His debut collection for the label, which referenced both Caravaggio and the Bauhaus, was mainly themed around Farnsworth House, the floating glass house designed by Mies van der Rohe in Plano, Illinois. The two began collaborating, and the following year, West named Abloh the creative director of Donda, the creative agency he had named for his mother.įollowing a brief stint screen-printing designs on deadstock Ralph Lauren garments and selling them for more than ten times the price at which he had obtained them, Abloh in 2013 founded streetwear brand Off-White, whose moniker he cited as referring to the gray area between black and white. In 2009, Abloh moved to Rome, where he interned at Fendi alongside rapper Kanye West, whom he had met in Chicago while working on his tees in a print shop. Around this time, he began designing for T-shirts and contributing regular articles so to the fashion blog The Brilliance. While studying for a master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Abloh, who had learned from his mother how to sew, apprehended the aforementioned Koolhaas building. On graduating from Boylan Catholic High School, he departed for the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he earned his bachelor of science in civil engineering. His father ran a paint company, while his mother worked as a seamstress. That same year, he cofounded the Figure Skating Collective, with the goal of elevating young Black multidisciplinary artists and of contextualizing Black identity within design.Ībloh was born in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanian immigrant parents. An accomplished artist, Abloh collaborated with artists including Takashi Murakami and Jenny Holzer, receiving his first solo museum show, a midcareer retrospective fusing his efforts in art, fashion, and music, in 2019 at the Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) the show became the third most popular in the history of that institution. The founder of unicorn fashion house Off-White, renowned for consistently predicting trends in a highly volatile industry, Abloh at his death was CEO of that company and the artistic director of the Louis Vuitton menswear collection, the first African American to hold such a position at a French luxury brand. Trained as an architect, Abloh turned his attention to clothing after a Rem Koolhaas–designed building he spied being constructed on a college campus inspired him to apply the strictures of architecture to the structure of garments. Visionary designer and artist Virgil Abloh, who built a clothing empire based on the Duchampian notion that an original design need be altered only 3 percent in order to stand as new, died in Chicago on November 28 of cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

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