Nike and Off-White designer Virgil Abloh have announced plans for a book titled ICONS: Something’s Off that will examine their collaborative efforts. According to Nike, the book is underpinned by The Ten, a groundbreaking collection of collaborative shoes first launched in 2017 that examined some of the brand’s most enduring silhouettes.
Published by Cologne, Germany-based publisher TASCHEN, is a dynamic retrospective of the extensive collaborative project between NIKE, Inc. and Virgil Abloh.
More than just images of the shoes, according to press, ICONS provides “a behind-the-scenes witness to The Ten’s DIY approach, which gives each model in the Off-White™ c/o Nike collection its own unique touch.”
Writing about the book on Instagram, Abloh commented, “this book is a catalog of images from my process that are largely not on the internet. the beauty about books is exactly that. you can rarely google image search the full picture of anything.”
The book includes text by Fragment designer Hiroshi Fujiwara, New Yorker writer Troy Patterson, curator and historian Glenn Adamson and Abloh.
In support of independent bookstores, Abloh has partnered with Nike and @arch___itecture to gift the books to an international group of bookstores, many of which are Black owned.
ICON will launch first at select book stores on January 12, 2021, followed by a launch on nike.com on January 22nd.
Black-owned bookstores: Fulton Street Books & Coffee, Tulsa, Oklahoma; OK Good Books, Atlanta, Georgia; Malik Books, Los Angeles; Marcus Books, Oakland, California; Matter, Denver, Colorado; Mendo Books Amsterdam; Reparations Club; Los Angeles; Semicolon Bookstore, Chicago, and The Collective, Oakland, California.
Independent bookstores: 0fr Bookshop, Paris; Books & Books, five locations in Florida; Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn; Lower East Coast, Miami; FL Mag Culture, London; Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago, Illinois; and Skylight Books, Los Angeles.
