Virgil Abloh’s most recent collection, unveiled at this year’s Pitti Uomo, appears to have little to do with poetry. Abloh strayed from the graphic-laden pieces familiar to Off-White fans in favor of deconstructed tailoring and political commentary. Yet poetry is a common thread stitching together Abloh’s latest work. The back of the show invitation features a line from Iranian writer Omid Shams. A patch on the back of a translucent jacket repeatedly reads “A Live Poem,” a small nod to Abloh’s penchant for graphics and to his collection’s literary foundation. In fact, Abloh himself stated on his Instagram, "Ironically the first book I ever read front to back, inspired the whole collection ~ Temperature®." That book? Ray Bradbury's classic, Fahrenheit 451.

Models walked in front of giant projections of poems curated by artist Jenny Holzer, including more than thirty poems by Anna Świrszczyńska, a Polish poet and member of the resistance movement during World War II, as well as poems by contemporary poets writing about Syria and Palestine. Abloh confessed that even the title of his collection, “Temperature,” was plucked from a Margiela text in which the designer described color as temperature.

Putting text on clothes is “fundamental to streetwear,” Abloh said in a post-Pitti interview with Dazed. “Different types of fashion designers have said hey, put text on it. It generally makes things sell more.” However, Abloh’s choice to incorporate text in his latest collection is more than commercial. “What Jenny [Holzer] and I have done is curate a number of voices that are beyond our own to bring light to a message that largely is left on news stations but not in the other genres of art,” Abloh said.

While previously apolitical, it should not be unexpected from Off-White to provide social commentary. The brand has always carried a rebellious energy which partially helped popularize the label with younger consumers. It is increasingly difficult and irresponsible to maintain neutrality in the current global political climate. This accelerated tension and younger generations’ historic penchant for protest makes the time ripe for Abloh to pivot toward more poignant product. By tapping writers and poets’ works inspired by their own lived experiences, Abloh simultaneously illuminates the voices of the most vulnerable and avoids the hackneyed, Etsy-esque slapping of words like ‘Resist’ onto tees and jackets.

For its F/W 17 menswear presentation in Paris, the label traded the runway for three rooms in which models, styled in Margiela’s classically off-kilter proportions, read 1958 paperbacks of Henri Bergson and quietly conversed over a soundtrack of Jack Kerouac recordings. Despite the looming presence of Bergson and Kerouac in the show, the collection did not directly reference specific writers’ works but rather captured the spirit of a literary movement and envisioned what the Beat Generation may have looked like in present day.

The Beat Generation consisted of a group of writers that came to prominence in the 1940s through the 1960s. They aimed to break free of traditional academic forms of literature and played with more conversational–and at times rambling and fantastical–language. Their gritty, sometimes vulgar works and often unstable, hermetic or nomadic lifestyles challenged greater social norms for art, drugs, philosophy, sexuality and spirituality. They were often stereotyped, and at times demonized, by the public, and the Beatnik caricature emerged as a hedonistic Communist lowlife who wasted his days away in back-alley jazz bars.

It was a feat for the Margiela team to successfully resist falling into the same patterns of mimicry that have persisted for over half a century. Absent from the collection were any stereotypical black berets and turtlenecks; instead, Margiela presented a series of modern takes on the dishevelment of Beat writers with stiff outerwear, frayed details, and delightfully awkward layering. The Beat writers’ disregard for fashion and disdain for trends became a discordant source of inspiration for an internationally renowned designer label. However, the two are surprisingly compatible. Maison Margiela disrupts the fashion industry in a nature similar to how the Beats disrupted literature, often presenting gloriously anti-fashion pieces that communicate an alternative intellectualism coupled with whimsy.

Yang Li’s FW16 collection also drew inspiration from the Beats, but rather than an imagined modern day author, Li's take manifested as the wardrobe of a fanatical reader. Li himself confessed that he had been reveling in “perverse interests” throughout the design process, which included consuming quite a bit of William Burroughs. Known for his semi-autobiographical work, Burroughs writing detailed his lifelong heroin addiction and travels through Mexico City, London, Paris, Tangier and the Amazon. Born into a wealthy Missouri family, Burroughs’s youth was glossy on paper—he attended private boarding school and later attended Harvard University—but he concealed his experimentation with drugs and his visits to brothels and underground gay bars.

In true tribute, Li placed the author’s illustrated face on one of the collection’s few graphic tees. The Beat Generation’s sartorial indifference was also reflected in intentional size play: oversized coats jutted off shoulders. Silky jackets were cropped short and pulled taught across models’ bodies. Shirt cuffs and collars spill out of suits cut too tight, and pant hems either float inches above the ankles or pool bulbously over lug-soled boots. Though the immediate grit is missing from Yang Li’s FW16 collection, there is undeniably a dark underbelly that mirrors Burroughs’s life and work.

One of Ann Demeulemeester’s most iconic garments is a simple loose tank emblazoned with the word ‘holy’ in curling type. First released in 1998, the graphic has been reprinted several times, finding its way across the front of tees and long sleeves. Many attribute this piece to Ann Demeulemeester’s friendship with Patti Smith, believing it a reference to Smith’s song “Spell.” In reality, “Spell” is simply Smith’s song rendition of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl”:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

For the label’s SS16 collection, designer Sébastien Meunier continued Ann Demeulemeester’s legacy of referential graphic tees, incorporating an excerpt from E. E. Cummings’s poem “may i feel said he”:

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

The poem, published in 1935 and predating Ginsberg’s “Howl,” is a lighthearted and humorous piece about love and sex. While not a Beat writer, Cummings also relished in a more liberated poetic form that experimented with layout, capitalization, and punctuation. Regardless of whether it was a conscious choice, Meunier’s turn to Cummings’s more lighthearted work is reflective of the direction he is taking the label. Under Meunier’s leadership, Ann Demeulemeester is perhaps losing its original cultish touch, but also gaining a vibrant vigor. Regardless, two things remain constant at Ann Demeulemeester: the designers’ affinity for literary references, and an overarching gothic romanticism that cannot be shaken.