Virgil Abloh — barrier-breaking fashion designer
Virgil Abloh, the barrierbreaking Black designer whose ascent to the heights of the traditional luxury industry changed what was possible in fashion, died Sunday in Chicago after a two-year battle with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer. He was 41.
His death was confirmed by his family.
The artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear as well as the founder of his own brand, Off-White, Abloh was a prolific collaborator with outside brands from Nike to Evian, and a popular fashion theorist whose expansive and occasionally controversial approach to design inspired comparisons with everyone from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons.
Abloh transformed not just what consumers wanted to wear, bridging hypebeast culture and the luxury world, but what brands wanted in a designer — and the meaning of “fashion” itself.
For him clothes were not garments but fungible totems of identity that sat at the nexus of art, music, politics and philosophy. He was a master of using irony, reference and the self-aware wink (plus the digital world) to recontextualize the familiar and give it an aura of cultural currency.
“Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself,” his wife quoted him as saying in an Instagram post. He believed deeply, she wrote, “in the power of art to inspire future generations.”
“Virgil was not only a genius designer, a visionary, he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom,” said Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
A workaholic who maintained a punishing schedule and moonlighted as a DJ and a furniture designer, Abloh nevertheless seemed to glory in having his fingers in as many pies as possible.
Just in July, he had been promoted to a new position within LVMH that would allow him to work across the group’s 75 brands, making him the most powerful Black executive in the most powerful luxury group in the world.
When he was 22 Abloh met Kanye West. That relationship set him on the road to Paris when, in 2009, West signed a deal for a sneaker collaboration with Louis Vuitton, and he and his creative team, including Abloh, headed off for fashion week and became the talk of the season. (A group photo of West, Abloh and their collaborators outside a show went viral online and was even satirized on “South Park.”)
He is survived by his wife, Shannon Abloh; his children, Lowe Abloh and Grey Abloh; his sister, Edwina Abloh; his parents — and a legacy he identified during his first Louis Vuitton show, held in the gardens of the Palais Royale in front of an audience that included West, Rihanna and ASAP Rocky, as well as 1,500 students.
“There are people around this room who look like me,” he said to the New York Times. “You never saw that before in fashion. The people have changed, and so fashion had to.” He made it so.