🧵 Legacy in Motion: 'Virgil Abloh: The Codes' Comes to Paris

This September, the Grand Palais in Paris will host Virgil Abloh: The Codes - the first major European exhibition dedicated solely to the late designer’s trailblazing career. Running from 30 September to 10 October 2025, the show offers a timely moment to reflect on Abloh’s cultural impact, and what it means for the future of creativity, collaboration, and design.

As the lines between fashion, art, music, and tech continue to blur, the exhibition serves not only as a retrospective, but a roadmap for cross-disciplinary thinking.

Key Takeouts

• Creative Legacy as Brand Blueprint
  The exhibition brings together over 20,000 items - including sketches, prototypes, personal artefacts and archival media - showcasing how Abloh fused luxury with streetwear, architecture with apparel, and high fashion with everyday language. His multidisciplinary approach offers a strategic framework for expanding creative boundaries.

• Collaboration as Currency
  Through partnerships with cultural figures like Serena Williams, A$AP Rocky, and Takashi Murakami, Abloh built a model of co-creation that was rooted in mutual respect. Collaboration, in his world, was a method for cultural dialogue - not a marketing stunt.

• Open-Source Thinking in Action
  Abloh's commitment to transparency and shared knowledge (often releasing templates and process materials publicly) reflects the ethos of contemporary creative communities. His "open-source" mindset champions accessibility, authorship and shared cultural ownership.

• Risk of Mythology
  While the exhibition celebrates his genius, there's a risk of flattening his legacy into aesthetic shorthand. His work was deeply informed by lived experience and social context - not simply a visual style to emulate.

• From Archive to Action
  The Codes is more than a look back - it’s a call to reimagine how we create, connect and communicate. The real value lies in understanding not just what Abloh made, but the mindset and methods that shaped it.

As Shannon Abloh, founder of the Virgil Abloh Foundation, put it: “This exhibition is just the beginning.” The Codes offers a rare opportunity to engage with the inner logic of one of the most influential creatives of our time – and to consider how his ideas might inform what comes next.