The fitting room at Off-White's Milan headquarters smells faintly of steam and sizing

The fitting room at Off-White's Milan headquarters smells faintly of steam and sizing. Ibrahim Kamara stands beside a rack of samples, one hand on a jacket sleeve, the other gesturing toward the window. He is explaining, in his soft Sierra Leonean accent, why he removed all the quotation marks.

"Virgil used them as punctuation," he says. "I don't need punctuation."

Kamara became creative director of Off-White in March 2023, two years after Virgil Abloh's death. He arrived with no formal fashion training, no atelier apprenticeship, no pattern-cutting diploma. What he had was a decade styling for Dazed, art direction credits across i-D and AnOther, and a conviction that fashion is a publishing problem as much as a garment one. Off-White, in his hands, would stop announcing itself and start assuming you were paying attention.

The quotation marks went first. So did the zip-tie hang tags, though a version reappeared later, smaller and embossed rather than printed. The signature Abloh toolkit—ironic, referential, almost pedagogical in its use of text—was gently dismantled. What replaced it was quieter but no less coded. Kamara's first collection, spring 2024, opened with a series of deconstructed shirts in pale cotton poplin, each one split at the side seam and reattached with grosgrain tape. The tape was the same width as the original seam allowance. You had to look twice to see it.

"I'm not interested in explaining," he said in an interview with System last year. "If you know, you know. If you don't, maybe you will later."

The stylist who didn't style

Kamara's route into fashion was editorial, not commercial. He moved to London from Freetown in his late teens, studied photography at University of the Arts London, and began assisting on shoots. By his mid-twenties he was styling for Dazed, working with Ibrahim Kamara—no relation—and later taking over as fashion director. His editorial work had a sculptural quality. He treated fabric like material, not decoration. A Comme des Garçons coat would be worn backward. A Margiela boot would be laced through the sole.

When he styled Adwoa Aboah for the cover of British Vogue in 2018, he wrapped her in a Burberry trench and left it open, the belt trailing on the floor. The image was striking not because it was avant-garde but because it looked unconsidered. That quality—the appearance of ease masking total control—would become his signature at Off-White.

He joined the house after a brief, semi-public courtship. LVMH, which acquired a majority stake in Off-White in 2021, wanted someone who understood Abloh's vision but could move it forward without pastiche. Kamara was not the obvious choice. He had never designed a collection. He had never worked in a studio. But he had spent fifteen years thinking about how clothes photograph, how they move, how they communicate before a single word is written about them.

"Fashion is a visual language," he told AnOther in 2023. "I've been writing in it for years. Now I'm just using a different grammar."

The first collection and the second

Spring 2024 was cautious. Kamara kept the Off-White codes—the diagonal stripes, the industrial hardware, the sportswear-tailoring hybrid—but turned the volume down. Blazers were cut longer, with a softer shoulder. Dresses were bias-cut in jersey, not structured in technical fabric. The palette was cream, grey, black, with occasional flashes of cobalt. The show notes, for the first time in the house's history, did not include a manifesto.

The reaction was mixed. Some critics praised the restraint. Others wondered if Off-White without Abloh's maximalism was still Off-White. Kamara seemed unbothered. "Virgil built a house," he said in System. "I'm living in it. I'm allowed to move the furniture."

By autumn 2024, the furniture had moved considerably. The collection was darker, more textural. Kamara introduced heavyweight wool coats with exposed seams, their raw edges left to fray. He showed trousers in a 14oz cotton drill, cut wide through the thigh and cropped at the ankle, the hems bound in leather. The diagonal stripe appeared once, on a single jacket, rendered in tonal stitching rather than contrast tape. It was there if you looked. It didn't announce itself.

The accessories were where Kamara's editorial instincts showed most clearly. He reworked the Binder Clip bag—one of Abloh's bestsellers—into a soft pouch with a single metal clasp. The Arrows sneaker, previously a chunky runner, became a flat leather slip-on with the arrow motif debossed into the insole. You couldn't see it when the shoe was on. That was the point.

What training means when you didn't have it

Kamara's lack of formal fashion education is both his liability and his freedom. He does not think in terms of dart placement or grain line. He thinks in terms of silhouette, texture, and the way a garment reads in motion. This makes him reliant on his studio team—pattern cutters, tailors, technicians who translate his visual ideas into three-dimensional form. It also makes him unencumbered by the industry's received wisdom about what a collection should be.

"I don't know the rules," he said in Dazed last autumn. "So I don't know which ones I'm breaking."

This approach has its limits. Off-White is not a couture house, but it operates within the luxury system, which demands technical excellence as well as conceptual clarity. Kamara's early collections were occasionally criticised for construction issues—jackets that pulled at the back neck, trousers that bagged at the knee. By his third season, those problems had largely disappeared. He had learned, or his team had compensated, or both.

What he has not learned—what he seems actively to resist—is the idea that a designer must perform a certain kind of genius. He does not give lengthy post-show speeches. He does not theorise about his work in press releases. When asked about his vision for Off-White, he tends to redirect the question. "It's not about vision," he told System. "It's about looking."

The next chapter, or the one after

Off-White's sales have remained steady under Kamara, though not spectacular. The house still relies heavily on its accessories and its collaborations—recent partnerships with Nike and Rimowa have performed well—but its ready-to-wear has not yet achieved the cult status it enjoyed under Abloh. This may be intentional. Kamara has said he is not interested in hype. He is interested in clothes that last.

His spring 2025 collection, shown in September, was his most confident to date. He opened with a series of tailored separates in a lightweight wool-linen blend, each piece dyed a slightly different shade of off-white. The variations were subtle—ivory, ecru, chalk, bone—but they created a sense of depth, as if the collection were developing in real time. The closing look was a trench coat in undyed cotton canvas, its seams reinforced with the same grosgrain tape from his first collection. The tape was black this time. You could see it from the back row.

Kamara has said he plans to stay at Off-White for at least five years. What happens after that is unclear. He has not ruled out starting his own label. He has not ruled out returning to editorial. For now, he is focused on building a body of work that does not require a footnote.

"Virgil was a communicator," he said in AnOther. "I'm a translator. I take what's there and make it legible in a different way."

The quotation marks are gone. The language remains.