On the late designer’s 45th birthday, September 30, 2025, Paris Fashion Week will launch with a once-in-a-lifetime show: “Virgil Abloh: The Codes,” the first extensive European retrospective dedicated entirely to his revolutionary work. The show is installed in Paris’s legendary Grand Palais and is on view for only ten days, closing on October 10, a tight yet potent tribute to his polymathic vision.

A Thoughtfully Curated Stroll Through Two Years of Innovation

Presented by the Virgil Abloh Archive and Nike, the exhibition spans approximately 13,350 square feet, drawing from a massive archive of 20,000 objects, featuring around 1,000 of its most significant pieces, many of which have never been seen by the public. With great care put into it by longtime partners Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan, in association with Shannon Abloh and backed by the Virgil Abloh Foundation, the show showcases not only his designs but also an exposition of his thought process and design approach.

Guests can expect sketches, prototypes, WhatsApp brainstorming sessions, personal library artworks, sneakers, furniture, graphics, and co-objects with peers and brands, including Takashi Murakami, Serena Williams, and Nike, with whom he famously collaborated on the iconic “The Ten” sneaker project.

Why Paris, Why Now?

Paris means a great deal to Abloh: his birthday consistently coincided with Fashion Week, and he burst onto the city’s main runways — both under his Off‑White label and as Louis Vuitton’s men’s creative director since 2018. To stage the first European retrospective in the Grand Palais is symbolic and fitting: a final nod in a city that shaped and sharpened his visual language.

Shannon Abloh describes the show as “just the beginning of our work to share Virgil’s legacy and principles with the creative community and the larger world,” highlighting public access — not only to his finished work but also to his unfinished work and process notes — so that his creative DNA continues to inspire future generations.

Exhibition as Manifesto

Not so much a retrospective, “The Codes” is being staged as a visual manifesto. It reveals how Abloh shattered outdated notions of craft and exclusivity, replacing them with openness, collaboration, and the iteration of shareable cultural codes — whether in streetwear, architecture, music, or design. His interdisciplinary path — trained as an architect but steeped in street culture and technology — allows the viewer to trace lines of influence from Chicago hip-hop, industrial design, DJ culture, and high-fashion converging into a single artistic ethos.

Public Programs & Global Outreach

Alongside the objects, the Grand Palais will feature dialogues, workshops, performances, screenings, and publications designed to expand access beyond the physical exhibition. With virtual components, “The Codes” is intended to engage a global audience, furthering Abloh’s open-source design philosophy and collaborative approach.

Legacy in Context

Abloh redefined luxury fashion by reimagining streetwear as haute couture — first through Off-White, and then as Louis Vuitton’s first Black menswear artistic director, expanding LVMH’s reach to younger, digitally native generations. His battle with angiosarcoma, which he fought in private before passing away in November 2021 at 41, also made him more human, and his legacy continues through scholarship programs and posthumous collections.

Robin Givhan’s upcoming biography, Make It Ours, set for release in July 2025, places Abloh at the centre of a larger turning point: away from craft-driven fashion and towards social media-driven cultural storytelling, inclusive communities, and collaborative energies.

A Momentous Milestone

Where Paris Fashion Week is accustomed to featuring homages, this is not the case: it is a grand archival retrospective, the first on the continent, that illuminates not just what Abloh created, but why and how his working process operated across various disciplines. For devotees, academics, and designers, “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” invites us to engage more meaningfully with his unfinished concepts, his discussions, and his acts of creative defiance.

As the world of fashion progresses in the image of its models — linked, interdisciplinary, open, and expressive — this exhibition is a beacon: its designs live on, not as artefacts, but as living provocations to future generations.