Andre Walker is a New York classic—the kind of person who is anywhere anything cool is happening. The Ditmas Park–bred fashion designer was a star of New York’s downtown fashion scene in the ’80s and ’90s—his wry collections included styles with names like “Boring wrap dress”—and has been a longtime friend and onetime consultant to Marc Jacobs and Kim Jones. Pre-pandemic, he was a familiar presence at art fairs and galleries, in his tank top with his drawstring knapsack on his back. I’d never seen someone look at art the way he does: leaning and bobbing before a canvas, like each piece might be three dimensional. Like each painting might be hiding something.
If designers often point dilettantishly to the same slate of obvious references, Walker is of the rare breed that works like a sponge. He is a mover but not a shaker, endlessly eager to wring out some of what he’s soaked up through any medium. (Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela, and Willi Smith, whose brand Walker briefly took over after Smith’s death in 1987, were also this way.) A few years after he shuttered his brand, in 2001, he launched the print magazine project TIWIMUTA (“this is what it made us think about”), which he described to me as “the most illogical, improbable magazine in the world, really. It’s quite ridiculous.” He doesn’t seem to dart from project to project like a bee. Instead, he buzzes and lingers like a hummingbird, drinking things in. As a result, he seems less like a relic of the ’80s or ’90s during which he came to prominence than a multidisciplinary artist who will never run out of ideas.
“I never like when people call me a veteran,” he said, chuckling, “but I guess I am one, at this point.”
I called up Walker last week to talk about his collaboration with Virgil Abloh’s Off-White, which was just released, even though it was announced in 2017. It’s made up of classic but quirked pieces in the Walker tradition—a hoodie whose pocket extends up almost to the collarbone, a T-shirt with two long box pleats and a belt, a pair of black track pants. Abloh and Walker took a year and a half to build it, Walker said, “and the year following that I was so busy, and then Virgil got signed on to Vuitton.” (That made me feel like a veteran.)
Walker is characteristically philosophical about sitting on the collection for so long. “In fashion, there’s this sense of urgency that often pervades the participants’ mindset,” he said. “There’s this sense that It has to be out now and It has to be out right away. And I don’t believe that’s true at all anymore.”
Still, he says, “Imagine sitting on that wild T-shirt design for four years. I thought I was gonna burst!”
He continued, “I’m just happy that there’s a limited edition of those very progessive and enthusiastic design pieces out there that people can enjoy. And at the same time, heralding a camaraderie within the design community, and just the community at large.”
Indeed, the past four years—especially the civil rights movement of last summer—have brought a new appreciation for designers like Walker, who may have once been cult figures but are now legends to a vintage-hungry generation eager to respect the recent history of fashion. In particular, Walker is an idol to the high fashion rapscallion designers Vaquera, and has walked in their fashion shows.
Walker is also a part of Concept 012:Black_Space at Nordstrom, a pop-up curated by Black creatives featuring the work of Black designers, where old editions of TIWIMUTA are for sale. (The embossed Jean-Paul Goude images alone are worth the $225 purchase price.) He’s also penned a piece for The New Now, Kim Hastreieter’s downtown newspaper. But Walker has always been in lots of interesting places at once—at the time he announced the Off-White project, he was presenting a show in Paris that remade many of his archival designs in partnership with Pendleton, which was intended as a kind of relaunch of his brand. Now that brands are trying to be media empires, it’s nice to remember that true geniuses, doing a bunch of different things is just called being a multidisciplinary artist. If Walker’s fashion output seems erratic, it’s not for lack of energy or interest: he embodies the New York attitude that balances hustling for work with hungering for sensation.
Walkerheads might geek out on the Off-White collection’s knapsack, a black leather rectangle with elastic straps, as a kind of talisman of his personal style. “I’ve been rollerskating like a maniac since I was 11 years old, and then eventually giving way to rollerblades and bicycles,” Walker explained of his longtime adoration for the bags. “I’m very athletic, naturally.” Knapsacks were an easy way to tote around sketch pads, thrift shop finds, and books. The Off-White version was inspired by one he made four years ago, when he took a Miu Miu shoebag and attached an old pair suspenders. “I left the clasps on so I could attach it to my pants, so I could eventually do a handstand or something like that,” he said, “without having to worry about the contents of the bag falling out.”
Waiting so long to release the collection looks more and more like the right choice; one wonders if a collaboration done more recently might have looked different, more deferential to Walker’s archives. Perhaps more designers should put collections in time capsules for a few years.
I asked Walker whether he’d been paying attention to fashion over the past year, and he cackled (he’s an easy laugher—perhaps because his laugh is so great). “Fashion has yet to stand up and make a rallying cry for its true relevancy, which for me is the fact that it’s pure utility,” he says. Designers and journalists tend to take things “too seriously. Or maybe unseriously. You’re only taking the aesthetic seriously, and not the know-how, or the savoir-faire, and you’re not paying enough attention.” The kinds of existential, bottom-up questions that, say, the food industry has asked itself about sourcing and production, have somehow elided the fashion world.
Walker hinted that he’s working on something that sounds like a fashion line with infrastructure that might ensure a more consistent output. But doing that requires dealing with the numerous issues bedeviling the industry: businesses competing for the same customers; a problematic status quo interested in neither change nor creativity. “It’s really important for people who work in fashion to honor creativity, because its purpose is really a kind of renewal—bringing new life into this inanimate object that is clothing, and imbuing it with purpose and integrity,” he said. “But purpose and integrity, and even cool—these are kind of slippery terms.” He mentioned he’d recently been reading an issue of cult artist AA Bronson’s zine FILE from the ’70s, which included “this conceptual piece about glamour. One of the main characteristics of glamour is that it doesn’t exist.” He laughed. “What’s great about glamour is that a lot of it is imagined—that imaginary realm is one of the foundations of creativity.”
When pondering what’s missing from fashion today, Walker, characteristically, doesn’t sound like an old timer claiming things used to be better. Instead, it’s a question of emotion. “People who are in fashion—writing about it, producing it, making it, selling it—of course they’ll stand behind it because it’s part of their job,” he mused. “But apart from having a job, there’s got to be passion somewhere.”
This story has been updated.
