Abloh, bold designer of menswear, dies at 41
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 selfaware 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,” Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët
Hennessy Louis Vuitton, said in a statement.
A workaholic who maintained a punishing schedule and moonlighted as a DJ and a furniture designer, Abloh referred to himself not as a designer but as a “maker,” in acknowledgment of his own omnivorous creative mind.
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.