Virgil Abloh shocked the system – fashion was only part of it

“Me being here, in this space is about so much more than just making stuff that’s cool because it’s luxury,” Abloh said.

“Me being here, in this space is about so much more than just making stuff that’s cool because it’s luxury.”

Yet right from the start he created cool “stuff,” in volume, through regularly timed drops and with a maximalist aesthetic that was often far from the sleek refinement of those designers that dominated the upper reaches of menswear when he was on his way up. Whereas seminal late 20th-century designers like Helmut Lang and Jil Sander worked from an aesthetic of crisp, if still sexy, subtraction, Abloh generally favoured a pile-on, whether of garments themselves or of references. (At one of his last Vuitton shows, it was coats atop tunics over trousers with hats clamped on hoodies and bags slung around waistlines, across bodies and strapped to backs.)

He was notably liberal in his samplings from other designers — to wit: a cloud print collection Italo Zucchelli designed for Calvin Klein in 2014 (and that Drake would later wear on tour) turned up again on a Vuitton fall 2020 runway in pretty close replica — or uninflected by invisible quotation marks. He mixed with abandon, snagging exoskeleton shapes from Rick Owens’ tool chest, creating $550 flannel shirts for his cult label Pyrex Vision from logoed Ralph Lauren deadstock.

As a designer, he was a stealth sentimentalist, someone whose late ’80s and early ’90s influences — whether they were Saturday morning cartoons; or Thriller-era Michael Jackson (in a collection that was pulled by LVMH in response to the Leaving Neverland documentary that detailed allegations against the singer of sexual abuse); or the dewy young Princess Diana, circa her chiffon and pussy-bow period; or the Statue of Liberty as re-imagined as a Sudanese infant; or else the flags of the African continent — he wore on his sleeve.

“I was stuck with this idea of celebrating what’s here while we’re here.”

At times his shows could be as campy as a revival house matinee of a Warner Bros. musical. For his Louis Vuitton men’s show debut in 2018, Abloh covered the gravel paving at the Palais Royal gardens in Paris with an ombré rainbow carpet and then opened the gates to a guest list including 600 students from local architecture, art and fashion schools. For his Michael Jackson-inspired show, he reconstructed a grubby Lower East Side street in a tent erected in the Tuileries Gardens. (Guests smoking weed added a touch of Alphabet City verisimilitude.)

For his spring 2020 show, which closely followed a devastating fire that toppled the spire on Notre Dame and came close to destroying the beloved cathedral, he took over the nearby Place Dauphine, where he installed a Louis Vuitton bouncy castle, had aproned waiters serve Champagne to invitees seated at cafe tables set on the ancient cobblestones and gave away Vuitton-branded trinkets like ashtrays and miniatures Eiffel Towers to guests who wholeheartedly shovelled these souvenirs into their bags.

“I was stuck with this idea of celebrating what’s here while we’re here,” said Abloh, the designer, who also remained throughout his life Virgil Abloh, the suburban kid who could hardly credit where his own good fortune and hard work had gotten him.

The inner child Abloh often claimed as his creative North Star, the person he said he thought of when he sat down to design, had never been tutored in fashion, learning instead to sew from his mother Eunice. No matter how highflying his life became, he returned with regularity to the Midwest, to his wife and two children and to the extended Ghanaian-American family from whom he learned — in the words of his father, Nee — the importance of having “a distinguishable career.”

From this critic’s vantage, what will distinguish Abloh’s truncated career in fashion most durably may not be the goods he had a hand in creating — his sneaker collaborations, his fashion collections or his highly coveted accessories. What people will remember Abloh for above all is the structural changes he was instrumental in bringing into effect.

Once again, he foresaw that for himself.

“There’s one level of the work that’s designing at Louis,” Abloh said in January 2021 in an interview Pharrell Williams conducted with him and the artist KAWS for his OTHERtone podcast. His real mission, as Abloh saw it, was “to make sure there’s, like, six young Black kids that take my job after me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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