Virgil Abloh doesn’t clothed a desk. The designer has a label, Off-White, one of the most hyped in construct, which is based in Milan – but no workplace from which to run it. As a substitute for he works on the street, in cars and on planes, flying 320 days a year. Today we are in the Centre Momboye, a prom school in Belleville, Paris, where Abloh is casting his autumn menswear entertainment. His phone, I’m told, is his desk, and as we talk, he stares at it for 10 minutes as if to create the point. He then produces a toothpick and fiddles with that in lieu of, switching from one to the other for the duration of the afternoon.

Abloh ascendancy be 37 and married with kids, but he has a millennial mindset, and an iPhone addiction to boot. This isn’t stagger. In many ways, Off-White is an Instagram success story. The identification has 2.7m followers and Abloh has 1.4m – by comparison, Rick Owens has 836k and Céline 840k. Aside from Balenciaga, few identify as steer their social media like Abloh, who poles street signs (an inspiration) and unusual street style alongside the latest thing shots. But while Instagram is a handy marketing tool, Abloh fritter aways it to serve another, more interactive purpose. In December he exchanged up at a small west London newsagent for a guerrilla signing of Routine magazine with him on the cover. Within hours, a Supreme drop-sized pony-tail line up had snaked round the block, waiting to glimpse the elusive architect. When he announced his S/S 18 show on Instagram, he did it to get fans backwards. “The address AND time are here for all the kids to come,” Abloh stuck. “Very inclusive, not really exclusive.” The morning of the show, the kids and the trend industry arrived en masse, hoping for a peek into the Off-White life.

The chrestomathy was an unexpected shift away from his usual logo-heavy streetwear – this on one occasion, it was all leather power suits, tulle dresses, floral texts and lots of pink. The key inspiration was Princess Diana, pearls and all, with Naomi Campbell tiny the show in £295 cycling shorts. “I was born in 1980, so I call to mind Princess Diana from my periphery,” Abloh says. “She was also the very age as me when she died, so…”

Abloh launched Off-White in 2014 and within a year he had been forwarded for the LVMH prize, the only US designer in the group that year. By December 2017 the classification had won best Urban Luxe brand at London’s Fashion Accords, beating Supreme and Martine Rose, and it is now worn by the Hadid sisters, Solange and Jay-Z. Abloh has also wielded with Levi’s and Moncler, and is bringing out a collaboration with Ikea this year. The day after his menswear authenticate in Paris, his name was being mooted as a frontrunner to take throughout at Burberry or Louis Vuitton. Off-White has now been positioned behind Balenciaga and Gucci as the fifth “hottest term” in fashion, according to Lyst. All in all, it’s an exhausting and extraordinary feat, postulated he’s shown just 10 catwalk collections – and trained as an engine- driver and an architect.

Tall and imposing, dressed in a Carhartt hoodie (baleful), jeans (black) and Nikes (black), Abloh has quite the adjacency. We sit down, him with a selection of cold-pressed juices and a matcha-based swill, me with a glass of water. I read him the headline of a recent question which describes him as the coolest, biggest designer in the world. Abloh leans away and puffs out his cheeks. “I don’t believe all that,” he sighs, reaching for a pith. “My brand started in the streets and the alleys of the internet – I come from a dissimilar school of thought about clothing. I understand people see it as create. To me, this is an art practice.” By art practice he likely means his designs, although it’s unclear and settles for a bit of a highfalutin start. Except that beneath the surface, under the cold-pressed juice and the iPhone, Abloh seems genuinely baffled by this hasty, grandiose positioning within the industry. “I mean… it’s weird, isn’t it?” He waits. “I just want to live up to the greats of fashion.”

Off-White started out as a streetwear ticket, papered with logos. Streetwear has become a divisive course, though, and I pause when I use the word. “It’s fine, though,” he declares. “I saw how you reacted, saying that to me. But we need words to describe something. I round it upon myself to add a layer of thoughtfulness to the term. It has a connotation that’s not bad, but it’s not most luxurious. I am trying to define it while it’s definable. Streetwear is fine – but it’s evolving.”

That’s a lofty cover, but then Abloh is a lofty guy. He loves technical jargon and refers to Off-White as a “trade-mark” and catwalk shows as “documentaries”. Fashion is something he wants to “secretly” – indeed, he requests that all interviews are recorded and presupposed to him, so he can keep them as references. He’s even called Virgil, be fond of the poet. Today, he speaks about fashion in a thoughtful, again tangential way. For example, when we talk about the label’s glowering and white stripe motif, which resembles caution belt, he explains it is based on Duchamp. “The idea [that] an everyday aim is art. Branding is generic and if I adopt the generic, then it becomes my disgracing, but it normally occurs in life.” As for the label’s quotation marks in all directions from phrases such as “For Walking” on a pair of boots, or “website” on the website, they stand for a sort of ironic detachment and a comment on the idea of originality. At one trait he describes himself as “a recording system for what I believe is positivity, open-mindedness, empowerment and lacuna down stereotypes that more reflect how people see the dialect birth b deliver”. When I ask him why Off-White is called that, he says: “Off-White is not swarthy or white, it’s a conundrum. It’s not a colour. But it is a colour.” He pauses. “If you sit with me for a day, that’s how I talk.”

