Amen Break

Louis Vuitton presented the Spring-Summer 2022 Collection by Virgil Abloh in the film “Amen Break” on June 24th, 2021. I had no idea what ‘Amen Break’ meant. so I immediately went down the rabbit hole that is google looking for it. 

The Amen break is a drum break that has been widely sampled in popular music. It comes from the 1969 track "Amen, Brother" by the soul group the Winstons, released as the B-side of the 1969 single "Color Him Father". The drum break lasts about seven seconds and was performed by Gregory Coleman. 

With the rise of hip hop in the 1980s, the break was widely sampled; in the 1990s, it became a staple of drum and bass and jungle music. It has been used on thousands of tracks of many genres, making it one of the most sampled recordings in history. The Winstons received no royalties for its use; bandleader Richard Lewis Spencer said it was unlikely Coleman, who died homeless and destitute in 2006, realized the impact he had made on music.

WiKi

So my curiosity was piqued, of course. By the time I’ve found more about it, I knew I had heard the Amen Break somewhere. It was the rage back when I used to go to raves and used to dance all night long in huge warehouses and barns in and around Pittsburgh and North central West Virginia. Those were the days of tiny t-shirts and huge JNCO jeans (if you did raves in the nineties and early aughts, you know which jeans I am talking about) and people were carrying water bottles and candy pacifiers everywhere they went. The Amen Break was part of all those records that resonated in the night in places that only the day before would look innocuous and harmless, but that later, for one night, would be part of some collective delirium. Dozens of people would be dancing to Trance, and Tribal and Acid House and Trip Hop records all through the night. That's the memory I have of the Amen Break. 

So of course I had to pay attention to a collection with that name. I love Virgil Abloh. I consider him a Chicago boy through and through and I have a wall in my house full of his posters and some of his collabs with the Museum of Contemporary Art and IKEA. I love his vision of what fashion is or can be and the concepts and themes each one of his collections have. Of course, these are not clothes that are prèt à porter or bound to appear in your nearest Sears. Even though his clothes to me look very 'street' we all know a pair of trousers or a jacket or one of his coveted bags would send us several hundred dollars back.

He uses do-rags, wide-brim hats, hoodies, jeans and conventional menswear in ways I seldom see on the runways. And that’s exciting. I also enjoy the way he visualizes his collections. Due to COVID-19, last year's collection and this year's collection have been introduced through short mini-movies, small marvels of movement, color and sound that present Virgil's own concept of what he'd like to see us wearing. 

I see what he has created here as a nod to the sampling done in music, the evolution from one music genre to another by the use of cutting and pasting, the collection of influences that make any cultural manifestation vibrant. This collection gave me classic tailoring and Hip-Hop (like it or not, Black streetwear culture influences heavily what people wear. Black people wear in the streets what people sometimes see on runways one year later), office grays and graffitti neons. East and West. Young and Old. It remixes and reworks what goes from one generation to another. It's about our tribes and about or cliques. We are what we wear.

XOXO

See more from the show at http://on.louisvuitton.com/6001yRDAJ  

A Film by Virgil Abloh

Starring GZA, Goldie, Saul Williams, Issa Perica, Caleb, JIM JOE, Kandis Williams Thelma Buabeng Octavia Burgel, Lupe Fiasco, damian Eugene Nagisa Williams, Julian Eugene Tsukasa Williams, Shabaka Hutchings, Shabaka Hutchings and Malik Le Nost