As first reported by Vogue, in one of the first scenes from filmmakers Mahfuz Sultan and Chloe Wayne Sultan’s new documentary for the venerable fashion magazine on the legacy of Virgil Abloh—titled simply V, as the designer and polymathic creative was known among his friends—we see one of Abloh’s best friends, the vintage car dealer Arthur Kar, driving a familiar route around Paris. On any given day, Abloh could likely be found in the passenger seat with Kar listening to hip-hop as the two drifted in and out of conversation, or Abloh worked on his phone. “He just wanted to enjoy the music and his time with me,” Kar explains in the film.
When Mahfuz and Chloe first began discussing the possibility of making a film about their late friend, it was the opportunity to offer a window into these more quotidian moments of Abloh’s life that they found most compelling. “Some of it contains easter eggs for folks that knew V, or his community of followers, and one of the things we really wanted to do was evoke his life in Paris,” Chloe explains. “Mahfuz had the idea to seat the camera on the passenger seat where V would sit and we asked Arthur to drive a route that they would often drive together. One of the big questions was: How do we make this person that we all love so much feel present, even in his absence? How can we ask each person to participate in a way that is personal to them, or to their relationship with V?”
As Vogue reports, to do so, the pair set up shop for two days in the Hôtel Costes—a favorite of Abloh’s that often served as his gravitational center in Paris—in the midst of Paris Fashion Week back in February, inviting a who’s who of Abloh’s collaborators to step into some of his most iconic designs for Off-White (all styled by Vogue’s global contributing fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson) and share memories of their time spent with Abloh in the City of Lights. These included a handful of his favorite models, including Bella Hadid, Karlie Kloss, Joan Smalls, Alton Mason, and Kendall Jenner; a number of his collaborators at both Off-White and Louis Vuitton, including his music director Benji B and stylist Ib Kamara; and many of those who shared more typically amorphous creative synergy with Abloh, including designer and creative consultant Tremaine Emory, DJ Pedro Cavaliere, and poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal, whose words in tribute to Abloh serves as the film’s powerful conclusion.
“We didn’t initially plan it to be something of this size, but it became increasingly ambitious as it went on,” says Chloe. “Part of that is because people just said the most incredible things about their friend, and we wanted to have it on the record. If anyone cares to watch this in 10 years, we’ve been able to collect some of those amazing testimonials about Virgil’s impact, and what an amazing person he was.” For Mahfuz, the film’s format—each speaker is introduced without any kind of formal description, and in various locations around the hotel—was also a means of paying testament to Abloh’s democratic outlook. “I think that format also kind of freed us from the obligation to be encyclopedic,” he adds. “We couldn’t shoot everyone, of course, so there are many close friends and family that weren’t able to be in it. But we never wanted it to have any kind of hierarchy.”
And while Abloh’s friends and collaborators reminisce on both the bigger moments of their time together (the smiles they’d exchange at the end of a landmark Louis Vuitton show, say), as well as the more everyday moments (walking around Paris and chatting on a park bench is a recurring memory), both Chloe and Mahfuz were adamant that the film should honor his genius as a designer, too. “Working with Gabriella, one of our goals was always to show everyone what an amazing fashion designer he was—to have a true fashion moment that honors his legacy is one of the most important fashion designers ever, in our opinion,” says Mahfuz. “We were interested in that more abstract or poetic approach as a way for the film to carry all of the emotion we were all feeling.”
According to Vogue, the film’s intimacy comes, in part, due to the fact that both Mahfuz and Chloe were close friends and collaborators with Abloh too. The pair, who are partners in both life and work, first met Abloh separately in New York many years prior, while Chloe was working on a Yoko Ono exhibition at MoMA and Mahfuz was entering architecture graduate school at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “We developed a way of working over WhatsApp some years ago—he’s famous for his WhatsApp conversations,” adds Mahfuz, laughing. “Then it became more formalized over time. After Chloe, he was probably my closest collaborator, and definitely my most important mentor.” Eventually, the trio launched Architecture Films together, a practice they first began working on in 2020 and that had its first official release with a documentary about Sha’Carri Richardson that premiered at Sundance earlier this year. “We’re beneficiaries of what everyone talks about with Virgil, which is that he was so generous about using his platform to give the next generation of Black or POC creatives opportunities,” Chloe adds.
It’s a sentiment that was shared by many during the filming of the documentary, which both Mahfuz and Chloe describe as a profoundly emotional—if ultimately heartwarming—experience, marking the first time that many of Abloh’s friends were back in the city for fashion week without him there. “I have to say, we were basically crying all day on set,” Chloe remembers. “One of the days we shot was actually the day of the Off-White show, and many of the models we filmed were walking in the show that evening. So of course the emotions were very palpable, just because we were all together feeling the loss. But then we all went and worked on the Off-White show together mere hours later, which was really beautiful.”
Still, for all of the emotional charge of the film, at the end of the day, the filmmakers’ ambition with V was perhaps the simplest goal of all. “We hope that the film displays a cross-section of the diversity of the people he impacted and in turn was impacted by—the world and community that he created around him, the number of people he influenced and touched,” Mahfuz concludes. “To me, Virgil is world-historical, a once-in-a-generation artist and designer, and I hope this contributes in some small way to telling that story.”
You can watch the entire 30 minute documentary “V” via vogue.com.
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