Spearheading the Virgil Abloh ship in the years after his passing is a daunting task. When one of the most prolific designers in sneaker and fashion culture of the past few decades tragically dies and leaves behind an endless number of ideas, products, and stories to tell, each release, like the upcoming Virgil Abloh Archive x Air Jordan 1, has to be handled with meticulous care.
Enter Mahfuz Sultan—someone who shares Abloh’s architectural background and is also a film and art director who worked alongside Abloh since 2018. Sultan has been given the keys to the Abloh Archive with his partner, Chloe Sultan, and Virgil’s wife, Shannon Abloh. In the physical sense, the V.A.A. consists of a 20,000-product warehouse in the Midwest, including a separate warehouse that houses 30-foot canisters containing over 6,000 sneakers. It houses products that Abloh both collected and designed—some sketched into existence on cross-the-globe flights, on Chateau Marmont napkins, and on any other objects within Abloh’s reach. These doodles often came to fruition through precision X-Acto knife cuts across iconic silhouettes that Abloh ended up making his own.
One of the pivotal sneakers among the hundreds Abloh designed was the all-white Jordan 1 that first released in 2018—a sneaker he has gone on record saying “started it all” when reflecting on his Nike partnership. (Fun fact: the original Chicago colorway of the Jordan 1 from “The Ten” was supposed to be this all-white pair until Abloh called a last-minute audible after an airport security-line revelation.)
On April 3, 2026 the Virgil Abloh Archive x Air Jordan 1 “Alaska” (AA3834-100) releases for the first time since 2018, and is basically an exact one-to-one recreation of the original model—except for one key detail. You won’t see the Off-White stamp that has been present since The Ten, as Sultan explains in the interview below that the Abloh enterprise has had no ties to the company since 2022. Instead, these will be branded “V.A.A. for Nike,” a key detail that Sultan says holds major weight in the Nike partnership going forward. Ahead of that official April 3 release date, V.A.A. will have a number of special “World’s Fair” releases, including one at ComplexCon Hong Kong the weekend of March 21 and 22. About a year away from the 10-year anniversary of The Ten’s first release, Sultan, speaking to Complex exclusively, breaks down the upcoming release, Abloh’s always-on, always-creating design ethos, and explains why now is the right time for the bring-back. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the conversation in its entirety here.
I want to introduce Mahfuz Sultan. He is an art director, director, and you are the co-director of the Virgil Abloh Archive. Thank you so much for sitting down with me and Complex at such a great time in so many aspects of sneaker culture ,and culture in general. Thank you for taking the time and on such a tentpole release in sneaker culture. And I want to start there. Why this shoe, this colorway, and why now?
That’s a great question. I guess I’ll start with why Jordan first in general, and then I’ll zero in on why this particular silhouette was the one that we chose. For Virgil, and he’s spoken about this publicly extensively. Jordan was this tremendous aspirational figure, not just as an athlete, but also as a style icon. Yeah. Not just the sneakers, but the apparel, the cars, the hats, the home, the whole kind of cosmos. And what’s really crucial about Jordan for Virgil is that is Virgil’s first exposure to design, his first moment when he goes, “Ah, wow, this object was made via a series of decisions.” And the decision maker is a designer. That’s a job. That’s a thing that someone does. And then he’s also discussed the sort of evolution of his exposure to design through kind of silhouette after silhouette. Peter Moore’s Jordan 1, which has a certain kind of flat look, almost like a system of panels that have been put together to make a sneaker, to Tinker’s.[Tinker’s] was a lot more architectural because he was an architect. There were little samples of bridges and structures and building elements. And until you get into late Tinker, like 13, 14, where it’s like bubble architecture, spaceship, Ferraris. And so becoming obsessed with design through the evolution of the design of Jordans was a very important part of Virgil’s journey. When he started with his Nike partnership, he started with a Jordan.
And specifically this Jordan, the white-on-white Jordan was the Jordan that he sat around and cut up with an X-acto knife that he cut the Swoosh off of, that he tried to find the Air bag, peeled the layers of foam off. And so the “Arctic” Jordan 1, we felt was almost like a manifesto object. And it almost contains all the different gestures that became staples of the Nike x Virgil collaboration going forward. The “AIR” in quotes, the kind of applique strategy, transparency, ghosting, self-reference. And so we said, “let’s go back to where the partnership began. Let’s go back to where it began for Virgil. And then let’s also pick an object that frankly was quite rare and give people the opportunity to get their hands on it.” In terms of the second part of your question, why now? Yeah. I would say that Virgil was an artist, yes, but he was also fundamentally a product designer, and I think the way in which he was able to interact with his public, with his audience, through the objects, through getting the objects in front of them, I think that was very important to him. It gave him a lot of joy, and gave his family a lot of joy. And so why now? We just felt like the audience missed V, I missed V, my friends missed V, and the best way to interact with V is through the things he loved and made.
