Off-White™ & GORE-TEX® Brand at Paris Fashion Week
Off-White™ is an Italian luxury fashion label founded by Virgil Abloh in Milan in 2013. Abloh worked across a wide range of disciplines and brands and was appointed Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton menswear in 2018. For F/W 2018, Off-White™ introduced its first GORE-TEX® Products, built from the waterproof and breathable fabric and shown during the Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh runway show at Paris Fashion Week.
Beinghunted. initiated the partnership between Off-White™ and the GORE-TEX® Brand directly with Abloh. To activate it, Beinghunted. developed the concept for a give-away, which Abloh translated into a co-branded cross body bag. Five hundred pieces were produced and handed to guests of the F/W 2018 show, conceived as a piece the fashion crowd would carry straight away and take into the streets of Paris.
The runway look that drew the most attention paired the GORE-TEX® Brand outfit with the white Air Jordan The Ten, worn by the model as the highlight of the show. The stages of the project, from handout to runway, backstage and street, were documented by fashion and street-style photographer Adam Katz Sinding.
The bags appeared across Paris for days and moved onto Grailed and eBay at high resale sums. Images of guests ran in GQ, Vogue, Vogue Hommes, WWD Japan and other titles and circulated widely on social media. Vogue named artist Takashi Murakami best dressed man of the week and published a picture from the Off-White show showing him with the GORE-TEX® Brand bag.
A fabric debut inside a runway show can easily be read as a technical story, a set of specifications shown on the body. Beinghunted. chose a different route into the moment. Rather than framing the GORE-TEX® Brand as outerwear performance, the activation gave the audience an object to carry, letting the brand move on the shoulders of the fashion crowd once the show had ended.
The give-away worked because it was designed for circulation. A bag by Abloh handed to the right guests turned into the item to be seen with across the Paris shows, then held its value on the resale market for weeks after. The GORE-TEX® Brand travelled through the week inside images that had nothing to do with a spec sheet and everything to do with who was carrying it.
The runway pairing extended the same logic. Seen alongside the white Air Jordan The Ten, the GORE-TEX® Brand look sat inside the overlap of streetwear and luxury that defined the moment, read as fashion rather than as function. The press pickup and the street-style coverage placed the fabric where the conversation already was.
