Off-White's muses
Virgil Abloh stood backstage at the Palais de Tokyo in January 2019, adjusting the hem on a gown that shouldn't have worked. Tulle over a screen-printed slogan. A zip-tie dangling from the waist. Naomi Campbell turned once, then nodded. The collection was called "Natural Woman", and it ran on three distinct energies, three women who had shaped what Off-White meant when it spoke to anyone outside the streetwear circuit.
The house built its name on irony and quotation marks, on putting "SCULPTURE" on a hoodie and watching twenty-year-olds queue for it. But between the launch in 2013 and Abloh's death in 2021, Off-White refined itself around a handful of collaborators and muses who pulled the work somewhere else. Not softer. Sharper, maybe. Three women in particular.
Bella Hadid and the architecture of a campaign
Hadid walked her first Off-White show in 2016, the same season she opened and closed for Givenchy. She was twenty. The casting made sense on paper—her face was everywhere, her following was climbing past ten million, and she had the frame for the oversized blazers and deconstructed trench coats Abloh was turning out. But the relationship stuck because she understood the grammar.
Off-White's aesthetic was borrowed, remixed, annotated. Hadid worked the same way. She could shift registers mid-campaign, tomboy to black-tie, without the seams showing. Abloh used her repeatedly: lookbooks, runway, the collaboration with Nike that put her in a glass box wearing Air Max 97s. She wasn't selling aspiration in the traditional sense. She was selling fluency.
The Spring 2018 campaign shot by Inez and Vinoodh placed her in a studio space with white walls and industrial lighting, wearing a deconstructed bomber and straight-leg jeans. The styling was deliberately flat. No narrative, no location, just product and posture. It worked because Hadid brought enough presence to fill the frame without overpowering the clothes. She made the quotation marks feel intentional rather than lazy.
By 2019, she'd walked nine Off-White shows. The repetition mattered. It built a visual language. When you saw her in the finale look—usually something that leaned further into evening than the rest of the collection—it read as progression. The house was learning to dress women who moved between contexts, and Hadid was the proof.
Serena Williams and the space outside fashion
Williams wore Off-White to the 2018 French Open. A black catsuit with a red stripe down the side and "SERENA" printed across the back. The French Tennis Federation banned it three months later, citing respect for the game. She came back the next year in a cape and a slogan tee under her competition kit.
Abloh had met Williams through mutual friends in the art world, and the collaboration made sense for both of them. She needed a designer who understood performance fabric and wasn't interested in making her look smaller. He needed a muse who existed entirely outside the fashion system and didn't care about its approval.
The 2018 US Open collection they worked on together included a tutu, which sounds ridiculous until you see it on court. It was layered tulle over compression shorts, black on black, with the Off-White logo heat-pressed onto the bodice. Williams wore it during her finals match against Naomi Osaka. She lost, but the outfit stayed in the conversation longer than the score.
What Williams brought to Off-White wasn't elegance or aspiration. It was legitimacy in a different arena. She proved the house could design for a body in motion, for someone who needed clothes to perform under pressure. The work they did together—three years of competition kits, training gear, and off-court capsules—expanded what the brand could mean. It wasn't just for people who wanted to look like they were going somewhere. It was for people who were already there.
Hailey Bieber and the shift to wearability
Bieber's relationship with Off-White started later, around 2019, and it looked different from the beginning. She wasn't walking the runway. She was wearing the clothes in paparazzi shots, at airports, outside pilates studios in Los Angeles. The exposure was constant and casual, and it did more for the house than any campaign could have.
Abloh had always said he wanted to design for the street, but the early collections were too referential to land there cleanly. The oversized blazers and the industrial belts required a certain literacy. Bieber wore them like they were Levi's. She styled an Off-White puffer with bike shorts and Nike sneakers. She layered a logo tee under a Khaite blazer. She made the house look easy.
The Spring 2020 collection shifted in response. Simpler cuts, fewer slogans, more colour. Abloh told Vogue that he was thinking about women who didn't have time to decode a reference. Bieber was in the front row. She wore a slip dress from the collection the next week, photographed leaving a restaurant in West Hollywood. No stylist, no occasion. It was just a dress.
What she gave Off-White was permission to be functional. The brand had always traded on exclusivity—limited drops, collaboration fatigue, resale markups that priced out the audience it claimed to serve. Bieber's version of the house was accessible in a different way. She wore it like it was part of a wardrobe, not a statement. That shift mattered. It let the clothes breathe.
What they built together
Abloh died in November 2021. The house continued under new creative direction, first with a series of guest designers, then a more permanent structure. The women who shaped its first era didn't disappear. Hadid still walks the shows when the calendar allows. Williams still trains in the performance line. Bieber still wears the basics.
But the energy is different now. Off-White is finding its way without the person who invented its language, and the muses who helped define it are working with other houses, other designers. What remains is a template. A way of thinking about aspiration that doesn't require a backstory. A way of dressing women who move between worlds without changing register.
The gown Naomi Campbell wore in 2019 is in a museum now. The zip-tie is still attached.