[The box is] done so well, the zine comes out and it’s so easy.
So the zine, Modernism, is not new. Virgil undersold how much he sketched and drew. It was a really, really important part of his practice. He drew a lot. This is a fraction, single digit percentage of the number of drawings he produced of everything that he worked on.
And it was anywhere. I remember Chloe saying Chateau Marmont, napkins.
Doodles, literally everywhere. I think now it’s a nice time to share a lot of those things. I think there was a reason at the time not to make that so prominent, but now it’s a good moment. And to share that with his audience, that he was a kid that before he decided he wanted to be an architect, before he decided he wanted to design clothes, he was drawing sneakers. He was sketching sneakers and everything began with sneakers and returned to sneakers again and again. If you look every step of the way, whether it was Off-White, whether it was Louis Vuitton, the sneaker and sneaker design was almost like this model-making laboratory through which he would work out ideas very, very quickly, like with an X-acto knife and with a Sharpie. And then those ideas would migrate kind of inductively into other parts of the collection, other parts of the brand.
With such an expansive archive, how does it go from off the shelves of the archive in the Midwest warehouse to … “Let’s start thinking about bringing this back?”
So there are nearly 20,000 objects in the archive. However, I should say that there’s one warehouse, which primarily is devoted only to sneakers. The significance you feel in visiting the archive is that there are many things that are significant to him. There’s art, there’s furniture, there’s magazines. It’s very Japanese. It’s very like Otaku. It’s very Nigo-esque. I mean, he was just collecting bags, just kind of going for it. But there is one warehouse where 85% of what’s in there, and we’re talking storage racks that are 30 feet high, like a kind of Ikea style storage racks of just sneakers. Multi-brand, everything. He was just buying sneakers.
He often looked back fondly of [the white Air Jordan 1] being the first. What do you remember, even though it was designed maybe before you started working with him? What was really special to him about this colorway? It seemed like throughout time, even there’s an Instagram, which I love, and it’s all these white, yellowing that we talked about, and he captioned it “Like a fine wine, the original idea, instant vintage, very Off-White.” And it reminded me a little bit of today because finally New York has the sun out and it’s like the sun, the Instagram, the sun is hitting the shoes and like that whole mid part is yellowing.
I think because so much of the design of this shoe was surgical, like so much of it was cutting away the Swoosh and reapplying it, removing the Swoosh and then leaving its ghosted outline behind, reattaching the wrong Swoosh actually, right? Identifying the different layers of foam, articulating the structure. I mean, it’s almost, you actually realize that the Air Jordan 1 is a sandal that’s been stuffed with foam. When you look at it, you look at it from here, it’s almost like a sandal that’s been stuffed with foam and that all the different elements that normally we assume are kind of indivisibly attached to a Jordan 1. I think on the white on white, and it’s similar to the white Air Force 1, which is a different conversation, I think he thought it was like this pure minimum unit, like this minimum Jordan, this already ghosted Jordan through which as he worked on it, you could see all the different operations at play clearly exposed.
Whereas with the “Chicago,” you’re dealing with color paneling, right? The Jordan Wings are like super, super articulated. There’s just more going on. This has a kind of clarity. That’s why I think he loved it. I mean, I also think, and then this again is speculation, but I talked to him far more about the Air Force 1 because I think the Air Force 1 was more like my time, where his attention turned during my time, right? It was the museum pair. It was also thinking a lot about what kind of valence streetwear had in his art practice. What does it mean to take this thing that I grew up loving and you grew up loving and Virgil grew up loving and not leave it behind when you become the artistic director of Louis Vuitton or when you start to show in a museum. How do you take these things that we loved when we were 16 and we still love now and not say, ‘Okay, this is an adolescent practice and now I make paintings.’ And so the Air Force 1 was a really useful way for him to think about those things because he started going, ‘All right, art school kids wear it dirty and messed up and it has this kind of meaning, and then black kids Uptown wear it pristine, and then black kids in Atlanta buy a new one every month,’ and then so on and so forth. And so he got really into all the different layers of meaning that are projected onto the Air Force 1. And I think some aspects of that energy exist in this shoe. And so it’s just a really charged sneaker for us.
It’s funny that you kind of bring up the sandal portion. One quote that you said about his ethos of sneakers, which I loved was, “It’s a hiking shoe, but it’s a skateboarding shoe, but I played basketball in it.” He looked at sneakers almost as multifaceted like, “You categorize it as this, I categorize it as this, and then I also categorize it as this.” How is he looking at sneakers and thinking like, not that they’re made for any use, but the original use may not be the one that it ends up being?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the first projects we worked on together was this track and field campaign, and it was for the Rubber Dunk, which was part Pegasus, part Dunk, part Air Max too. It was kind of a zombie.
A little Frankenstein.
Yeah, exactly right. But at the time we were told that for, let’s say liability reasons, we couldn’t encourage people to skate in it. We couldn’t shoot a video. “It’s not a performance shoe” was like the recurring phrase and we started laughing. We were like, “What does that even mean, it’s not a performance shoe?” I had friends that skated in Flightposites. And so we shot a track and field campaign in those shoes instead, which is even more absurd—sprinting, pole vaulting. It’s just even more with Olympic athletes. And so I think that’s really emblematic of the attitude, right? The attitude was always like sneakers deviate from their intended use. The Air Jordan 1 is as much a skate shoe as a basketball shoe. I’ll speak for myself. I believe that Virgil was similar to this, but I don’t want to put words in his mouth. The Jordan 1 was even more important to me as a skateboarding shoe than as a basketball shoe. But also like a Mid-Atlantic East Coast punk scene shoe. It would get destroyed, kids would write on them, kids would cut the high off, leave the foam all nasty.That was a huge part of Virgil’s thinking. I always thought that he wrote on sneakers to pre-scuff them, to make people more comfortable with violating the surface of the shoe, because if he writes on it right away and gives it to you, it sort of changes and it’s not a pristine signature. It’s a big, sharpie sort of.
You can’t hide it. Which I like. It’s like, oh, not too precious. You can’t step on my shoes. It’s already not like he flipped it in such a way where like, oh, I made it because he signed it, but it’s a little defacing of you hear sneaker culture, like don’t step on anything.
And like my favorite Jordan, we call it the garages, the garages because they were tossed up. I don’t know if Arthur Kar or Virgil tossed them up onto a heating pipe in Arthur’s garage, but they were tossed up there and they sat up there for years. Nobody wore them, and all of their aging and color sort of changes were just from the cars. And so they became this kind of conceptual thing for us, this kind of funny symbol of just you can’t protect your Jordans at all. … So you’re like seeing it over the years. You’re going by and you’re being like, “Why do those look so balled up?” No one has used them, but it’s just car fumes.
That’s awesome. I can’t wait to see that photo. One thing when I was putting questions together, I saw these [Off-White x Air Jordan 5s] and I saw a video of him and he’s like, these are one of my favorites. These 5s are definitely one of my favorites. Also think that he leaned in so much to the marketing of it. He did the Jumpman in front of the Eiffel Tower and I felt like, “Oh, he’s really going after it for these.” And when we first started talking today, it’s like, oh, these are one of your favorites. What do you remember about this project, especially because this is when you would be fully in the mix with him during this partnership.
So there’s an artist, Gordon Mata-Clark, who passed away quite young, but did most of his work in New York. One of the most important facts about Gordon Mata-Clark is that he studied architecture and he’d make these building incisions. He’d cut into buildings to reveal their innards. This was a big influence on how Virgil worked on sneakers for sure. He cut through walls and subtracted elements and then those elements he subtracted would behave as sculptures. Sometimes the negative is what would remain. And so he had this project in Paris that he did that was called Conical Intersect, where he cut big circles, big, big circles out of buildings. And I think at the time on the mood board, there was a lot of Gordon Matta-Clark and a lot of thinking about what it means to cut something away that is precious, like the wall of a building, somewhere like Paris where everything feels historic. That was embedded in that, also encouraging people to cut the panels away.
See, I won’t do it. I’ll mess these up. I know. I’m so bad at that type of stuff. I’d be like, I’m not messing these up, but he did it so effortlessly.
Yeah. But I think this is a really special shoe because it’s so overcoded with references, which I think where he was at LV at that time, which is really like dense, dense, referential design in which all of the references were made visible to the audience, almost to like bring the audience in where he left everything out. And so with this, you also have Terminator 2 and John Connor. You have like all of the above all at once. I mean, this was a really heavy sneaker. It’s definitely my favorite that he did. And I like the “Pine Green” Dunks, with the orange overlace.
I want to ask, this says Off-White and this one says V.A.A. for Nike. What is it like having his initials on this for the first time? Because it’s still different having a brand that you were running and then your Virgil Abloh Archive on it.
That’s a great question. I know it’s a question that a lot of fans of Virgil’s are probably asking. I would say that first of all, and this is an important caveat, the Abloh Estate, the Abloh family, has not worked with Off-White or has not had any links or ties to Off-White since early 2022, shortly after his passing. Off-White has new owners. It’s a different journey. In terms of Virgil, the partnership with Nike and Jordan was always with Virgil, the person, and he chose to brand it Off-White for a variety of reasons. It was dope at the time. It was also like an accelerator for the brand. Obviously the relationship between Virgil, the person, and Nike is the most important thing to the family. And I should say it’s really important to note that Virgil was such a big artist, such a big, big artist, he took up a lot of space, and was a part of such a big community. I think it’s important that the objects going forward really honor Virgil, the artist, right? That it’s about him and it’s about his legacy as an individual maker and as a member of a community, an identifiable member of a community. Without being too long-winded about it, yeah, this is very emotional for us because it’s really lovely to see him there.
Like any other artist foundation, I love Donald Judd, for example, and visiting the Judd Foundation and seeing an organization that bears his name is very gratifying for me. Very emotional for me. And so I think about V.A.A., similarly, this is an organization, institution that’s committed to championing his ideas, to making them accessible to the public, to sharing the Codes. And so yeah, V.A.A. has a lot of resonance for all of us.
Love that. Yeah. I just think 2026, the most predictable thing I would love to see what he would do with the Air Max 95 now? But then also I could see him on a Vomero Plus, which I love. What would he do on that?
Honestly, I think he’d even be just somewhere else, because I think if you look at the Terra Forma, which was like an experimental shoe, but the last sneaker that he worked on that was put out, it was a mix of like kind of Gorp sort of hiking culture with raver culture. And he was already thinking about Berlin and Zurich and health golf culture and clubbing as a form of sports. He was already into other things. And so you get this thing like the Terra Forma that you can neither hike nor dance in. You do neither of them, but it’s this kind of sculptural object, this kind of special sculpture. He was doing other things. There was a rock climbing shoe that was never released. So I don’t know where he would’ve gone. He embraced everything. I think he would’ve embraced AI. This is like how he was. He was kind of a continuum for whatever the vibes were in the world.
There’s going to be pop-ups for this release, ComplexCon, Hong Kong. Excited about that. What are you excited about and what can we expect from that?
ComplexCon, Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where he opened his first store, and so it has a special kind of history for V. In general, I mean Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Virgil really committed to street culture, streetwear, fashion culture in Asia, very, very early on in his journey as a designer, and obviously idolized Nigo and Hiroshi. And so ComplexCon Hong Kong felt right.
Because of the pandemic towards the end of his life, maybe he wasn’t able to travel there as much as he would’ve liked. And so it felt like a bit of a homecoming. In terms of what we plan on doing, we thought it would be really, really interesting to extract fragments of the exhibition in Paris and do something over there in Hong Kong for people that weren’t able to travel and see it. I’m being deliberately vague, but I would describe it as a mini exhibition of sorts, like a mini Codes of sorts.
Has anyone ever in sneaker culture done anything as much with an X-acto knife than this guy did?
Publicly, no. Certainly at Nike and at Jordan. I’ve never worked on sneakers with a different brand, but Nike and Jordan, they use X-acto knives to cut shoes up. They make things by hand. But in Virgil’s case, he came to it as an architect. I studied architecture and the X-acto Knife is like your main, main tool.
Before the era of laser cutters and CNC mills where you could use machines to make stuff, you were cutting things by hand, gluing it by hand. And so I think that approach to sneakers also came out of model making and also came out of architecture. So I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone from that vantage point, you know what I mean? Or do it on camera, encourage people to cut their own shoes.
And the last thing I want to end on, I think a good thing to kind of button everything up, almost six years to the day. It’s April 19th, and he Instagrams this, which is this shoe, one of its early forms. And he says, “There was a time when getting Michael Jordan’s autograph was a major life goal, an X-acto Knife and this off-the-shelf pair of Jordan 1s and The Ten came to fruition.” This is the exact pair that kicked off an epiphany circa 2016. And going from that to now this, how does it button up and everything if you’re taking a step back, like continuing his legacy through the family and this archive and these product drops?
Okay. So if you weren’t born when The Tens dropped, you don’t really know who Virgil is. You might, you might if you follow pop culture, but you don’t really fundamentally know. You don’t know what The Tens were because you kind of had to be there. It was both designed by Virgil and the Nike teams, but also somehow they’re also the sort of emblem of a time. It was like a moment and it was the right moment. And so everything.
Everything changed. It was before this collaboration dropped, and literally after this collab … And that’s not to interrupt you, but it’s just true. It’s like this thing happened and it was kind of how you thought of this space before and then how you were thinking about it after.
And if you go to this store and you buy one of these, or if you get your hands on one of these and you compare it to let’s say a standard “Chicago,” the differences tell you so much about who Virgil was as a designer, not just as a sneaker designer, but as a designer in general. There’s so much about wanting an audience to understand the different elements of this object, understand how it was constructed and put together, see details that appear handmade, even if we know that they’re machine made, appear handmade, see honest materials. Materials are what they feel like. You know what I mean?
Are these going to yellow too?
These are going to yellow, for sure. These are identical to the original. There were some factory challenges, but outside of that, it’s the same shoe. So this is kind of a manifesto object, a way to learn who Virgil was through the product itself, and I think that’s really special. That’s different from a video, that’s different from the books, from the zines. The object itself can tell someone else how it was made. And I think that’s really cool.
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