Midwestern Fashion Pioneer: Virgil Abloh, 1980–2021

Abstract

Midwestern Fashion PioneerVirgil Abloh, 1980–2021 Holly M. Kent Virgil Abloh, a pioneer in the worlds of fashion, design, visual art, and music, whose creativity regularly both crossed and challenged disciplinary boundaries, has died at age forty-one, after a private battle with cancer. An innovator and leader in global fashion, named one of Time magazine's one hundred most influential people in the world in 2018, Abloh maintained a deep connection to his midwestern roots throughout his life. Abloh was born in 1980 in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian immigrant parents (his father managing a paint factory and his mother working as a seamstress). Abloh did not receive any formal training in fashion design and credited his mother with teaching him how to sew. A 1998 graduate of Rockford's Boylan Catholic High School, as a young man, Abloh was deeply immersed in the worlds of skateboarding (a subculture whose aesthetic would profoundly influence his later work as a designer) and DJ-ing (a pursuit he followed throughout his life, often creating the playlists for his fashion shows and performing as DJ Flat White at music festivals including Coachella, Tomorrowland, and Lollapalooza). Abloh attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering in 2002. Though he did not pursue engineering professionally, Abloh noted that his degree honed his skills in problem-solving and multitasking. During his final years of university study Abloh took an art history course, where he studied the work of Renaissance artists and the German design school Bauhaus, both of which became significant influences on his future work as a designer. Abloh reconnected with the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2015, when he created a commemorative T-shirt for his alma mater. Abloh next attended the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he received his Master of Architecture degree in 2006. While Abloh was pursuing his degree at Illinois Tech, a building was being constructed [End Page 125] on campus that had been designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Abloh later noted that the work of Koolhaas (who had also designed for the fashion house Prada) helped to spark his own interest in the fashion world. Abloh's time in Chicago also profoundly influenced his future career, as it was at a print shop in that city in 2002 that he met musician Ye (then known as Kanye West). Abloh collaborated with Ye numerous times throughout his life, interning with Ye at the fashion house Fendi in 2009, becoming creative director of Ye's company Donda in 2010, and serving as art director on Ye's albums My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus, and Watch the Throne. In 2009, Abloh opened the fashion retail store RSVP Gallery in Chicago. Subsequently, between 2012 and 2013, he founded and ran Pyrex Vision—a business he frequently referred to as an artistic experiment. At Pyrex Vision, Abloh purchased discontinued garments from fashion brand Ralph Lauren, reprinted these garments with his own original designs, and then resold them (a business model which proved to be decidedly successful). In 2013, Abloh founded his Milan-based company Off-White, which offered bold, innovative reinterpretations of streetwear fashion. Off-White rapidly became (and remains) both a popular and critical success—an influential, prominent part of the global fashion scene, with brick-and-mortar stores in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. In 2018, Abloh became the creative director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection—one of the very few Black people to have held such a prominent position within a still White-dominated fashion industry. During his career, Abloh was invited to collaborate with well-known brands including Converse, IKEA, Mercedes-Benz, and Nike (among many others) and to design garments for celebrities including model Hailey Bieber (whose wedding dress he created in 2018) and tennis champion Serena Williams (who wore Abloh-designed pieces to compete in the French Open in 2019). Abloh also remained immersed in the world of visual art, collaborating with artists such as Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, and Takashi Murakami and having his own exhibit, Figures of Speech, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago...