Design
Virgil Abloh will customize his Ikea chair for another BLM auction
His unreleased Air Jordan 4s sold for $187,000.
After auctioning off a pair of unreleased Off-White Air Jordan 4s for more than $180,000, Virgil Abloh is putting another customized item up for bid to support the Black Lives Matter movement.
The designer has teamed up with Design Yard Sale to auction his Ikea Markerad Chair with a personalized illustration done by Abloh himself. Because the furniture collaboration has long since sold out, the chair was taken from Abloh's personal collection. Bidding has begun today and will be open through Saturday, July 11. You can view the listing right here on eBay.
Proceeds will go to The Bail Project — While Abloh's last auction was in support of The Black Curriculum, which addresses the lack of Black British history taught in U.K. schools, this one donates proceeds to The Bail Project and Colloqate. The former organization works to combat mass incarceration by paying bail for those in need, while the latter designs spaces for "racial, social, and cultural justice."
The winner of the Ikea chair will have their name written on it by Abloh, just as he did with the Air Jordan 4. A digital mockup of his illustration also indicates he'll use his signature air quotes for "chair" and will add the year the collection went on sale, 2018.
As of publishing, and just a few hours into the auction, the highest bid is at just $305. Expect it to rise significantly between now and Saturday, although it's hard to imagine it'll end anywhere near the $187,137 bid for the Air Jordans. But even that was an astonishing figure, so who knows what the ceiling is for this Ikea chair.
Design Yard Sale has more up for bid — In addition to working with Abloh, Design Yard Sale has enlisted the design firm Snarkitecture, Benjamin Edgar Gott, and other artists to contribute pieces for its Racial Justice campaign. They'll roll out over the course of the month, and Abloh's chair is just one of the offerings in the first lot.
Also up for bid right now are works from Oliver Popadich, Rachel Israela, Kyat Chin, and Jeffrey Halstead. You can view each of the pieces on Design Yard Sale's site, which will be updated with additional listings throughout July.
Frankly, Abloh good use the good press — The pair of auctions from Abloh follow his disastrous reactions to the Black Lives Matter protests across the country. When looting hit streetwear stores owned by him and his friends, he used the moment to admonish the act and lament the current state of streetwear.
To make things worse, it had appeared that he donated just $50 to support the movement before he cleared things up and said he had simply reshared someone else's image. This resulted in "two Virgils" (i.e. 50 + 50 = 100) becoming a meme, with the subtext being his questionable history of bolstering black designers in his own company.
So, while it would be cynical to assume Abloh is engaging in these charitable initiatives to explicitly change the narrative, the narrative is indeed becoming more palatable.
