Step 11 of “Free Game,”Virgil Abloh’s new platform meant to help aspiring designers create their own clothing lines, is simply titled “Personal Mentors.” The content of the “lesson”
consists of an interview with Peter Savile, the graphic designer most famously known for Joy Division’s iconic Unknown Pleasures album artwork. “My personal mentor: Peter Saville - this video taught me millions of things,” the entirety of Abloh’s caption reads. In one choice anecdote from the interview, Saville describes going to a museum and being inspired to put Henri Fantin-Latour’s “A Basket of Roses” on the cover of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies. You may remember Abloh’s earliest Off-White pieces printed with Caravaggio’s work. “Free Game” positions Abloh similarly, an available mentor to would-be designers anywhere with an internet connection.
“Free Game” can tell us about more than just starting the next great American brand, though. You know what they say: if you really want to know someone, take their free online course on branding. And even a cursory run-through of the program reveals an awful lot about its creator: how he thinks about brands and design, his own roles at Off-White and Louis Vuitton, and the path to becoming a designer in 2020.
The stated goal of the Free Game is to help “brands in their earliest phases,” especially those within the black community. And what it reflects is the totally new and modern way that Abloh (and a few peers like him) came up within the fashion industry. There isn’t a step that suggests someone go to prestigious schools like Central Saint Martins in London or the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, which both produce designers with resumes ready made for the biggest ateliers. Instead, Abloh suggests that everything a person needs to know about getting started in the fashion industry is available within YouTube’s network: the stuff inside each step—the meat of the content—is an already-existing YouTube video, or several clips, on the topic. And why wouldn’t Abloh think that way, considering that he himself is not formally trained? Abloh climbed the ladder in the most unconventional way possible and now helms one of the most coveted positions in high fashion. The Free Game isn’t just a course for aspiring designers but the work of Abloh going back and retracing his own steps.
The structure of the course mirrors the way Abloh says he approaches design. What Abloh’s done is assemble a course through already existing materials. Rather than creating something wholly original, Abloh’s grazed the internet for what he considers the very best information on the topic. The step on how to find wholesale blanks links out to a video from someone with the username Flex Mckenzie. One step simply contains old lectures Abloh has given. The course is not unlike Abloh’s previous work: a little bit of him mixed up with a lot of what's previously been done. It’s not so dissimilar from the way Abloh designs, constantly taking existing references and tweaking them ever so slightly. He calls it his 3% approach: taking an existing design or idea, like an Air Jordan, tweaking it three percent, and profiting.
Only the most literal-minded will find advice meant to be applied directly to your budding clothing line. The first step at the top of Free Game is “How to Name Your Brand.” This is the one Abloh approaches with the most piousness. “For me, the brand or entity name has been the most important part of my logic,” he writes. “Your brand name should be an endless reference point to why your brand exists.” Abloh famously landed on Off-White because he wanted to define “the grey area between black and white.” Looking at Abloh’s name—however nonsensical it might be: the area between black and white, as he himself points out, is grey, not off-white—might be more instructive than the video that follows. Abloh came up with a goal that inspired the name, which seems like pretty sound advice for kickstarting a brainstorm. Or at least that thinking may be more helpful than the advice that comes through in the embedded video: a TED Talk that includes the choice line “invented names can be highly unique but if you’re not careful, they can start to sound like pharmaceutical drugs or the name of a sofa from IKEA [mild laughter].”