Virgil Abloh (1980 - 2021)
Virgil Abloh at Paris Fashion Week in 2019 (photo: Myles Kalus Anak Jihem).
“I don’t believe in titles; I only believe in work.”
A quote is perhaps the best way to begin the obituary of the Black designer who made the quotation mark the 21st century’s hottest piece of punctuation. True to his word, Virgil Abloh produced a truly impressive body of work in his too-short life, a real polymath whose oeuvre spanned fashion, design, architecture, art, and music.
As 2021 draws to a close, the fashion and design worlds will be reeling from the sudden loss of one of their most hardworking and prolific stars. Though he may not have had much truck with titles, he was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear and the creative director of his own brand, Off-White, when he passed away at the age of only 41 after a secret battle with cancer.
Born to Ghanaian immigrant parents in Rockford, Illinois, Abloh studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where an art history class put him “on this path of thinking about creativity in a much more cultural context — not designing for design’s sake, but connecting design to the rhythm of what’s happening in the world.”
He went on to train as an architect at the Illinois Institute of Technology, but he continued to refuse to be confined to one creative field. “I don't believe in disciplines,” he said in an interview with Dezeen. “I only believe in theory and in research.” Abloh art-directed music albums for Kanye West, made clothes for Beyoncé, created sneakers for Nike, DJ’d at Lollapalooza, and even designed a collection of furniture for IKEA. He was also an author, publishing a book of his own quotes, called Abloh-isms.
A friendship with West began in the early noughties and saw the two men interning together at Fendi in Rome and making waves at 2009 Paris Fashion Week, where they situated themselves at the vanguard of the now ubiquitous world of street style. “We were a generation that was interested in fashion and weren’t supposed to be there,” Abloh said. “We saw this as our chance to participate and make current culture.”
Abloh founded his Milan-based streetwear studio Off-White in 2012 and went on to open his concept stores in Tokyo, London, Miami, and Paris. Along with the signature quotation marks, his accessories often featured security tag-style zip ties, which sometimes got celebrities in trouble. His designs sold out in minutes and were so in demand they often popped up in bootleg form on the black market, something he took as a compliment. "I love counterfeits,” said Abloh. “It's the best feedback, it's better than like a great review on Vogue.”
The designer was highly attuned to his position as a high-profile Black man in contemporary America working in fashion, a notoriously racist industry that would turn him and West away from shows. He was vocal in support of Black Lives Matter and donated to bail funds. “I am a Black man. A dark Black man. Like dark-dark. On an average trip to the grocery store in Chicago I fear I will die,” he wrote on Instagram after the murder of George Floyd. “Any interaction with police could be fatal to me.”
His exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019 was intended to be a mid-career retrospective, but that same year he was diagnosed with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive heart cancer. Abloh chose to keep his treatment quiet, continuing to put out work and securing his legacy – a legacy that was not just for himself but for those he hoped would come after him.
“For me, it’s not just to run around and make cool stuff. None of that really feeds my ego. What I would be more impressed by is the next candidate for a house that gets hired as the next head designer has this multidisciplinary background and comes from, you know, not a fashion school,” Abloh told Pharrell Williams on a podcast earlier this year. “There’s one level of the work that’s designing at Louis [Vuitton], but my real job is to make sure that there’s six young Black kids that take my job after me.”
Words India Block