Before Louis Vuitton Men’s new Creative Director Pharrell Williams reveals his first collection this June during the Men's Fashion Week in Paris, AOC shares a jacket from the current Spring 2023 collection.

It’s easy enough to forget Virgil Abloh’s brilliance and all the ways he wove Black culture — and even Black American folk culture —into the Louis Vuitton brand.

This jacket — called the “Crochet Leather Overshirt” — caused an Anne double take today, as I remembered the Florida A&M [FAMU] Marching Band 100 marching band blowing their horns at the Louve in Paris. I saw Black quilters in the American south creating colorful patches that were not only homespun art but their own real-life stories.

Who knew that large swaths of North America were formally known as New France? AOC does today, with this unplanned detour into American and Canadian colonial history. Upper Louisiana was located in what is now Illinois — a northern state because we are looking at a map of North America.

Technically-speaking, when Virgil Abloh’s parents came from Ghana and settled in Rockford, Ill. which is close to Chicago, he was conceived in what once was New France in North America.

Imagine the Louis Vuitton ‘Crochet Leather Overshirt’ with its Own DNA Test

The design of the Louis Vuitton ‘Crochet Leather Overshirt’ is hardly workwear in the style of the American West . . . or even coal miners in Appalachia. Those pretty crochet Louis Vuitton flowers and emblems would get real dusty damn fast.

To purchase the jacket will cost you $37,000 and it’s made to order, so you must contact your local LV to pursue the conversation.

OMG! What LV could do under Pharrell is to create the patches custom — with plenty of LVs, of course. But after purchasing a DNA test as part of the jacket, the wearer could learn his/her roots. Then a select number of patches could honor those roots.

A recent story about Black Panther activist and academic Angela Davis comes to mind. Davis was recently a guest on Henry Louis Gates Jr ‘Finding Your Roots’ PBS show, in which he tells people about their heritages. The multi-talented host Gates Jr. also serves as Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Davis was astonished to discover that Angela Davis’ ancestors traveled to the US, as one of 101 people on the original Mayflower. The ship transported them — known as Pilgrims — and a crew of about 30 to Plymouth, Massachusetts, dropping anchor in November, 1620.

This is a much longer story, that the Louis Vuitton jacket has triggered, because Angela Davis’s childhood coincides with another meaningful AOC story. A clear vision is coming into my mind. ~ Anne