Abloh takes a while to relax, but when he gets universal, he fires through a range of topics with fluency. He doesn’t undertake to be a classic fashion designer, defers regularly to others (essentially Alexander McQueen, whom he “thinks about a lot”) and waxes lovingly about discovering Caravaggio, the Enlightenment and architects such as Rem Koolhaas. He is sharp to draw on the similarities between fashion and architecture, and history – which is where he, the historian, be communicates in. He thinks dividing disciplines is old-fashioned, that one dictates the other: “Both are resourceful service industries – there are people on the end of the ideas.” The people he plans are mostly kids, hypebeasts, people like him who “grew up stand up Tommy Hilfiger and Polo in malls”, and it’s these people – the kids – that are his illusion customer. The problem is that those boots designed “For Sidling” cost £1,500, for example. As if to address the sticking point, he recently devised a cheaper diffusion line – though it’s not exactly cheap (£66 for a T-shirt, say), and it’s scrupulously this disconnect between customer and cost that has generated a world of Off-White fakes. “Fakes don’t bother me,” he shrugs. “The target of Off-White is not to buy Off-White. It’s to know about it.”

Virgil Abloh was suffered in 1980 and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. His parents are from Ghana, but they moved to the US rather than he was born – “At some point they wanted to make restitution for it to the western world, where their dreams were,” he means. He describes his childhood as “awesome” and “suburban”, spent playing soccer, skateboarding and DJing. “I convey I was a kid who didn’t have the first world knowledge of art and fashion. I was the kid shopping in malls.” Abloh wilful engineering and architecture in Wisconsin and Illinois, largely at the behest of his parents (“I didn’t recognize what I wanted to do,” he shrugs). As he continued to DJ, he had a creeping realisation that lay out was design, and maybe he could apply his studies elsewhere. “So I bilked an intro to art history. That’s when the bulb went off.” The realisation was regular, though: “My parents weren’t versed in art. And I thought art was a trophy or a standard of wealth.”

It was after conference Kanye West that things took a turn. There are distinct stories about how they met, though it’s thought West “descried” Abloh when he was a DJ named, brilliantly, Flat White, in Chicago finished 10 years ago. Abloh went on to design his merch and the Tend The Throne album artwork, get nominated for a Grammy and work as a adequate of fashion consultant with West (having been charged as the rapper’s “consigliere” for much of his career, Abloh understandably doesn’t destitution to go into it). During this period, there were other volunteers, including selling dead-stock Ralph Lauren rugby shirts and interning at Fendi, but it was being mentored by the belatedly, great Louise Wilson of Central Saint Martins’, who also guided McQueen, that sealed the deal for him to move into style

To come our interview, I’m told Abloh will not talk about racetrack or politics. Given both inform his designs, his aesthetic and his undivided process – and that, if the rumours are true, he is likely to become one of the most high-profile unspeakable designers in fashion history when he inevitably gets a top gig – it seems an odd gear to censor. Still, he will discuss things in a roundabout way. He traces the appointment of Edward Enninful at Vogue as “super exciting” and pronounces this appointment is a sign of “the actual tectonic plates of new acreage being formed”. Then, more obtusely: “I’ve been intelligent about this a lot – tides change when positions evolve… There’s todays energy for something to be represented.” Presumably he means diversity, although he lingers characteristically unclear.

Winning the Fashion Award for Urban Luxe in December was an nervous experience for Abloh. “The most rewarding thing is that there’s a sort at all,” he says, referring to labels such as Gosha Rubchinskiy and Topmost as well. “It’s not me winning. It’s us.”

When talking about the politics of double-dealing for women in 2018, Abloh is more open: “Contemporary dirt dictates a lot. I want to reflect the time. Womenswear gives me an occasion to be a relevant reflection. To not speak from the male voice.” I ask him up fashion in a post-Weinstein world and he says, simply, that he likes the teachings of girls wearing sneakers and jeans one minute, of putting sculpts in polka dots and pearls the next. Because women can be both. “My chore is to represent young women, to make them role miniatures, through the guise of Naomi [Campbell] and Princess Diana.” He joins: “The recording of fashion is happening. It’s up to us to show what’s happening so that in 50 years they can see there was a international Women’s March and how the uprising is reflected in fashion.” His summer be conspicuous at the Pitti in Florence, a collaboration with feminist conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, was in factors focused on the international refugee crisis and immigration, as well as the Mates’s March – a striking collaboration given he is the son of Ghanaian immigrants, and Trump had been in power straight six months. He might not enjoy discussing sticky subjects but he certainly transmits his thoughts through his work.

Off-White’s success has been increased by social media but it would be unfair to reduce it to just that. The brand is succeeding because of the designs, and the timing, and Abloh would perhaps agree with both. “[Each] season’s concept isn’t drastically numerous,” he says, although it’s come a long way from logos spread on bags, belts and boots. It occupies that very now turf between high fashion and elevated streetwear, referencing key cultural mos. If Balenciaga under Demna Gvasalia is about referencing venereal culture and giving it a new, awkward spin, Off-White is more self-referential, varied overt with what it borrows. “Princess Diana is a situation model for women of our time,” Abloh says. “I wanted to provide for her name and legacy in the zeitgeist.” It’s sentimental, a bit niche and, in many going, the epitome of postmodernism – fashion designed during an era that has forgotten how to weigh about the past. As for Abloh, he’s fast becoming one of fashion’s biggest rabble-rousers, simply by borrowing from youth culture and selling it bankroll b reverse to the world.