Shock death of a fashion genius: Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh’s final interview
Just three weeks before losing his battle with a rare cancer, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of menswear, streetwear maestro Virgil Abloh spoke with WISH.
Virgil Abloh, artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton as well as the founder of the streetwear label Off-White, died yesterday in Chicago after a two-year battle with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer. He was 41.
Abloh was a barrier-breaking designer whose path to the top job at Louis Vuitton was anything but conventional. When he was appointed in 2018, he famously said he wasn’t a designer. Abloh transformed the notion of streetwear and elevated it into the luxury realm and redefined the role of a fashion designer in the process.
His death came as a shock to the industry, and just two days before Louis Vuitton was due to stage a fashion show in Miami featuring his spring 2022 collection. Less than six months ago, Abloh was promoted to a newly created position within LVMH which would allow him to work across the group’s 75 brands.
At the same time, LVMH raised its stake in Off-White.
In mid-December a pop-up Louis Vuitton menswear store is due to open in Sydney for three months.
“Virgil was not only a genius designer, a visionary, he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom,” Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, said in a statement.
Abloh is survived by his wife, Shannon Abloh; his two children, Lowe Abloh and Grey Abloh; his sister, Edwina Abloh, and his parents.
Three weeks ago Abloh gave The Australian’s WISH Magazine what was to be his final interview. WISH went to press before news of Abloh’s passing and the resulting story from that interview is published here:
Artist, architect, designer, DJ … and the rest
It’s exhausting just reading it. Virgil Abloh’s website states that he is “an artist, architect, engineer, designer, musician and DJ, chief creative director, and artistic director”. If that sounds like a lot of balls in the air, Abloh is also a fashion designer, even though many people – himself included – have said he isn’t a bona fide designer. In a 2018 profile for a fashion news website shortly after his appointment as men’s artistic director for Louis Vuitton, Abloh said: “I would sort of agree I’m not a designer; that term seems like it’s for traditionalists.” His job title, in his mind, was “TBD”.
“That statement was just to prod and poke people in a way,” he tells WISH via telephone from Chicago, reflecting on his now famous words. “What is a designer? That’s more my rhetorical question, and it’s different for every person, but it just sort of challenges the archetype. It’s more of a rhetorical statement than anything specific, and it showcases that in my world of creativity everything is sort of a thought process. It’s not just simply performing as a designer. There is a theory, there is a logic and a rhetoric that goes with it.”
It’s a logic Louis Vuitton understood when it appointed Abloh to the position of artistic director of menswear in 2018, for all intents and purposes designating him a fashion designer. His appointment rankled some of the traditionalists, which is exactly the disruption LVMH, parent company of Louis Vuitton, was looking for when it came to reinventing its menswear offering.
Abloh succeeded Kim Jones, who moved within the group to become artistic director of Dior Men. Jones was praised for his deft combination of tailoring and casual wear at LV, but Abloh’s elevation to the position was an acknowledgment of the growing significance of streetwear for the luxury sector in general and a sign that the world’s biggest luxury brand was responding to a shift in contemporary culture. “My muse has always been what people actually wear, and I am really excited to make a luxury version of that,” Abloh told The New York Times at the time.
Purveyor of cool
A first-generation Ghanaian American, Abloh was raised in Illinois and is widely considered one of the fashion industry’s consummate purveyors of cool. After studying engineering and architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Illinois Institute of Technology, he interned at the LVMH-owned fashion house Fendi in 2009 alongside Kanye West. The following year Abloh became the creative director of Donda, the umbrella agency for West’s many non-music related side projects.
Abloh founded Off-White, a high-end streetwear label, in 2013, and has been a master of irony and self-awareness in myriad collaborations with companies ranging from Mercedes-Benz to Nike to Ikea. His work with established brands has been about creating a bridge between the classic and the zeitgeist of the moment to produce sell-out products and cult collections. LVMH was clearly hoping for some of that alchemy when it appointed him to run menswear at Louis Vuitton, the jewel in its crown.
Understanding whether the hype has translated into sales is difficult because LVMH does not break out results for its individual brands. However, the group’s most recent financial statement goes some way to explaining the Abloh effect on the company’s bottom line. In the luxury sector, LVMH has emerged as one of the winners of the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first nine months of 2021 the group recorded sales of €44.2 billion, an increase of 46 per cent compared to 2020, and an organic growth rate of 11 per cent on pre-pandemic (2019) levels. Louis Vuitton is widely considered by analysts to be the biggest single brand in its fashion and leather goods division, which achieved organic growth of 38 per cent in 2021, compared to the same period in 2019. Thanks to that, LVMH’s share price is also up – as much as 70 per cent on its December 2019 level – which for a brief moment earlier this year made its chairman, Bernard Arnault, the richest man in the world.
Despite the company’s unwillingness to reveal results for individual brands, in July Louis Vuitton’s chief executive, Michael Burke, gave Women’s Wear Daily a restrained indication of just how well things are going with Abloh at the helm of menswear: “Things absolutely fell into place here at Louis Vuitton with menswear. The results are in, and they’re very, very good.” Which is why in July LVMH widened Abloh’s role within the group to working across all its categories, including wines and spirits and hospitality, to launch new brands and harness innovative collaborations among them. In the process, LVMH raised its stake in Abloh’s Off-White brand to 60 per cent, tying him to the group well into the future.
And with lockdowns eased around the world, Vuitton is taking the Abloh show on the road. Later this month the company will open a temporary menswear store in Sydney that it is calling Temporary Residence: Walk in The Park. The two-storey pop-up on the corner of Pitt and King Streets will run until March and Sydney is only the fourth location, after Paris, Tokyo and New York, to host such a concept. After Sydney it is due to travel to Seoul and Nagoya. While the store will offer iconic pieces from Abloh’s ready-to-wear collections and accessories for Louis Vuitton, the main focus will be on sneakers, including 100 limited edition pairs in custom packaging. The store design, which will be unique to Sydney, will feature walls made from 1600 stacked shoeboxes as well as a 7.5m-high sculpture of Abloh, 3D printed by an Australian company based in Byron Bay, that will cut through a void in the two floors. There will also be an invitation-only rooftop bar operating three nights a week.
Abloh will not be visiting Sydney for the pop-up store’s opening, but he says he knows the city well. “I started my career in design by travelling an awful lot, and I spent plenty of time in Sydney visiting friends and staying there for extended periods of time, so I have memories of the city and my own experiences to draw on,” he says. The Temporary Residence project, he says, is all about making a big global brand feel local. “It’s about showing up with a creative interior design and concept and bringing the clothes that we work on in Paris to Sydney. My background is in architecture and I like [store] designs that aren’t duplicated all over the world so it’s a bespoke experience in every place.”
Breaking the mould
From Abloh’s first runway show for Louis Vuitton (Spring Summer 2019), it was clear he would be breaking the mould of what a fashion designer is and dismantling traditions within the luxury industry. For one thing, the show was held outdoors in an arcaded courtyard in the Palais Royal on a long rainbow-hued catwalk. More than 1000 invited guests were seated – the usual mix of celebrities, LVMH executives and media – with 1500 standing-room tickets given to specially invited students. Featured was a cast of ethnically diverse models (and also musicians, such as Kid Cudi, Playboi Carti and Theophilus London), something that regrettably would have been inconceivable on a Paris runway five years earlier. The show itself was titled “We Are the World”, a reference to the 1985 charity song, and Abloh included in the show notes maps highlighting the global origins of each member of the cast.
“Being one of the figureheads of minorities within the industry, I take very seriously the idea of championing diversity and inclusion,” says Abloh. “Not in a marketing or performative way, but really taking it down to brass tacks and how I conduct my studio and how I look to inform and build bridges … It’s an active process that takes a tremendous amount of work, but it’s one of the things that I find most important and one of the things I use my platform to message the most.” When it comes to brass tacks, Abloh founded the Post-Modern Scholarship, which has raised more than $1 million for the education of Black students in the US.
