The fitting room at Off-White's Milan headquarters, spring 2019
The fitting room at Off-White's Milan headquarters, spring 2019. Bella Hadid stands in a deconstructed blazer, one shoulder dropped two inches lower than the other. Virgil Abloh circles her twice, scissors in hand, then cuts the lining out entirely. The jacket stays on the body. The asymmetry remains. Hadid wears it to the Met Gala three weeks later.
This is how a muse works at Off-White — not as decoration, but as structure. The house built its identity around a rotating cast of collaborators, but three women in particular shaped what the maison became: Heron Preston, Bella Hadid, and Serena Williams. Not models in the traditional sense. Not ambassadors either. Something closer to co-authors.
Heron Preston and the founding vocabulary
Before Off-White had a runway, it had a studio on the outskirts of Milan and a circle of friends who treated fashion like a group project. Heron Preston was already designing for Kanye West's tour merchandise when Abloh asked her to consult on the first collection in 2013. She brought a specific skill set: an understanding of garment construction that came from working in streetwear, where a T-shirt has to survive a mosh pit, and an instinct for how clothes photograph when worn by someone moving fast.
Preston's influence shows up most clearly in Off-White's approach to the white shirt. The house returned to it season after season, but never as a basic. Abloh and Preston treated the shirt as a frame — something to distort, annotate, or build around. Sleeves got longer. Collars migrated. The signature diagonal stripes, which became Off-White's most recognisable motif, started as Preston's solution to a fitting problem: how do you make a boxy silhouette read as intentional rather than unfinished? You add a graphic element that moves with the body.
She appeared in early lookbooks wearing oversized shirting with the cuffs folded back to show the striped grosgrain tape inside. The styling was casual, almost incidental, but it established a template. Off-White's clothes were designed to be worn wrong — sleeves pushed up, hems uneven, proportions skewed. Preston made that approach look natural because she wore the prototypes the same way she wore her own work: as tools, not costumes.
By 2016, she had launched her own label and stepped back from the day-to-day work at Off-White. But the vocabulary remained. Every exaggerated sleeve, every shirt worn half-open, every piece of grosgrain tape visible at a seam — that's Preston's handwriting.
Bella Hadid and the body in motion
Hadid opened Off-White's spring 2017 show in a sheer black gown with the house's signature zip-tie dangling from the hip. She closed it in a wedding dress with the train cut into strips. Between those two looks, she changed clothes eleven times. The casting was deliberate. Abloh needed someone who could make rapid transitions look effortless, and Hadid had spent two years walking for Givenchy and Balmain, houses that required models to move with precision through complicated garments.
What she brought to Off-White was a particular kind of physical intelligence. The clothes were built around imbalance — one shoulder bare, one sleeve trailing, hems that landed at different points on each leg. Hadid understood how to carry that asymmetry without letting it collapse into chaos. She walked fast, shoulders forward, and the garments moved with her rather than against her.
The collaboration deepened off the runway. Hadid wore Off-White to airports, to dinners, to the front row at other designers' shows. She treated the pieces as modular: a deconstructed blazer over a slip dress, a logo belt worn backward, a handbag carried by the zip-tie instead of the strap. Abloh responded by designing for that kind of improvisation. The spring 2018 collection included a series of reversible jackets and skirts with detachable panels. The clothes assumed the wearer would take them apart.
Hadid's influence was most visible in Off-White's approach to evening wear. The house built its reputation on streetwear, but by 2018 it was dressing women for red carpets. The gowns that emerged — sheer, asymmetrical, often held together with visible hardware — looked like formalwear designed by someone who had never been told what formalwear was supposed to do. Hadid wore them to the Met Gala, to Cannes, to the CFDA Awards. She made them read as coherent.
She remains the face most associated with Off-White's women's line, even as the house has moved through multiple creative directors since Abloh's death in 2021. The current collections still reference her proportions: long legs, narrow shoulders, a frame that can support both volume and severe tailoring.
Serena Williams and the expansion
Williams came to Off-White in 2018 with a specific request: design something she could wear at the US Open that wouldn't restrict her serve. Abloh responded with a tutu. Not a costume tutu, but a layered skirt in black tulle that moved independently from the body. Williams wore it with a leather-trimmed bodysuit and won her opening match in straight sets.
The collaboration mattered less for what it produced — though the tutu became one of Off-White's most referenced pieces — than for what it proved. Off-White could dress an athlete at the top of her sport without compromising function. The tutu was built like performance wear: the bodysuit had flat seams, the skirt was weighted to stay in place during overhead motion, the whole ensemble was constructed to survive two hours under stadium lights in August.
Williams pushed the house into new territory. She needed clothes that worked under conditions most designers never consider: extreme heat, rapid movement, the structural demands of a body that generates serious force. Abloh and his team responded by treating athletic wear as a design problem rather than a separate category. The fall 2019 collection included several pieces that referenced Williams directly: a pleated tennis skirt in heavyweight cotton, a zip-front bodysuit with mesh panels, a warm-up jacket with exaggerated shoulders that allowed for a full range of motion.
She wore Off-White off the court as well, but always in a way that emphasised utility. A logo hoodie over a slip dress. A deconstructed blazer with track pants. A handbag carried to a press conference, not a gala. Williams made Off-White look like something you could actually use, which was a different kind of endorsement than the house usually received.
What remains
Off-White has changed considerably since Abloh's death. Ib Kamara took over as image director in 2022, and the house has moved toward a quieter, more refined aesthetic. But the foundational vocabulary — asymmetry, visible construction, clothes designed to be worn in motion — remains intact. That vocabulary came from collaboration, from designers and muses working through problems together in real time.
Preston, Hadid, and Williams didn't just wear the clothes. They shaped what the clothes could be. The house is still building on that foundation.
