Louis Vuitton x Nike Air Force 1 / Lorenz.OG

This Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1 was hand-dyed by British colour designer Lorenzo G. Federici, known as LORENZ.OG, in his established Dusk colourway on 19 October 2024. Beginning with an authentic white Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1 Low designed by Virgil Abloh, Federici transformed the finished luxury sneaker through the gradual colour transitions that had become central to his PATENTED COLORSCHEMES® practice. Only one Dusk example was produced on this Louis Vuitton model, and Federici does not intend to repeat it.

The underlying shoe belongs to Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring–Summer 2022 collection. Abloh created 47 expressions of the Nike Air Force 1 for the project, combining Bruce Kilgore’s 1982 basketball silhouette with Louis Vuitton materials, Monogram treatments and his characteristic quotation-mark graphics. Every pair was manufactured by Louis Vuitton at its Fiesso d’Artico footwear facility in Italy, marking the first time in the Air Force 1’s history that the model had been produced outside a Nike factory. Nine editions were subsequently selected for commercial release in 2022.

The project itself was already an exercise in recontextualisation. Louis Vuitton and Sotheby’s explicitly connected Abloh’s design to the 1988 cover of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s It Takes Two, on which E-Z Rock wore a Nike Air Force 1 altered with Louis Vuitton imagery by Dapper Dan. What had begun within hip-hop as an unauthorised collision between sportswear and luxury was eventually reconstructed, decades later, as an official collaboration between the two companies.

Federici’s intervention adds another stage to that sequence. Rather than customising an ordinary Nike shoe to imitate Louis Vuitton, he altered the genuine Louis Vuitton-manufactured object itself. By 2024, authentic examples were already highly collectable and were generally approached as finished Virgil Abloh objects to be preserved. Dyeing one therefore carried a different implication from conventional sneaker customisation: an expensive and culturally significant finished product was deliberately treated as raw material for another designer’s visual language.

The choice of Dusk also connected the object directly to Federici’s wider practice. He developed the colourway during lockdown after studying sunsets from his window and has described it as probably his best-known colour system. Federici’s work is based on the idea that a recognisable colourway can retain its identity as it moves between different silhouettes and objects. Virgil Abloh himself encouraged this thinking. After being introduced to Federici’s work through Lil Yachty, Abloh began speaking with him directly, acquired his work and coined the term PATENTED COLORSCHEMES® in response to the colour systems Federici was developing.

The Louis Vuitton Air Force 1 formed part of a wider project organised by Disndat with a luxury concept store in California. Disndat negotiated for Federici to receive a group of objects selected to balance familiar footwear with more ambitious surfaces capable of extending his work to a new audience. The project included the Dusk and Menta Prada Re-Nylon prototypes as well as this considerably more valuable Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1. Disndat coordinated the relationship, ensured the objects reached Federici, managed the content requirements and oversaw their onward logistics.

The resulting Dusk Air Force 1 circulated widely on Instagram after it was revealed. Its impact came partly from the recognition that the base object was genuine: this was not an Air Force 1 made to resemble the Louis Vuitton collaboration, but an authentic Louis Vuitton pair being permanently altered after release. A surviving commercial record from the period identifies the size US 10 pair as a one-of-one and dates the intervention to 19 October 2024. The Archive has not identified an earlier well-documented artist intervention on an authentic commercial Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1, although it stops short of asserting an absolute “first ever” without a complete historical record.

The pair was subsequently presented through the California store and sold to a private client in the United States with its original Louis Vuitton accessories. Neither Disndat nor Federici retained ownership.

For Disndat, the object records the same proposition tested through the Prada bags, but at a materially different level of consequence. Federici already possessed an established visual language. The role was not to change that language but to identify objects capable of testing how far it could travel. In this instance, the existing object carried the authorship of Nike, Louis Vuitton and Virgil Abloh; Federici’s intervention did not erase those identities but added another layer to an Air Force 1 whose history was already built around appropriation, modification and changing context.