Virgil Abloh would turn 42 today: here are his top 5 things he has done for the fashion world

Almost a year ago, on November 28, 2021, Virgil Abloh, creative director of Louis Vuitton and founder of streetwear brand Off-White, died. And that history will now always be painted black for the entire fashion industry. The story of Virgil’s rise to Olympus fashion is truly decisive: he has come a long way from a boy from an immigrant family from Ghana to one of the most legendary designers of our time. Yes, so much so that his last show, which is no longer in his lifetime, was watched by anyone with access to the internet.

Before the 2022 spring-summer show, the fashion designer did not live only three days: a rare form of cancer – cardiac angiosarcoma, which the designer had secretly struggled with in the last two years of his life, was stronger. The show was headlined by the large “Virgil Was Here” headline, every second of which was devoted to the legendary designer – from a two-minute video initially featuring a boy on a bike chasing a balloon to the brand’s latest debut. team with tears in their eyes. “Life is so short that you don’t get to spend a day doing what people think you can do instead of what you can actually do,” Virgil said at the end of the show.

The best tribute to the designer is the eternal memory of his values. We are talking about 5 exploits of “Voldemort from the world of fashion”, which divides the history of the industry into “before” and “after”. Thanks Virgil.

Live a century – work a century

The designer has once again demonstrated and proven that the shell in the field of design is not an indicator for a fashion designer. He had no special education: first Abloh graduated from the School of Civil Engineering in Wisconsin, and then earned a master’s degree in architecture in Illinois, and even managed to work in his profession for several years.

It is noteworthy that the knowledge from “another opera” was certainly useful to him in the role of a designer: he skillfully worked with forms and sewed real New York skyscrapers on jackets. Another clear proof that every skill is important in life and that special education is far from a guarantee of success.

Music got us hooked

Virgil had a warm friendship with Kanye West for 12 years. To get to know the rapper, the designer was even on duty near his studio in Chicago – to start the journey, you need to go. Friends attended shows together and regularly appeared in street-style diaries.

Later, Kanye decides to entrust the entire visual component of his work to a friend – so Virgil becomes the creative director of the Donda agency. The designer said he was ready to work on the beach 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and began stamping literally samples of products and covers for the artist. Bottom line: In 2011, the artwork for the album Watch The Throne won Grammy awards for best music record design and best rap album. Result 2: The whole world starts talking about Virgil.

new luxury

After collaborating with Kanye West, Virgil created Off-White, the premium streetwear brand that resonates with pride even today. It eventually and irreversibly changed the position of luxury clothing. The essence of the matter is also simple and difficult for the ear of an ordinary person: a label with beautiful letters on it does not matter, the main thing is demand: “Luxury is what you desire.”

Off-White shot with a focus on millennials: Abloh was one of the first to recognize the power of a banned social network and did everything possible to make their work look good on the air. The brand became a new way of thinking – even avid adherents of high fashion began to wear streetwear. Virgil took the simplest motifs absolute—graphic stripes, quotation marks, crossed arrows, and graffiti-like prints. And this is perhaps one of the best lines on a resume for any designer. Finding the fifth corner in the fashion space, where everything has long been invented for you, is definitely the highest value.

The first black creative director in the history of the leading fashion castle

In 2018, Abloh was named creative director of the Louis Vuitton menswear line. And he became the first high-profile black designer in the history of the luxury home, and also one of the few blacks to make the list of France’s top fashion designers. Virgil presented a magnificent combination of luxury and streetwear to create the brand’s first collection: the many pockets you can and cannot do, abstract and floral prints were invented in a new luxury style. Needless to say, at the end of the show, all the guests of the show gave a standing ovation to the victory of the master, and the length of the podium for a moment became 250 meters.

we are going as a couple

And finally, Virgil was notorious for resounding collaborations and particularly the selection of candidates for partnerships. So the designer has managed to work hand in hand with Nike, Jimmy Choo, IKEA, Evian, Byredo and more. By the way, for an endless flurry of cooperation, he was not very popular in the industry. For example, Virgil’s beloved Raf Simons called him “a sweet but certainly not original designer.” Some even chose not to say his name at all: “He’s like Voldemort, just from the fashion world,” said the statements of world journalists.

However, it was Virgil who laid the foundation for a new era of fashion collaborations that still rules the fashion world. It consists of a collaboration of brands from two different games – fans of high fashion and streetwear, “high” and “low”. No one argues that the main purpose of such collaborations in most cases is to become famous and enter the global market through the latter, the beauty of the content is already secondary. But unlike his followers, Virgil has always followed the opposite formula – at least get bags from the Off-White x Heron Preston collaboration and rugs with drawers from the IKEA collaboration. It is enough to remember what kind of hunt was declared for these items. And no, not because of those letters on labels or doors.