STILL HERE

Virgil Abloh dared to dream big and succeeded in remaking the luxury fashion landscape in the process. A tribute a creative force of his generation, and the next.

By JON ROTH

Let’s begin at the end.

On November 30, 2021, a fleet of drones spelled these words out in the sky above Miami:

VIRGIL WAS HERE.

The same phrase would soon appear on Louis Vuitton storefronts across the globe.

Two days earlier, Virgil Abloh, artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, founder and CEO of Off-White, architect, furniture designer, DJ, a compulsive collaborator and tireless advocate for bringing in talent from the margins, died in Chicago, Illinois of a rare form of heart cancer. Abloh had kept his illness quiet after his diagnosis in 2019, and so the news came as a shock not just to the fashion world, but the world in general – Abloh was more than a fashion designer, he was a force that transcended disciplines. His sudden death at 41 cut short a profoundly creative trajectory, and could have been the end of a cultural moment.

If you are holding this magazine, you almost certainly know all this already. The ripples of Abloh’s influence are wide and deep, and even those unfamiliar with his name learned it in 2018, when his appointment as Louis Vuitton’s men’s artistic director made headlines across the world – “the first African-American man to head a French luxury house.”

Still, it helps to revisit the context, to list out Abloh’s accomplishments, to isolate what we know about his life and career. It is impossible to read the arc of a person’s life as it happens – especially someone like Virgil Abloh, whose boundless energy seemed to spin into countless new partnerships and projects every day. But when that person passes and the dust begins to settle, the major plot points start to become clearer. Themes stand out more starkly, certain words and phrases start to echo. It becomes easier to find the thesis.

Talk to any one of Abloh’s many, many fans and they will have their own take on his mission. One through line in his work and his words is that he was a man enamored of possibility. Someone who saw potential where other people would never look, and took pleasure in asking questions.

What if we lifted up kids from the margins and gave them the tools they needed to make change at the center?

What if we remixed and remade it all, collaborating, cross-pollinating, appropriating and improving everything all with gleeful, kid-in-a-candy-shop abandon?

What if we were kids again? What if we maintained that wide-eyed optimism and curiosity.

This last question also brings up a corollary to Abloh’s preoccupation with possibility: wonder. Possibility is a concept. Wonder is the feeling it elicits. Again and again, he returns to this feeling:

“I’ve been on this focus of getting adults to behave like children again. That they go back into this sense of wonderment. They stop using their mind and they start using their imagination.”

“I start from the wonderment of boys. When you’re a boy there’s one thing that adults ask you: What do you want to be when you grow up? And you say artist, lawyer, doctor, football player, fighter pilot. But then, if I ask what does a doctor look like? There’s a knee-jerk. That’s where we can learn.”

“I’m going to… continue this feeling of the whole freedom of being a child, still learning. I’m changing my pace drastically.”

Why shouldn’t Abloh come from this place of possibility and wonder? After all, his story proves that dreams can, in fact, come true.

The designer himself has acknowledged in interviews that his trajectory is unbelievable. “To come from designing a graphic t-shirt in 2012 to making it to a house to design a collection... As a young black kid from Rockford, Illinois, from immigrant parents from Ghana, West Africa, that was like, impossible, you know?”

He did it anyway.

A little background to ground ourselves in where Abloh came from, and where he was going: He was born outside Chicago. His father Nee managed a painting company and his mother Eunice was a seamstress (she taught Abloh how to sew). He got a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. An art history class in senior year inspired him to pursue a Masters in architecture in 2003. He was fascinated by architecture, particularly the work of Rem Koolhaas, and the idea that architecture isn’t just about buildings, it’s about systems. During this time, he wrote about fashion for website The Brilliance, and he designed clothes, too. Through connections at a Chicago screen printing shop, he entered the orbit of rapper/entrepreneur/provocateur Kanye West, and Abloh’s life entered a kind of hyperspeed.

Working with West, Abloh joined a small brain trust of the musician’s collaborators. He became a kind of walking encyclopedia of design history, always rooted in his eclectic affection for artists like Caravaggio and Mies van der Rohe, Koolhaas and the Bauhaus. “Kanye wasn't going to put his art form in the hands of the art department at the record label. So he was like, ‘I am going to hire you, and let's literally work on this 24–7, laptop in hand, nonstop,’” Abloh has said. “So more than any title, I was just his assistant creatively. I believed that this was going to be another chapter in hip-hop.”

As West’s interest in fashion grew, so did Abloh’s, and the two attended Paris Fashion Week in 2009 with a group of collaborators including Don C and Fonzworth Bentley. It was an eye-opening moment for Abloh, who saw an opportunity in what felt like an airless fashion scene. “When Kanye and I were first going to fashion shows, there was no one outside the shows,” Abloh has said. “Streetwear wasn't on anyone's radar, but the sort of chatter at dinners after shows was like “Fashion needs something new. It's stagnant. What's the new thing going to be?” That was the timeline on which I was crafting my ideas.”

In short order Abloh and West become interns at Fendi, where Abloh meets Michael Burke, CEO of Louis Vuitton, for the first time. Not long after that Abloh launched a boutique called Pyrex Vision, buying up Champion product and deadstock Ralph Lauren Rugby pieces, screen printing over them, and selling them at a huge mark-up. More an art project than a viable brand, he dropped Pyrex to found Off-White in 2013. That brand, informed by the ironic sensibility of quotation marks, zip ties and ‘Caution’ tape, quickly disproved detractors claiming it was a derivative streetwear brand. Year over year, the concepts and designs grew increasingly refined, so that by 2018 the Lyst Index reported Off-White had surpassed Gucci in terms of brand heat. Meanwhile, Abloh is collaborating with the likes of IKEA, Evian, Rimowa, Nike, and Jenny Holzer - just a few topline names in a list of partnerships that goes on and on.

All of this – the studies in architecture, the education alongside Kanye, the fashion houses – feel like rungs on the ladder that finally brought Abloh to March 25, 2018, when he accepted the role of men’s artistic director at Louis Vuitton. It was the kind of historic first that made headlines around the globe, and even better, generated massive buzz among Abloh’s fandom, particularly the enthusiastic cohort of boys and young men who followed Abloh’s every move. Of the appointment, the designer said: "It is an honor for me to accept this position. I find the heritage and creative integrity of the house are key inspirations and will look to reference them both while drawing parallels to modern times".

If Abloh’s work at Off-White was defined by a clever irony, his work at Louis Vuitton felt more earnest and optimistic, both naive and elegant. His debut show in 2018 at Paris’ Palais-Royal Gardens, titled ‘We are the World,’ featured a rainbow ombre runway, a profusion of white suiting, and a cast of models made up partly of his friends. After the show, Abloh would post a photo of himself taking a bow, with a caption designed to galvanize aspiring creatives: “You can do it too.” Followers continue to leave comments on this post years later.

Over the eight collections Abloh produced during his time at Louis Vuitton, he would turn out designs that felt both commercial and innovative, guaranteed to inspire the young cohort he counted among his greatest influences, all underpinned with the immaculate construction and attention to detail one comes to expect from a French luxury house. Always a prolific designer, Abloh had two more collections mostly completed at the time of his death, but the ‘Virgil was here’ show in Miami, presented just two days after his passing, had a particular memorial quality. At the close of that presentation, Abloh’s voice rumbled through the speakers again, saying: “There’s no limit. Life is so short, that you can’t waste even a day subscribing to what someone thinks you can do, versus knowing what you can do.”

In exploring the possible, Abloh made sure to show others their potential, too. A famously open-minded, open-sourced artist, Abloh took pride in sharing “cheat codes” with his followers, tips and tricks he wanted to pass along to the next generation. He did this with talks at Harvard and Columbia, on a website called ‘Free Game’ that provides a masterclass in brand-building, and in a career retrospective exhibit, Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech,” which has traveled the world and reappears in the Brooklyn Museum this summer. Then there is his “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund, designed to present Black students with opportunities in the fashion industry – a fund that has raised $1 million to date. Much of this legacy will continue to be handled by Virgil Abloh Securities, a creative and philanthropic foundation headed by Abloh’s wife Shannon.

Even while his time was running out, Abloh continued to imagine, to innovate, and to lay the groundwork for the creatives who would come afterwards. “The next version of me literally works on my team today. You know, didn’t go to fashion school either, highly ambitious, super creative. And I know maybe 50 of them,” Abloh has said. “They will take my position, they will be the head of Louis Vuitton next, they will start another version of Off-White or a media company or whatever…I know my community is special, and that’s what I’m an advocate for.”

Yes, Virgil was here. And he’s still here - in his designs, in his philanthropic initiatives, and he’s especially here in that next crop of young creatives, in all those young Virgils he helped shape and inspire through his life and work. He was a visionary, a trailblazer, and a lot of other words that can lose currency over time, but maybe most of all Abloh was the spark that lit up the next generation.