The designer who had painfully little time to shake up the world: Virgil Abloh
He showed that street fashion can be luxurious and incredibly expensive. And that no matter what the carrier of a designer's strange vision is, be it a dress, a shoe, a chair or a CD cover, the cool factor is not to be found in the material. Virgil Abloh quickly became a superstar and a role model for disadvantaged young people, who showed that if you are talented, anything is possible. You can even be the head of the world's most coveted brand.
Virgil Abloh was born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1980 to parents who had immigrated from Ghana. His mother worked as a seamstress and his father ran a paint company. After attending a local Catholic high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he graduated with a degree in engineering in 2002 and a master's degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006.
Although her mother had taught her how to sew, it was here, on campus, that her interest in fashion was sparked. A Rem Koolhaas building sparked something in her, so while studying architecture, she was designing T-shirts and writing articles about fashion and design for a blog called The Brilliance. After graduating, she was selected for Fendi's internship program in Rome, where she met fellow inductee Kanye West, with whom she became good friends and creative collaborators.
After the program, Abloh opened a clothing store in Chicago with his second wife, but he didn't stay at RSVP Gallery for long, because Kanye appointed him as creative director of his creative agency, Donda, a year later, during which Abloh also got a taste of the music industry. In 2012, he launched his first company, Pyrex Vision, which essentially bought up old Ralph Lauren merchandise for pennies, Abloh printed this and that on the pieces, and resold them for more than ten times the price. This experiment also only lasted a year, but he didn't give up. That's a good thing, because the next idea turned out to be the breakthrough.
Off-White's triumphal march
In 2013, he founded his second company in Milan, with a design inspired by British interior designer and graphic designer Ben Kelly. From the beginning, Off-White wanted to be a high-profile streetwear brand, “somewhere in the grey zone between white and black”, which is why he chose this strange brand name. The brand first caught the attention of people in Paris, and then expanded to China, Japan and the USA. The brand features were very distinctive: black and white stripes, plastic tags, strange inscriptions, material overlays, adhesive tape-like elements – these were considered completely unusual for clothes, shoes and accessories at the time.
But the rich young people definitely got it that the brand wanted to be anything but conformist. In 2014, it also launched a women's line, which it presented at Paris Fashion Week, but ultimately slipped out of the LVMH award. That same year, it opened its first store in Hong Kong, followed by stores in Tokyo, Singapore and New York. It only took 4-5 years for sales and customer feedback to shock the market: this small brand dethroned Gucci as the coolest brand in the world. And from then on, everyone wanted to work with it, including collaborations with IKEA and Nike.
Virgil Abloh is the first black designer to lead one of the hottest French fashion houses
In 2018, Louis Vuitton appointed Abloh as creative director of the men's collections, making him one of the few people of color to lead a storied French brand. Abloh succeeded in the task, international superstars also went crazy for his creations, and the coffers were ringing nicely for the LVMH luxury group, who did not want to miss out on the other goose that lays the golden eggs, so they bought a 60% stake in Off-White. In addition to his talent, Bernard Arnault, currently the richest man in the world, made Abloh a superstar, almost a pop culture icon, who was also elected to the board of one of the most important fashion industry bodies, the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America). The designer has collaborated with many other brands, designing dinnerware for Alessi, chairs for Vitra, poufs for Cassina, cars for Mercedes-Maybach, and even water bottles for Evian. He never forgot where he came from, and he supported black students who wanted to work in the fashion industry with a scholarship program. Unfortunately, however, in 2019 he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive type of cancer, and he lost his fight against it in 2021. It is an incredible achievement that it didn’t take him even a decade in the spotlight to forever write his name in fashion and design history.
