Virgil Abloh, who died at the age of 41 with a rare form of cancer, was a pioneering multi-medium artist, designer and creative.
Perhaps his most notable achievement was becoming one of only a small number of black people to take the helm a major fashion house, following in the footsteps of Ozwald Boateng, who was made creative director at Givenchy homme in 2003.
In 2018, Abloh was appointed artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton. At his debut in Paris, the first third of the catwalk show was walked by black models. Attendees, which included fashion students who were invited by Abloh himself, were given maps highlighting the models’ heritage.
Abloh was also the founder and creative director of the Off White streetwear label, which he started in 2013. By 2015, Off White was a finalist in the LVMH Prize for young designers. The label collaborated with, among others, Jimmy Choo and Ikea. Abloh did not limit himself to one creative medium: he was also an architect, artist, engineer, creative director, designer and DJ.
He was born in Rockford, Illnois to Ghanaian immigrant parents – Nee and Eunice Abloh – where his father was a manager in a paint factory and his mother, who worked as a seamstress, taught him to sew.
As a teenager, Abloh sent shoe designs to Nike with his friends (it was fitting, then, that he later collaborated with Nike in 2017 to redesign some of their classic shoe silhouettes).
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003 with an undergraduate degree in civil engineering. He also earned a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2009, Abloh interned at Fendi in Rome alongside Kanye West. According to the New York Times, his salary for the role was just $500 (£377) a month.
Both men saw it as an opportunity to see how a fashion house operated from the inside. Later, Abloh would become the creative director of West’s creative agency Donda, and designed several of his album covers.
In 2012, Abloh founded Pyrex Vision, a clothing label that soon closed. He gave a lecture on creativity at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in 2017 where he shared his advice and “cheat codes” for creators. The talk was later published as a book – Insert Complicated Title Here.
He is survived by his wife and high school sweetheart Shannon Abloh, his children Lowe and Grey Abloh, as well as his parents and sister Edwina Abloh. Speaking via voiceover at the Louis Vuitton fashion show Virgil Was Here, which he had been planning but eventually took place after his death, Abloh said: “I’ve been on this focus in terms of my art and creativity, of getting adults to behave like children again. And they go back into this sense of wonderment.
“They start to stop using their mind, and they start using their imagination.”
Virgil Abloh, creative, born 30 September 1980, died November 28 2021
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