Ibrahim Kamara is beginning to deliver more of himself as he settles into his role as art and image director at Off-White. Last August he revisited Sierra Leone, the nation of his birth, which he left as an infant due to civil war. “A lot of that research I did back home into colors and textures and fabrics really informed the experiments we did in the studio,” he said. One of the most apparent indicators of that fabric was the Country Cloth-inspired blue rectangular prints—“a celebratory pattern” used on the opening men’s parka and across women’s in this pre-fall collection.
That was one fundamental dimension in a collection that simultaneously celebrated another: the codes of its founding designer, Virgil Abloh. The cut-out tailoring, inverted commas sloganeering—this time, “No Offense,”—and zip ties were all part of Kamara’s collage. He said his starting point concept had been “delivery,” that seemingly magical logistical glue that connects us, and added that his swerve had been to play with that concept transported to the moon. This was a subtle, clever device with which to play with those West African codes. As for “No Offense,” he said “it was something we came up with in the studio as we were experimenting in building hybrid things from the traditional.”
As well as creating a body of work distinctly his own, Abloh shaped a practice of working—Afro-centric but not excludingly so, communally elevating, and inherently benevolent—and it’s that practice that allows Kamara and all his Off-White colleagues to seamlessly build on what the founder started. Here Kamara worked to round and soften the harder shoulder lines of men’s outerwear and tailoring, and simultaneously apply strength and security in the “delivery” derived strapping details in the womenswear. There was an evident coming together of the two in variously-hemmed pleated skirts, and a blending in pieces like a varsity minidress. Hardware and prints incorporated tire tread marks and transport, which collided in tire-meets-meteor impact craters in those lunar landscapes that provided Kamara with the distance to work with serenity. Kamara said his personal mantra for this collection was On The Go: Off-White continues to move forward.
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