Virgil Abloh, Multi-hyphenate Maker, Dies at 41

Virgil Abloh died on Sunday 28 November of cardiac angiosarcoma, a cancer of the heart.

Born in Illinois to Ghanaian immigrant parents, Abloh rose to the top of the fashion world.

He interned at Fendi alongside Kanye West—serving as the rapper’s creative director for album covers including 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Watch the Throne—before founding his own fashion brand, Off White, in 2012.

Abloh sold a majority stake of the brand to LVMH this year, the same company that appointed him artistic director of menswear in 2018.

While he is best known as a fashion designer, Abloh described himself as a maker. He studied civil engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison before completing a masters in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He designed furniture as well as graphics, was a keen DJ, and developed a serious contemporary art practice.

His 2019 exhibition Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” at MCA Chicago was extended due to its popularity. The exhibition included photos of Black models from Louis Vuitton ad campaigns juxtaposed with yellow police markers counting off the 16 shots Chicago police fired at Laquan McDonald in 2014.

‘I never felt more excited by a designer since Alexander McQueen than when I saw Abloh’s first show for Louis Vuitton,’ said Ocula Magazine‘s Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Bailey. ‘That was pure hard-edge colourfield minimalism; stunning and coherent. Abloh was clearly an artist, something his 2019 MCA Chicago survey highlighted.’

She described his decision to install a cease-and-desist letter from the United Nationssent after he appropriated their logo for dance parties—as ‘pure genius’.

In a talk at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Abloh shared his ‘cheat codes’ for design. He argued in favour of readymades and laid out ‘the three percent rule’, which suggests tweaking something that already exists instead of trying to invent something totally new.

Alongside the exhibition, Abloh launched a pop-up store called Church & State on the fourth floor of the museum that featured Off-White best sellers and items exclusive to exhibition goers. He also dressed security guards at the museum in limited-edition blue Nike Air Force 1’s that he designed for the exhibition.

Abloh’s interest in the intersection between commodity branding and art paved the way for a partnership with Takashi Murakami, who included a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique as one of the exhibits in his retrospective ©Murakami. They partnered on a series of exhibitions at Gagosian‘s galleries in London, Paris, and Beverly Hills. Abloh also showed at the Japanese artist’s Kaikai Kiki gallery in Tokyo.

‘Virgil was one of the hardest working people I ever met,’ said the MCA exhibition’s curator, Michael Darling. ‘He never took the easy path nor took anything for granted. Everything, no matter how small, was an opportunity for reinvention and re-imagining.’

‘But in addition to that work ethic was his humanist ethos: always interested in supporting young strivers and offering hope and help for those who just needed an example to guide their dreams,’ Darling said.

Kanye West devoted his Sunday Service on 28 November to Abloh. —[O]

Main image: Exhibition view: Virgil Abloh, Figures of Speech, MCA Chicago (10 June– 22 September 2019). © MCA Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay.