LVMH has sold their one-time star designer’s brand. Off-White’s performance must have been wanting

The last-standing Off-White store at the Shoppes at Marina. Photo: Galerie Gombak

Off-White, considered a pioneer of luxury streetwear, has been sold by its once proud owner LVMH. The buyer is Bluestar Alliance, a brand management company, based in New York. In their portfolio are Bebe, Nanette Lepore, Scotch & Soda, Tahari, and others of similar mass positioning. Financial terms of the transaction were not made available. Already, industry chatter call it a downgrade. It is not clear yet what Bluestar Alliance intends to do with Off-White when they welcome the latter into their fold of brands with not particularly strong presence outside America. LVMH has, hitherto, not offered a reason for the sale, but it is not unreasonable to assume that Off-White has not performed well for them. Where is Naomi Campbell when she is needed most?

Off-White was founded by Virgil Abloh in 2013 as a more solid fashion brand than predecessor Pyrex Vision. At the start, Off-White was encouragingly successful as the brand was, according to its founder-designer, “the grey area between black and white as the color off-white” that might describe the fashion world. It helped that he had the support of the Italian company New Guards Group—they had aided then-fledging streetwear brands, such as Heron Preston (now collaborating with H&M’s menswear) and Palm Angels. Although Off-White was not the first label by an African-American—there were, by then, Willi Smith’s WilliWear, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Sean John and, more recently, Shayne Oliver’s Hood by Air, just to name three—it did garner international attention. Mr Abloh was enjoying the reputation as the “main slayer on the modern day streetwear scene”, which eventually led to his appointment as the menswear designer for Louis Vuitton in 2018.

Where is Naomi Campbell when she is needed most?

In Singapore, Off-White enjoyed a good start, too. It opened its first store in 2016 at 268 Orchard Road, where the Nike flagship now visibly occupies. As we reported then, the concrete store went by the cryptic name “Windows” (quotation marks included), possibly an opening into the Black aesthetic that locals were unfamiliar with at the time. By what was discernible was the considerable queue, which could lead to the conclusion that they were successful. That year, Off-White T-shirts with the logo of a pair of arrows arranged as an X on the rear of the garment was so ubiquitous that it risked turning into a massive fashion cliché. In 2019, a new woman’s store opened in Paragon just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard. The unprecedented situation soon led to the shuttering of the first Off-White space at 268 Orchard Road, along with the other tenants on that first floor, such as the multi-label streetwear space Surrender.

In 2020, Off-White unveiled a new outlet at the Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, and it is, presently, the only store left standing. Unlike the somewhat brutalist yet eye-catching design of the debut boutique, Off-White now is easier on the eye for most of their shoppers, and is stocked to the rafters with merchandise that do not appear to have shifted aesthetically from those during their conception and their now-tired, text-centric graphics, such as what was on one raffia tote: the words “Can‘t Wait” that glared at us during a recent visit. There was an uncomfortable coldness inside. Not a single customer was present on that Friday afternoon and the two staff members did not appear to know what to do or say, except to make their presence extremely felt in the ironically “Window”-less confines. On the Off-White Singapore Facebook page, there was not a single post since May 2022.

The entrance to the Off-White store in 268 Orchard Road, 2016. Photo: Off-White

Virgil Abloh showed his first collection for LV in 2018 to rave reviews. Interestingly, his chum and one-time collaborator Kanye West “hated” the designs at the time. But that had no effect on the ensuing popularity of Mr Abloh’s LV. Three years after his debut at the French house, LVMH announced that it would take a 60 percent stake in Off-White, while the e-commerce platform Farfetch secured 40—both companies probably so impressed with Mr Abloh’s measurable success at LV that they must have thought it would spill over to Off-White. But, not long after that transaction, Virgil Abloh died unexpectedly. Unlike LV, which hired Pharrell Williams to helm it, even if they did not rush with the decision, no one of hype-level might took over the design reigns at Off-White. The brand was stuck in a limbo. In 2022, they hired the Sierra Leone-born, London-based creative Ibrahim Kamara as Off-White’s “art and image director”. Mr Kamara, an alum of Central Saint Martins, is not generating the noise that a brand without its founder needs.

In a statement accompanying the sale of Off-White, LVMH said that it was “proud of the legacy that Off-White has built under Virgil Abloh’s visionary leadership.” But not sufficiently to keep the brand in its expansive stable. No solid reason was offered to explain the sale other than that “Bluestar Alliance is the perfect partner to carry that legacy forward.” It is not clear why, despite the news-making talents LVMH is able to attract and the marketing muscle that it has built, Off-White has to be let go merely three years after Mr Abloh’s death. While it is not unusual that a massive conglomerate such as LVMH drops labels so that they could focus on their core brands, such as LV and Dior, it does appear that the group prefers not to let Off-White’s no longer pristine presence affect their overall performance. Why keep a goose that’s no longer golden or able to lay and lay those prized shiny eggs? Curiously, they have kept the weak-performing Marc Jacobs for 30 years now.