In Brooklyn for a few days Virgil Abloh - Lifestyle sneakers

A Greenpoint Brooklyn warehouse painted orange to look like a Nike box.

Next to the door, the colossal statue of a boy who does the handstand.

Inside, on display for a few days until the end of the month, the swan song of Virgil Abloh, the Louis Vuitton designer who died of cancer last November at the age of 41: a tribute to a genius of design and fashion and his campaign to eliminate the barrier between fashion and streetwear, this time through 47 pairs of Air Force One, Nike's iconic sneaker this year at the turning point of 40 years.

    AF1 is one of the last projects Abloh worked on before he died: a combination of aesthetics, production techniques and ideology.

The design is vintage Nike, but the iconography is LV and the shoes are made in Italy, produced in the Louis Vuitton atelier in Fiesso d'Artico between Padua and Venice using the materials developed by Virgil for the spring-summer 2022 fashion show last June.

Sneakers are everywhere inside the shed: in shop windows, but mostly hung on the wall in various configurations and with the laces unfastened.

Plain, checkered, a pair covered in fluorescent fur, another with the flag of Ghana, where Abloh's parents were born, and another decorated with graffiti by writer Ghusto Leon.

    The exhibition precedes the commercial launch by a few days, but already in February 200 specimens of the collection had been beaten by Sotheby's to finance the Post-Modern Scholarship Fund, the fund created by Virgil to support young African-American talents, raising 25.3 Millions of dollars.

Of the 47 pairs exhibited at Greenpoint, nine will be offered up for auction at the end of the exhibition and the wait is so hot that sales have been limited exclusively to VIP customers on the brand's e-commerce channel.

    The retail price of the rest of the models is around 2000 euros (2500 for the high top models): double that of a typical LV sneaker and 20 times more than a standard AF1.

So much for mere mortals, but not for fans of designer Nike, one of whom paid over half a million dollars in 2020 for a pre-production example of the first Michael Jordan, while a prototype of the Air Yeezy worn by Kanye West on the 2008 Grammy stage it was sold for 1.8 million dollars.

(HANDLE).