THE JOURNAL

The supergroup. The dream team. Peanut butter and strawberry jam. It’s only human to fantasise about what might happen if things that are great individually are combined into one all-conquering force, so you can imagine how excited we are about the latest designer collaboration to hit our shelves. A shared project between Off-White, the wildly popular brand from Mr Virgil Abloh, and Undercover, the cult Japanese label from Mr Jun Takahashi, UNDEROFFWHITECOVERS is the hypebeast equivalent of watching Messrs Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, or Messrs LeBron James and Stephen Curry, play for the same team.
The two designers are no strangers to the world of collaborations, having already inked their own individual sneaker deals with Nike. Off-White’s The Ten – a series of reimaginings of classic Nike sneakers executed in Mr Abloh’s trademark deconstructivist style – have become some of the most sought-after sneakers of the past decade, while Undercover’s recent take on the Daybreak was instrumental in kickstarting our current obsession for retro Nike models of the late 1970s, such as the Tailwind and Cortez.
What we have here, then, are two of the most influential names in streetwear joining forces to work on the same collection. At a time when designer collaborations are becoming increasingly commonplace, this one still feels like a big deal. The resulting collection is more a case of Undercover reinterpreting the iconography of the Off-White brand than the other way around, with Mr Abloh’s bold diagonal stripes and double-ended arrows overlaid with images of hunched skeletons and monstrous claws. The UNDEROFFWHITECOVERS logo plays a big part, too, splashed large across the front of zip-up hoodies and the back of T-shirts. If the brief was to design a collection that could be identified from 100 yards away, Messrs Abloh and Takahashi can be adjudged to have knocked this one out of the park.
The collection is live on MR PORTER from today, and can be viewed and shopped in its entirety here. If you want our advice, don’t hang around. The hype is real with this one.