VIRGIL ABLOH ARCHIEVE

INSIDE THE TOP SECRET

- BY SAMUEL HINE PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL SCHMELLING

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was buzzed into a nondescript warehouse somewhere in the US Midwest. Inside, past several additional security doors and a locked gate, I entered a private storage facility where thousands of identical grey boxes filled a maze of floor-to-ceiling shelves.

My mind kept turning to the final shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Few people beyond the small staff in white gloves who had carefully organised the contents within would have known that I was looking at one of the most significant and valuable repositories of modern fashion history: Virgil Abloh’s sneaker collection.

This was my introduction to the Virgil Abloh Archive (VAA)—or at least about half of it. Following a three-year effort to track down and catalogue the late designer's vast materials, the enormous archive spreads between secret facilities in two different cities. Collectively, they house approximately 20,000 garments, shoes, bags, documents, pieces of art, and personal mementos that belonged to the most prolific creative force of his time.

Abloh worked with a legacy in mind. Well before he was the world-famous subject of museum retrospectives, he had a keen instinct of what to preserve, placing his college notebooks and portfolios from architecture school in a cardboard box that eventually made it into one of his many storage units. “Alongside Virgil's practice as a creator, he tended to work and think archivally,” says collaborator Mahfuz Sultan, who serves as codirector of the archive.