This fall, Paris will host one of the most anticipated cultural events of the year: the Virgil Abloh: The Codes exhibition, opening on September 30th—what would have been the late designer’s 45th birthday—during Fashion Week Paris September 2025. The exhibition, created by the Virgil Abloh Archive™ in collaboration with Nike, will run until October 10th at the historic Grand Palais, offering an immersive tribute to one of the most influential creative minds of the 21st century.
Tribute to Virgil Abloh: a multidisciplinary legacy
The exhibition serves as a comprehensive tribute to Virgil Abloh, who revolutionized the boundaries between fashion, design, art, and music. Drawing from a vast archive of over 20,000 objects, The Codes will showcase personal items, design prototypes, sketches, unfinished projects, and rare collaborations with cultural icons such as A$AP Rocky and Takashi Murakami. Through this collection, the curators, Chloe and Mahfuz Sultan, aim to map the creative language Abloh developed over two decades—a language rooted in openness, collaboration, and reinterpretation of everyday objects.
Virgil Abloh Designs: a closer look at his iconic work
Among the highlights of the exhibition are several standout Virgil Abloh designs that defined his practice. One gallery explores the iconic “The Ten” sneaker collaboration with Nike, which deconstructed and reassembled classic silhouettes to highlight design as a transparent process. Another installation reimagines modular furniture as an intersection of streetwear aesthetics and Bauhaus-inspired functionality—illustrating Abloh’s training as an architect and his ability to remix disciplines with ease.
More than a retrospective, the show invites visitors into his conceptual world—where quotation marks question meaning, everyday objects are elevated to art, and nothing is off-limits to reinterpretation.
Supported by public programming including workshops, screenings, and performances, The Codes is designed not just as a celebration but as an act of transmission. In many ways, the Virgil Abloh exhibition at the Grand Palais is a homecoming to the city that shaped him—and which he, in turn, helped reshape. As Fashion Week brings global creative energy to Paris, The Codes promises to be a defining cultural moment not only for fans and friends of Abloh, but for anyone inspired by the limitless potential of creative cross-pollination.