Virgil Abloh was not only the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton, he was also the first representative of the hip-hop generation to take over a major European luxury house. Unlike the couturiers and art school-trained designers of the previous generation, Abloh’s source code and inspiration came from hip-hop, an art form which samples and remixes existing music until it becomes something totally new.
He liked to disrupt symbols of wealth, such as a plain Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, by roughly emblazoning the blocky logo of his Off-White brand onto it. In doing so, he turned the base ore of an everyday polo into a covetable grail, giving it new energy and desirability. Abloh’s career closed the loop on the work that Diddy, Dapper Dan, Jay-Z and A$AP Rocky had been doing for many years. From being sued for copyright, as Dapper Dan had in the 1990s, one of hip-hop’s very own had kicked in the door of the grandest luxury maison of them all.
So Abloh understood the symbolism of olde-worlde luxuries such as AAA wholesale replica watches and had lots of fun messing about with them. His watch collection will be known primarily for three models of high quality Patek Philippe fake watches: a gold Nautilus and a pair of customised 5726 Moonphases. He wore the plain gold Nautilus in the manner most of us would wear a pair of trainers – with jeans and a T-shirt.
It was the first time any of us had seen such grand Swiss made copy watches worn in such an offhand manner. Was he dressing up streetwear with the Nautilus? Or was it the other way round?
Then there was the collab with Drake, a ‘slimed-out’ Nautilus in which the UK replica watches for sale was flooded with green emeralds, about which Drake sang, “Virgil got the Patek on my wrist going nuts” on the track ‘Life is Good’. Even by standards of hip-hop bling, it was pretty over the top.
But the pièce de résistance was his ‘blacked-out’ Nautilus customised by the magicians at MAD Paris via a process called ionic pulverisation, in which the steel outer case and inner mechanics were coated with a fine black diamond carbon. The retro-futurist lines of the iconic original designed by Gerald Genta for best online Patek Philippe replica watches in the ’70s has been a hit in hip-hop circles for some time now, but they’re usually ‘buss down’ – slang for flooded with diamonds. Abloh’s starkly minimalist version is so perfectly Abloh, it even featured his trademark “” design signature on the Patek Philippe logo on the perfect super clone watches’ face. It adhered to his ‘3% rule’ of design in which he only tweaked designs by 3% in order to totally reinvent them.
All three should now be housed inside the permanent collection of MOMA displayed alongside the Swiss movements fake Patek Philippe watches adverts of white families and the legend, ‘You never actually own a Patek. You merely look after it for the next generation.’