Right out of the gate after being hired as the art director of Louis Vuitton menswear, Virgil Abloh scored a huge commercial hit with an iridescent plastic tote bag, or “souvenir,” he called the Prism. A few hours since Abloh passed away at the age of 41, rare cancer, widely publicized, people struggled to describe a man whose contributions to the industry far exceeded any personal design. He was variously known as the kaleidoscope, a Renaissance man who was a tyrannical force in fashion history, however, looking back on his brief tenure at the height of the business, what is clear is the best word to describe Abloh has been there all this time . He provided it himself.
Prismatic Abloh, a designer capable of capturing the diverse colors and lights of a burgeoning culture, refracting them and then projecting them out into a world that awaits. Having just been heralded as one of the first Black designers to head a European luxury line (Olivier Rousteing successfully started the top job at Balmain in 2011), Abloh treated the achievement which, if not stature, comes with a seriousness. impression in and of itself.
“What is diversity?” Abloh once asked a visitor to Vuitton’s headquarters in Paris just hours before one of his menswear showcases.
The answer is everywhere you look. Since Abloh’s arrival with the label, Vuitton’s drab corporate offices on the Right Bank have been transformed into something more akin to a communal gathering space.
“I want all of this to mean something,” he said, words echoing something he told this reporter just months before he was officially appointed to the post. himself at Louis Vuitton.
On that occasion, in June 2017, Abloh was a guest designer at the summer edition of Pitti Uomo in Florence. Most designers in that position understandably exploit an unusual platform – Pitti Uomo is the world’s largest men’s clothing trade fair – to advertise their brands. However, instead of promoting her own Off-White label, Abloh used her salary to attract artist Jenny Holzer in a collaboration that saw the two of them excerpt poems by other artists. exiles caught up in a global immigration crisis and launched them onto the walls of the ancient Palazzo Pitti.
Two years later, at the Vuitton studio on the afternoon I visited, models of various colors whirled around trying out designs for every gender permutation. Abloh’s friends like Kid Cudi and others from the fields of hip-hop, skating, art, and design overlap around a table laden with expensive accessories that make most people at home. there are jobs.
Abloh, who had his nails painted gray that day, had just returned to work from what he calls a period of rest and reflection – a pause from the punitive schedule that once forced him to board the plane. at least once a week for many years – and that fact may have been due to the cancer that eventually took his life. If anything, he seems more committed than ever to a sweeping view of what constitutes the two. fashion and its message.
Abloh said: “I am here, in this space, not merely making interesting things because it is luxurious.
From the outset, however, he creates “interesting” things in bulk, through steadily recurring drops, and with a maximalist aesthetic often far from the polished sophistication of Designers dominated the high-end menswear market when he was on his way up. While famous designers of the late 20th century such as Helmut Lang and Jil Sander worked on an aesthetic of sharp, if still sexy, subtraction, Abloh in general preferred a heap, whether for garments or refer. (At one of his last shows, it was tunics over trousers with caps over hoodies and pockets around the waist, across the body, and tied at the back.)
He’s especially liberal in his patterns from other designers – to wit: the cloud print collection Italo Zucchelli designed for Calvin Klein in 2014 (and Drake would later wear in tour) reappears on Vuitton’s fall 2020 runway with a fairly close copy – or not selected by invisible quotes. He’s combined with dropping, taking exoskeleton shapes from Rick Owens’ tool chest, creating $550 flannel shirts for his hit brand Pyrex Vision from pegs. buckle with the Ralph Lauren logo.
As a designer, he’s a sneaky sentimentalist, an influencer from the late ’80s and early ’90s – whether it’s Saturday morning cartoons; or “Thriller” -era Michael Jackson (in a collection retrieved by LVMH in response to the documentary “Leaving Neverland” with detailed allegations against the singer of sexual abuse); or the dewy young Princess Diana, around the time of veils and bangles; or the Statue of Liberty as a Sudanese infant; or the flags of the African continent – he wears it on his sleeve.
His performances can sometimes be as boisterous as a revival of the Warner Bros musical. For the launch of his Louis Vuitton menswear show in 2018, Abloh covered the cobblestones with a rainbow ombré rug from the Royal Palais in Paris and then opened the door to a guest list. The invitation included 600 students from local schools of architecture, art and fashion. For his Michael Jackson-inspired performance, he recreated a dusty Lower East Side street in a tent set up in the Tuileries Gardens. (Visitors smoking weed added a little bit about Alphabet City verisimilitude.)
For his spring 2020 show, closely following a devastating fire that toppled the spire at Notre-Dame and nearly destroyed the beloved church, he took over the nearby Place Dauphine, where he installed a Louis Vuitton mansion, had disgruntled waiters serve Champagne to invitees to sit on quaint cobblestone coffee tables and gift Vuitton-branded trinkets like ashtrays Medicines and small paintings at the Eiffel Tower for guests who wholeheartedly put these souvenirs in their pockets.
“I’ve stuck with the idea of celebrating what’s here while we’re here,” says Abloh, the designer, who has also stayed with him throughout his life Virgil Abloh, a suburban boy who is hard to come by. You can trust where your luck and hard work come from. he.
The child inside Abloh often calls himself his creative North Star, who he says he comes to mind when he sits designing, has never been tutored in fashion, instead learning sewing from his mother Eunice. No matter how luxurious his life became, he regularly returned to the Midwest, to his wife and two children and to the Ghanaian-American family he had learned from – in the words of his father, Nee – the importance of having “a distinguishable career. ”
In this reviewer’s view, what will most significantly distinguish Abloh’s truncated fashion career may not be the merchandise he had a hand in creating – sneaker collaborations, his fashion collections or the accessories he covets. What people will remember about Abloh most of all are the structural changes he helped bring to fruition.
Again, he foresaw it for himself.
“There is a level of design work going on at Louis,” Abloh said in January 2021 in an interview Pharrell Williams conducted with him and artist KAWS for his podcast OTHERtone. His real mission, as Abloh saw it, was “to make sure that there were six black kids taking over my job after me.”
(This article originally appeared in The New York Times.)
