Paris honors the visionary genius of Virgil Abloh

Paris prepares for a return steeped in myth. From September 30 to October 10, 2025, the newly renovated Grand Palais will open its doors to host Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first major European retrospective dedicated to the visionary designer who passed away in 2021. More than an exhibition, this promises to be a collective celebration of a language, a method, and a way of conceiving creativity that redefined the boundaries of fashion and design. From the 20,000 pieces in his personal archive emerge prototypes, sketches, objects, photographs, private treasures, and collaborations that marked an era. It is a journey into a method rather than an aesthetic: an open, hacked approach that turned sneakers into icons and slogans into manifestos, that transformed retail into a medium and audiences into participants in an ongoing conversation.

The exhibition at the Grand Palais, spread across 1,240 square meters and showcasing over 1,000 pieces—some never before seen—aims to decode Abloh’s aesthetic principles, his “codes,” which unified a practice spanning multiple disciplines. From slogans in quotation marks to reimagined sneakers, redesigned furniture to reworked album covers, Abloh created a visual language that became a manifesto of accessibility and collective creation. The show also highlights the importance of his collaborations with artists, designers, and athletes, underscoring the ethic of community and creative dialogue at the heart of his work.

The choice of Paris is no coincidence. It was the city that most inspired Abloh, the place that welcomed him while he was still scaling the walls of the establishment. Here, the story intertwines with that of Colette, the legendary concept store on rue Saint-Honoré, which closed in 2017 and is now ready to symbolically come back to life inside the Grand Palais.
The Grand Palais retrospective, curated by Chloe and Mahfuz Sultan, is not only a love letter to Paris, as Mahfuz himself has said, but also a love letter to Colette—its energy and its ability to give space to what had not yet been named.
 

For ten days, the ground floor of the boutique—with its books, perfumes, limited-edition T-shirts, and the iconic fragrance L’Air de Colette—will be reconstructed as a living installation and gift shop. Not a nostalgic revival, but a tribute to a space Abloh considered integral to his formation. “Off-White would not exist without Colette,” he once declared. Sarah Andelman, the co-founder, had supported him from the very beginning: she was the one who replied to that 2008 email with the proposal for an improvised T-shirt—one of the first three Abloh had ever produced—turning it into an instant success. From then on, Colette became his platform, the place where streetwear and haute couture coexisted without hierarchy, where Karl Lagerfeld shopped and Travis Scott performed at night, where a young designer from Chicago found fertile ground for his vision.

Returning to Colette means restoring meaning to that dialogue, and The Codes offers the perfect frame. A retrospective that is not just an archive, but a collective manifesto: workshops, talks, performances, and publications will accompany the exhibition, in line with the idea of open and accessible creativity. Shannon Abloh, his wife and guardian of his legacy, described it as a first chapter, an act of transmission rather than a purely celebratory gesture. Because Virgil’s codes are not relics—they are tools to be reinterpreted, languages to be hacked, ideas to be extended to new generations. And so, on what would have been his 45th birthday, Paris will celebrate not only a designer but a vision. For ten days, within the walls of the Grand Palais, the energy of a store that taught the world that fashion is never just fashion—but a crossroads of art, design, music, and urban life—will pulse once again. Together, Virgil and Colette tell the story of an era without boundaries. And perhaps this is their most enduring legacy: the certainty that creativity, when shared, never closes its doors.
The Codes is not an epilogue, but a new chapter. An invitation to claim a legacy and push it further. Because, as Abloh loved to say, “everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself.”

And for ten days, Paris will once again be that place where everything feels possible.