Virgil Abloh was born in 1980 in Rockford, Illinois, the son of Ghanaian immigrants — his mother a seamstress, his father the manager of a paint factory. He studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin and took a master’s in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was taught within the lineage of Mies van der Rohe.

He began working with Kanye West in 2002, initially as a creative collaborator on printed merchandise and eventually as the art director of West’s agency DONDA. In 2012 he founded Pyrex Vision, which consisted almost entirely of Ralph Lauren shirts rescreen-printed with the word Pyrex; he moved a year later to his permanent project, Off-White.

The Three Percent

Abloh’s practice was built on a formal principle he called the 3% approach: change an existing object by three percent, and the resulting object is new. The approach was, implicitly, an argument about intellectual property in an era of globalised mass production. Every Off-White product — the industrial-belt logo, the quotation-marked captions ("SHOELACES"), the diagonal stripes — operated as a quotation of, and commentary upon, the streetwear and workwear vocabulary from which it derived.

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Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself.

Louis Vuitton

In March of 2018, LVMH appointed him artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, making him the first Black designer to lead a French luxury house. His debut show at the Palais-Royal — a rainbow-coloured runway, a cast drawn from the global Black diaspora, attended openly in tears by Kanye West — was, in its moment, the fashion industry conceding a historical point.

Short Reign

Abloh had been diagnosed with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer, in 2019 and had conducted both Off-White and Louis Vuitton through the pandemic from a wheelchair. He died on November 28, 2021, at 41. The Spring 2022 Louis Vuitton show, held in Miami four days later, had been conceived entirely by him. His final collection — a summation titled Virgil Was Here — was presented in Paris in June of 2022.

The generation that has succeeded him at the European houses — Pharrell at Louis Vuitton men, Colm Dillane at KidSuper, Kim Jones everywhere — works entirely within the permissions his tenure established.