Abloh doesn’t just look different from the other designers of established luxury brands, where only a handful of creative directors have been people of colour, he doesn’t work like them either. It’s not a consequence of being a Black American designing for a quintessentially French brand; it’s just that given his wandering resume, he doesn’t create products in the time-honoured way of European fashion houses. At 41, he is the ultimate millennial designer – confident, ambitious and unafraid to question traditional orthodoxies.
“I would say that positions in creativity, like the role of a designer, should evolve with the times,” he says. “Now designing and creative directing and artistic directing is not just designing the clothes, it’s having a reason for why they exist. So for me this multidisciplinary thinking between interior design, conceptual design, building a community within my ethos … it’s, you know, right in step with how I think and how I create.”
Abloh has a most unusual way of speaking about and explaining his work. He uses long, sometimes convoluted, sentences to make his point. A recurring theme is his “thought process”. On the subject of his ascent to the top job at Louis Vuitton and how he adapted to the world of luxury fashion design, he says: “It’s about a thought process and how can design be contemporary and intellectual and not just performative – runway shows or, quote unquote, what a designer should look like or think like, or talk like, and reference – and to bring my own thought process to the table and to have that be equal to the design itself, which is really what my practice is about.”
‘I don’t .... consider myself a designer’
In a 2017 lecture to students at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, available on YouTube, he explained some of those thought processes, making the point that the value of a particular design or product he created was directly related to how much of his thought went into it. His other message to the students was not to narrow their thinking to just architecture, to be multidisciplinary. “I don’t think that education in the future will be as linear as it was in the past,” he told WISH. “I think it’s a renaissance time that we are living in. The digital age is very much at our footsteps, and we will progress as a society the more rapidly we learn and the more rapidly we exchange with one another.”
“I’ve made it known that my multidisciplinary [approach] leans back to that. I don’t really consider myself a designer like people would assume. My education is much broader than just within fashion. So art, architecture, life, culture, skateboarding, hip-hop, DJ-ing – you know, the things that make up our human fabric – are what I draw from. So I generally think broad and stay creative and look to inspire, and generally don’t look to narrow down my practice or what intrigues me.”
While Abloh might be deliberately setting himself apart from the traditional archetype of a fashion designer, he is at the same time reinforcing the idea of the designer as a god-like creative genius. The design process, according to him, is an almost mystical one. Asked about his working process and whether he uses technology to conceive his ideas, he says: “I use all formats, both romantic and non-romantic. Design is often like a magical process, an idea of creation, but on an elemental level it’s communicating ideas from one brain to another. So whether it’s pen or pencil or words or a film or a run-on sentence, it’s transitioning one concept from one person to another and hopefully finding new territory.”
Regardless of the way he works, and the methods by which he arrives at a finished design, Abloh has undoubtedly changed how people think about menswear. Plenty of designers have reinvented tailoring and shifted ideas of masculinity, but Abloh has also created an entirely new silhouette and original garments. That harness Timothée Chalamet wore to the Golden Globes in 2019 – the one that sparked a million memes and copycat versions? You can thank Abloh for that.
Collaboration between brands has been one of the hottest things in luxury fashion over the past five years and Abloh has been the ringmaster of many of the most covetable ones. The products he has designed through these brand hook-ups are proof of his multidisciplinary approach. As well as a lot of sneakers, there’s been a water bottle for Evian, furniture for Ikea that included a rug resembling an Ikea receipt for a rug and a framed lightbox of the Mona Lisa, the interior of a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon, a transparent suitcase for Rimowa and costumes for the New York City Ballet, to name just a few.
For Louis Vuitton, Abloh has twice worked with the Japanese designer Nigo, and a collaboration with Nike and its Air Force 1 trainer forms part of his spring summer 2021 collection. And while many designers could only ever dream of working with brands such as Nike or Mercedes-Benz, Abloh says, in the spirit of Nike’s famous slogan, he just does it. “I’m the type of person that when I think of a collaboration I pretty much will it to happen,” he says. “I’ve made a career of this type of philosophy too, of collaborating and bringing brands together, so it’s pretty signature to how I think and how I create. It’s the idea of creating in conversation.”
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