As British Vogue reports, One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House, will posthumously publish Work in Progress, a book Virgil Abloh began writing before his death in 2021, the publisher has exclusively announced to Vogue. Work in Progress, co-authored by the late, visionary Off-White founder and artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, with Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, founder and editor-in-chief of Vestoj, will be a “hybrid work that combines cultural criticism, theory, art, and personal narrative,” according to the publisher. It does not yet have a publication date.
“In the last few years before his passing, Abloh sought refuge in intellectual, theoretical, and imaginative conversations with Aronowsky Cronberg about his work,” One World told Vogue. “Work in Progress is the culmination of their dialogue, a book that illuminates the ideas behind Abloh’s astonishing process and practice.” Nicole Counts, senior editor at One World, called the book “a perfect blend of textured and vivid storytelling with a meditative and imaginative look into the mind, practices, and philosophies of a visionary.”
Aronowsky Cronberg said she and Abloh began working on the book several years ago. “We based it on the conversations we were having: in person, over the phone, via emails, in message threads. We talked about Virgil’s process and ‘logic,’ and about ideas central to his practice: irony and earnestness, hybridity, paradox, the value of originality, and the policing of ‘good’ taste,” she told Vogue. “We challenged and learned from one another – and through this ongoing dialogue and friendship, the idea for Work in Progress was born.” Their intention, Aronowsky Cronberg explained, “was, and is, to put big ideas across in an informal way, but also to (re)frame fashion – as art, as industry, and as daily practice – both as an important space for critical thinking, and a site of dynamic cultural and intellectual exchange.”
Following Abloh’s death at age 41 last November, Aronowsky Cronberg is drawing on extensive recorded conversations with the designer to complete Work in Progress, with “the full support of his wife, Shannon Abloh, access to his archives, and the participation of his most trusted creative collaborators and friends,” One World said in a statement. “Work in Progress is a portrait of an iconoclast, an intellectual biography as bold and experimental as its subject.”
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