another object of no-name design and born out of a necessity that Abloh updated with contemporary lines and shapes while referencing its history. "It's taking something that isn't considered high-design value, and elevating it into an artistic object," said Most.
The pair also unveiled other objects from the collection, including a pair of rugs that bear ironic slogans: "KEEP OFF" (quotation marks included as they're another tool in Abloh's visual language) printed in bold, block letters in the middle of a Persian rug, and "BLUE" hand-stitched onto a predominantly red rug. While the latter piece can be placed on the floor, Abloh intends for it to "also perform as an art piece" and hang on the wall. "I thought about these items adding character. I purchase art, I engage in living amongst design," he explained, "but as a young person I couldn't afford quote-unquote art." So he created something that challenged the traditional nature of art and asks the questions, Is this a rug or a tapestry? Is it blue or is it red?
In keeping with IKEA's democratic design values, each item in the collection will be widely available and easily affordable—descriptors not typically applicable to Abloh's other projects. Markerad is designed with millennials and new homeowners in mind, and while the pieces in the presentation are just prototypes and subject to change, Abloh and Most felt it was important to share a look into the creative process. For more design insights and a glimpse at more of their prototypes, watch the video below.
Virgil Abloh and IKEA's Henrik Most walk viewers through their design process.
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