“Virgil Abloh attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a Bachelor of Sciences degree in civil engineering there. Outside of class, Virgil skated, deejayed and hosted dinner parties…” So reads an entry in the glossary at the back of this lavish tome, a reissue/remaking of a 2016 production that Abloh, who died at in 2021 at the age of 41, carried out in partnership with Nike. As the creative head of Louis Vuitton, and with his own fashion house Off-White, it’s a sign of Abloh’s immense breadth of talent and work-rate that he managed this collaboration too. But then civil engineering students have to put in the hours and dinner parties don’t organise themselves.

It’s easy to say that somebody who dies too early is a great loss but in Abloh’s case there is a painful sense of the lost potential, all the remarkable things he may have gone on to do but we will never know. While ICONS is a beautiful riff on the sneaker – a book that documents a project where Abloh deconstructed and refashioned 10 iconic Nike shoes – it is but a hint of what he might have done in so many other fields. He had a Master’s in architecture from IIT in Chicago, too, and we may feel that the fashion world was lucky to have him: he was surely on the way to do other things.

When we see these fun but ultimately lightweight examples of sneaker art, we might dream of what he could have done with a building, a district, sculpture, music… or any culture he cared to get into. That said, this is a nice object. A tip of the hat is due to London-based design studio Zak Group, who were partners in the making of the book, and Taschen for once again backing a winner. But there’s a sadness hanging over it that was never part of the plan.