The founder of the fashion brand Off-White and also the creative director of the French fashion house Louis Vuitton died at the age of 41.
According to the family, which published the news of his death on the designer’s official instagram account, Abloh fought a rare and very aggressive form of cancer for two years. He kept the disease a secret from the public and continued to work at full speed on the collections of both brands.
He was one of the most influential figures in the fashion industry, as well as a very skilled entrepreneur. The son of an emigrant from Ghana, who refused to stand out in his native Illinois because he was “too black” on his own Instagram memories, later became not only the owner of his own fashion brand Off-White, but also the artistic director of the Louis Vuitton men’s collection.
Czech footprint
The Czech designer Jan Černý, who stayed here on an internship in 2019, also met him here. At that time, he dedicated Czech Prestige sneakers to Abloh, whom he redesigned.
LohAbloh was a designer who was widely popular in his team. Although he previously worked as the creative director of Kanye West’s art agency, he certainly did not share greatness with the star rapper.
He once even had his phone number printed on his business card. When you called him, an answering machine was waiting for you, explaining the inspiration of one of the collections.
“Does he ever go to bed at all?” Wondered a journalist who had spent twenty-four hours with Ablah five years ago. As a reporter for GQ, he was shocked to see that Abloh was overseeing the launch of his brand’s women’s collection in one day, working on a video for Kanye and preparing a collection of sneakers.
The deployment also paid off financially: for his work at Louis Vuitton alone, he was to earn $ 10 million a year.
A combination of high and low
Designing was Abloh’s passion, and as he devoted himself to his favorite activities, he forgot everything else. He brought Streetwear culture into high fashion and was often compared to artists such as Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol for his approach.
Fashion for Abloh was not clothing, but the embodiment of identity, of which politics, music and philosophy must have been an integral part of his interpretation. While studying architecture at the University of Wisconsin, he ran a blog where he wrote: “We are witnessing a new era in which designers will be as popular as rock stars.”
A celebrity darling, whose models are worn by the most famous stars with millions of followers on social networks. This was one of Virgil Abloh’s positions, who demonstrated his ability to reconcile tradition and innovative achievements, for example, on a wedding dress designed for Hailey Bieber.
The shot, where the wife of a pop star is standing in a white lace robe, with the inscription “Till Death Do Us Part” on the veil, picked up four million likes.
K as Kanye
“Don’t ask me about Kanye West anymore,” he asked reporters. Abloh and his rapper had a friendship of almost twenty years, and in 2009 they went to Paris together, where the musician signed a cooperation agreement with Louis Vuitton, for whom he was to create sneakers. At the time, Abloh was part of the creative team and played all sorts of shows with West.
One of Tommy Ton’s most famous photographers captured Virgil Abloh alongside Kanye West before a presentation by the Comme des Garçons in Paris. Image It quickly circulated on the Internet and is still considered one of the pivotal moments of modern street style.
From Paris, the duo Abloh-West leaves for Rome, where they work for $ 500 a month as interns for Fendi. Here, Virgil learns everything she needs about the fashion business. After returning to the United States, he founded his own brand, Pyrex Vision.
He buys unsold flannel shirts from Ralph Lauren for forty dollars, prints the word “Pyrex” and the number 23, referring to his child hero Michael Jordan. The price rises to $ 550.
He later renames the company Off-White and rejects the box that it is a streetwear brand. Critics of Ablah call his creativity more “the ability to copy successfully.” But Abloh is unstoppable – he leaves for Paris again, where he becomes a finalist in the LVMH competition for young designers.
In 2018, Louis Vuitton became chief designer of the men’s collections, and Time magazine named him one of the most influential figures of the year.
Never slow down
For the last two to three years, Abloh had faced an insidious disease, of which only his immediate surroundings knew. Shannon Sundberg’s wife, whom he met while still studying, stayed with her children in Illinois.
On the outside, everything looked wonderful: last year, LVMH promoted Abloh to a position created just for him. This enabled him to work in a leading position across the seventy-five brands owned by the conglomerate. Virgil has become the most powerful dark-skinned figure in the fashion industry.
He also set up a foundation fund to raise a million dollars to support African-American fashion students. In May this year, he dressed the chairman of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, director Spike Lee, in colors so bright that the artist’s outfits became one of the hottest moments of the whole event.
During her last hospitalization, Virgil Abloh planned to fly to Miami to present the Louis Vuitton men’s collection in Miami. His talent and commitment were limited by the physical box that actually bothered him.
The public was shocked by the news of Ablah’s death. The man, who had 6.5 million followers on Instagram, was a very closed man, eager to leave his imprint in history. Even in such a short time, Virgil Abloh succeeded.
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