Off-White & Victorinox Collab On Limited Edition Swiss Army Knife
Swiss precision and creative utility meet in Virgil Abloh’s daring redesign of the iconic pocket knife.
The legendary Swiss Army Knife has shed its signature red skin for a special edition design by luxury fashion brand Off-White–marking one of the last posthumous collaborations of late design genius Virgil Abloh.
Abloh, 41, a multi-disciplinary visionary whose work spanned multiple creative genres, died on Nov. 28, 2021. His enduring legacy was recently celebrated in an expansive exhibition dedicated to his work at Brooklyn Museum, Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech, developed by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
The exhibition spans two decades of Abloh’s work, including collaborations with artists Takashi Murakami, Arthur Jafa and Juergen Teller, plus material from his fashion label Off-White and items from Louis Vuitton, where he served as its first Black menswear artistic director.
In this unique partnership between Swiss-based Victorinox and Milan-based label Off-White, Abloh reflected on mankind’s beginnings and ancient tools by Stone Age dwellers to conceptualize a sophisticated reinterpretation of the Swiss Army Knife.
The creative process took two years of development, rendering an unexpected design to a practically unchanged product for decades–a daring refresh that Victorinox feels quite proud of. The design of the blades represents the shapes of ancient tools made from stone used for cutting, drilling, skinning, and other prehistoric missions.
When positioned in the correct order side-by-side, the silhouette of the single tools resembles a fig leaf as a nod to Adam and Eve, further tying together the prehistoric origin stories now modernized for the urban adventurer. When closed, the blades’ rounded edges peek from the knife’s corpus which gives the product a completely new contour.
The theme of the ancient stone tool is also represented by a new material used for the first time on a Swiss Army Knife–Corian® Solid Surface–a composite of resin and natural minerals giving the product a scale-like texture which is like stone to the touch. The white surface is accented by iconic symbols in black, representing the heritage of the brand along with motifs that illustrate the evolution from stone to tool.
The Off White c/o Victorinox Limited Edition is limited to 3,000 units, and is available for $500 while supplies last in selected stores and online.
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