Virgil Abloh: The Codes: our photos of the designer's retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais - final days

Mark your calendars - From September 30 to October 10, 2025, the Grand Palais will vibrate to the rhythm of codes - not those of haute couture, but those of Virgil Abloh, multidisciplinary designer, genius remixer and master of cultural and creative crossbreeding. Theexhibition "Virgil Abloh: The Codes", orchestrated by the Virgil Abloh Archive in partnership with Nike, marks the first major European retrospective dedicated to the universe of this visionary jack-of-all-trades.

Trained as an architect, DJ, designer, artist, entrepreneur and - for the institutional touch - former Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton's men's collections, Virgil Abloh has redrawn the creative landscape of the 21st century with conceptual winks, cleverly diverted references and bridges between disciplines. Here, no fashion show, but an immersion in two decades of creative experimentation, drawn from a dizzying archive of 20,000 items. Sketches, prototypes, objects, photos, unfinished projects and personal treasures make up a veritable 3D mental map of a mind that broke all boundaries. Fashion, music, architecture, design, graphics, advertising, performance ... nothing escaped his conceptual scanner!

Its common thread? Codes. These open, flexible, living principles that he injected into everything he did - from slogans in quotation marks to hijacked sneakers, from redesigned furniture to revisited record sleeves. The exhibition explores how these codes formed a visual language, a manifesto of accessibility, transmission and collective creation.

Presented in Paris in an enriched version of the one to be shown in 2022 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, this edition reveals the breadth of a body of work conceived as a tool, a method and a source of inspiration. The choice of the Grand Palais is not insignificant... Paris, the city that nurtured his imagination, welcomes a return to his roots in the form of a creative love letter.

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And that's not all: workshops, dialogues, projections and performances will amplify the resonance of this extraordinary exhibition, activating minds and emotions alike. It's a program designed for those who want to learn, take ownership and extend this collective impulse that's shaking up the world.

With the support of the Virgil Abloh Foundation and the Swoosh brand, The Codes is more than a tribute. It's an act of transmission. An open source manifesto. And above all, an invitation to hack creativity Virgil's way.