FASHION Virgil Abloh, remembered as an ambassador and infiltrator
In recent years, it could often appear as if there were several Virgil Ablohs, all working at the same time. There were the multiple annual collections of Louis Vuitton, where he was the artistic director of menswear, and Off-white, his own label, which he’d founded while still in the orbit of Kanye West. There were the seemingly endless collaborations, with brands as disparate as Nike, Ikea, Evian, Rimowa, Vitra, Chrome Hearts and more.
And perhaps just as important, there were his daily Instagram missives. Seemingly no one posted more than he did — a couple dozen images on his story, easily, consisting of new designs, new music, screen grabs of conversations, fit pics posted by the super-famous, fit pics posted by the unknown. He was a geyser of ecstatic creativity.
What he was doing wasn’t flaunting his ubiquity and success, but rather offering up the blueprint for how to replicate it. The community of ideas doesn’t meet in private, he knew; it was fortified by exposure to sunlight and scrutiny. His mind was constantly churning, and his solution was to build an archive in real time, for everyone to absorb.
Look around at the way young men now think about clothes, design and music, and the ways in which those pursuits all intersect: It’s hard not to see Abloh everywhere.
Abloh, who died Sunday at 41, repurposed this ethic from hip-hop and skateboarding, two cultural pursuits premised upon the provocative and ultimately correct misuse of what came before. He succeeded at the highest levels of luxury by importing the bootleg, the remix, the alternate point of view. Crucially, Abloh was part of a generation raised to believe it was entitled to the luxury that high fashion houses offered, an idea and agitation he inherited from West. In his framing, though, the difference between those on the inside and those on the outside looking in was only a matter of who had placed the window, and where. Abloh simply shattered that window.
In this, he was part of a profound lineage. Since the 1980s, hip-hop had been doing shadow work in boosting the power and cultural relevance of high fashion, whether it was Dapper Dan’s cut-and-sew remakes in the 1980s or the Notorious B.I.G.’S embrace of Versace in the 1990s or ASAP Rocky’s early 2010s gestures to the avant-garde.
And yet there had never been a designer of the hiphop generation — to say nothing of a Black designer — at the head of a French luxury house until Abloh took over Louis Vuitton in 2018. He became an ambassador, and an infiltrator.
In recent years, plenty of high-fashion companies have attempted to incorporate hip-hop language or swagger or silhouettes into their collections, but those conversations have generally felt strained, clearly the product of observation. Abloh’s contributions were a product of immersion. In Louis Vuitton stores right now, for example, there is a stunning pattern-quilted leather jacket inspired by the ones made by the Detroit store Al Wissam that were a hiphop staple at the end of the 1990s into the early aughts. He understood that hip-hop was luxurious long before LVMH came calling.
Hip-hop had long ago “knighted” luxury, he said in a recent text exchange with this reporter. “Still surreal that it’s my day job to close the loop.”
Atop Louis Vuitton, he suddenly became the template for a generation of young designers, stylists and fashion dreamers who came up in the Abloh mold, an astonishing victory. He helped incubate the culture of hype that began with streetwear and sneakers and has now become the dominant ethos of luxury. He made limited-run merch for seemingly every occasion, a statement about fervent, unsatiable creativity and also the sense that every gesture was worth commemorating.
And while he reached out to elders to work together in various formats — Arthur Jafa, Goldie, Futura and more — Abloh also displayed a granular interest in other people’s creativity, especially young people. He was dizzyingly accessible in his DMS — several people posted screenshots of his private encouragements, emotional labor that was free and unseen, but not without consequence.
Because of that, the scale of his impact can’t be measured in garments or collections. Rather, it’s in the establishment of a universe in which Abloh wasn’t just a fashion designer but a folk hero and a superhero. Still, at root he was a fan, ravenous.
Rappers, naturally, loved him. When Drake needed a design for his personal Boeing 767, he turned to Abloh, who rendered it the palette of a cloudy sky. “Virgil was sending me drip just to see if I like it,” Young Thug rapped. Abloh sat Pop Smoke and Westside Gunn — who’d rapped, “Tell Virgil to write ‘BRICK’ on my brick” — front row in Paris.
This was the ultimate full-circle acclamation for
Abloh, who was also a curious and expansive D.J. — in the 2010s, he seemingly flew around the world more to spin records than to work on collections — and who made music of his own. He was a connoisseur of emerging sounds from around the globe, from Atlanta hiphop to British jazz to Ghanaian drill.
In this, as in all things, he prioritized the power and innovation of Black art. In his earliest promotional campaigns for Louis Vuitton and up through the video setting up the collection Louis Vuitton will show in Miami this week, he prominently featured Black children.
When he had his first museum exhibition in Chicago in 2019, he installed a work referencing the police killing of Laquan Mcdonald amid the advertisements and sneakers (and also a photo of Chicago drill pioneer Chief Keef ). In his collections, he wove in direct references to Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. He also imported hip-hop’s sense of collectivity into his garments, once delivering an intarsia sweater depicting the outline of 38 people who worked on his clothing.
In July, LVMH announced that Abloh had been promoted to a role in which he would work across the conglomerate’s several dozen brands, spanning clothing, spirits and hotels. (It also took a majority stake in Off-white.) It was a vote of confidence not simply in Abloh’s design work, but also in his vision for luxury, and how it would scale across various properties. It acknowledged that the sort of cross-pollinated cultural engineering Abloh naturally excelled at was indeed the most promising path forward, even for a company as steeped in tradition as LVMH.
That was one version of Abloh’s future. But he was just as preoccupied with an alternate, parallel path. He mentored of Black fashion aspirants. He organized scholarships for Black fashion students. He agitated behind the scenes for more diversity in the high fashion industry. He helped build a skate park in Ghana. He sold T-shirts that read “I Support Young Black Businesses” and donated the proceeds to charity.
So many seeds, sprinkled in so many places, guarantee flowers for generations to come. Look around a few years from now, and it will be hard not to see Ablohs everywhere.