Virgil Abloh’s 3% rule: a toolkit for making something new without starting from nothing

One Thursday in late October 2017, at a packed lecture hall in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Virgil Abloh took off one of his Nike Air Forces and held it up to the room. “Things are intriguing to me when they’re slightly edited, like these shoes,” he said. “I was only interested in restraining myself, and only editing it 3 percent.” The talk ended with students throwing their trainers at the podium for him to sign.

The headlines remember the sneakers. The lesson is better than that. Abloh used the hour to hand over a method. He called it a seven-point manifesto, “Personal Design Language”. If you make anything, whether clothes, music, zines or a side hustle, it works as a toolkit. At TRVTH it reads like a description of how our first collection was born.

Tool one: the 3% edit

The 3% approach is simple to say and hard to do. Take something that already works, a hoodie, a white tee, a trainer everyone owns, and change only what matters. A tag in the wrong place, a word in quotation marks, a zip tie left on. The object stays recognisable, which is exactly why the edit lands.

It goes against the pressure young creators feel to invent something nobody has ever seen. Abloh’s point was that you don’t need to start from nothing. You need to start from something and then show your thinking. The restraint is the skill. Anyone can add ten things; the hard part is choosing the one.

TRVTH’s BLVNKS range runs on the same logic. A classic-cut organic tee with what our own product page calls “reduced branding and muted colours”. The design work is in the fabric weight, the stitching and the colour, not in shouting.

Tool two: talk to the tourist and the purist at the same time

Another point on the manifesto was speaking to “the tourist and purist simultaneously”. The tourist is the newcomer who sees a piece and simply likes it. The purist knows the reference, the archive, the in-joke. Most brands pick one. Hype brands chase purists and leave everyone else out; high-street brands chase tourists and say nothing.

Abloh designed in layers so both could find a way in. For a young designer it is a useful test. Can someone with zero context get your piece in two seconds? Is there something underneath for the person who looks twice? If the answer to either is no, you have a poster or a puzzle, not a design.

Tool three: collect mentors across time

“I have mentors who are dead. I have mentors 30 years older than me. I have mentors 10 years younger,” he told the Harvard audience. He named Rem Koolhaas, Donald Judd and the artist Jim Joe among his influences. Abloh trained as an architect, with a master’s from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and it showed in how freely he borrowed across disciplines.

For anyone without connections in fashion, this is the most freeing idea on the list. You can learn from a book, a building, an old record sleeve or someone half your age on Instagram. Mentorship doesn’t need an introduction.

He backed it up with action. In July 2020 he raised $1 million for the Virgil Abloh “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund, supporting Black students heading into fashion. In the UK his influence runs through people like Samuel Ross, who interned with Abloh and worked as his creative assistant at Off-White before launching A-COLD-WALL* in London in 2015.

Tool four: insert yourself

Abloh opened the lecture as “Insert Complex Title Here” and closed it by renaming it “Insert Yourself Here”. Then he set homework: “Put yourself in my shoes. I’m not that special.”

That line has been quoted a lot since he died in November 2021, aged 41, having become Louis Vuitton’s men’s artistic director in March 2018. It is easy to read it as modesty. It is really an instruction: the method is open-source. The difference between people who make things and people who don’t is mostly whether they start.

Originality is not novelty

This is where the toolkit meets TRVTH. Our Originality Collection was the first collection we conceptualised. In our own words, the brand “was born out of originality”, with classic TRVTH branding, solid colours and only six product styles, in GOTS-certified organic cotton, cut and printed in London.

Six styles is a 3% decision. It would be easy to put out a new colourway every week. Keeping the range tight is the edit. Originality, the way Abloh taught it, isn’t about being the first to do something. It is about being honest about where you started and clear about what you changed.

So the brief for anyone reading: pick one object you love. Change 3% of it. Make sure a stranger gets it and a purist smiles. Then put your name on it, stay true to the edit, and be the TRVTH.

Future thinking. Sustainable. Honest. Start with the essentials: the TRVTH Originality Collection and the quieter BLVNKS Organic range.

Shop the Originality Collection →

Sources

• Harvard Gazette, ‘Ideas (and sneakers) were in the air’, 1 Nov 2017
• Reuters, Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh dies, 28 Nov 2021
• PR Newswire, Virgil Abloh raises $1 million for the ‘Post-Modern’ Scholarship Fund, July 2020
• Highsnobiety, 25 streetwear brands to know (A-COLD-WALL* and Samuel Ross)
• TRVTH, Originality Collection

Photos: TRVTH product photography.

Also on the TRVTH main site.