Virgil Abloh: The Codes, a Grand Palais Exhibition in Partnership with NIKE
The Grand Palais feels heavy when arriving at Virgil Abloh: The Codes. The ornate ceilings, the light filtering through tall windows, it all contrasts with the rawness enclosed inside. Nearly 20 years of work stretch out before the visitor: prototypes, sketches, personal objects, dozens of shoes. Nike’s presence looms: collaborations that shifted design culture, the “The Ten” pairs, familiar silhouettes revisited, reimagined. These are sweets for the sneaker obsessed and for anyone who cares what culture borrows and returns.
I wander among loose pages of notebooks, ink smudged, margins scribbled. I pause at an Air Jordan with its texture peeled back, a label hanging. Even unfinished works carry weight. They matter because they show process: doubt, iteration, obsession. Abloh chose to reveal not just triumph but failure and unfinished thought. That decision turns this retrospective into something fragile, luminous.
When the Nike shelves appear, the nostalgia spikes. Those designs once made for consumption now serve as relics. The display does not celebrate pure perfection. It honors the minute adjustments, the small signatures, zip ties, inside-out seams, bold text in quotation marks. Those markers became Virgil’s grammar. Seeing them up close reminds me of Sundays in high school, of saving photos, of wanting those shoes in grey markets, hoping for drops. The longing, the hunt, the thrill.
There is grief in these rooms: absence of voice, untold future. But also strength. Because creativity survived. His codes, these recurring design principles, act less like rules and more like signals. Through Nike collaborations, through Off-White, through personal library holdings, he offered access. He made public his process. He meant for the archive to be more than a shrine. He meant for it to teach.
Through the show I carry sorrow for what Virgil would still build. Some conversations with artists left half begun, some concepts awaiting realization. But alongside sorrow sits gratitude. Gratitude for what he left: both works he completed and those he left unfinished. The “codes” tether us to both. They insist on curiosity more than closure.
Leaving the Grand Palais I feel as though I have attended a rite. Not of fandom but of humanity: a reminder that making means leaning into discomfort, that legacy comes from asking questions even when the answers remain elusive. Nike’s swoosh, his sketches, the personal, the collaborative, they all are into one pulse. A pulse that reminds: creativity survives those who shape it and those it shapes.
Words and Photograhy by DONALD GJOKA
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