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W
ow, this guy can talk. Great thick-
ets of verbiage tumble forth as
Virgil Abloh thinks out loud in
long, run-on sentences—often
doubling back to critique himself
or to add further thoughts or re-
phrase. He’s so excited to explain, to be understood, that he
sometimes cuts himself off to get to his next thought. (He’s
also such an eager and attentive listener that he often antici-
pates what you’re about to say and says it for you.) As Serena
Williams, who collaborated with Abloh on the tutu dress she
wore at the U.S. Open last summer, says, “He’s one of the
most interesting people I’ve ever had a conversation with.
You find yourself thinking, Wait: Are you 90 years old? How
do you have so
many stories?!”
Or as his friend
Kim Kardashian
told me back in
February, “There
is no other way to
describe it: He’s
the nicest person
you’ll ever meet.
He’s a genuinely kind
soul. You’ll see.”
None of which ex-
plains why someone who
only recently emerged,
at 38, onto the main
stage of international
fashion—as the artistic
director of menswear at
Louis Vuitton, the first
African American to
helm a major global luxury brand—deserves a major mu-
seum retrospective. “Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech,’ ”
which opens June 10 at the Museum of Contemporary
Art Chicago, will begin by detailing the obsessions of
a seventeen-year-old skateboarder from Rockford,
Illinois; wend its way through the work Abloh did as
Kanye West’s creative director and the 2013 founding
of his label, Off-White; and end in the upper echelons
of Paris ateliers.
Abloh’s work feels so utterly of-the-moment not only
because he seems to work at the speed of social media
(where he has an uncanny instinct for harnessing the
attention of a rapt audience) but because he’s also the
kind of cross-disciplinarian polymath who designs
furniture for Ikea and DJs at Coachella, all the while
appropriating the work of those he admires through
collaborations with everyone from Williams to Jenny
Holzer and John Baldessari. “It’s a very contemporary
way of working,” says Michael Darling, the chief curator
at MCAC, “where someone is absolutely fearless about
crossing boundaries and genres. A lot of what pushes culture
forward is absorbing and recognizing things that already
exist, nudging them further along. Virgil sees all of this as
one big collective, generational effort.”
“From the beginning, I approached the idea of design
from a grassroots level,” Abloh says. “I removed this idea
that it’s somehow detached from the consumer.” Abloh gives
great metaphor, in this case to explain how his process differs
from that of designers of the past. “You don’t have to sit in
your studio and throw a dart and hope that it lands on the
bull’s-eye. If you actually walk up to the dartboard, you can
just place it in the bull’s-eye. I think that’s the success of Off-
White. I haven’t made a distinction between the design world
and the real world—I’ve just immersed myself in both. And
because I came from outside the fashion industry, I don’t
have the luxury of creating collections in a traditional way.”
It’s no accident that Abloh’s ascent has mirrored the rise
of the social models, like Kendall Jenner and Gigi and Bella
Hadid. “I think fashion is really diving into a streetwear place,”
says Jenner, “just this really cool, easy, laid-back moment.
And I think Virgil embraces
that—embodies that. He’s
just the happiest, nicest guy.
He has perfectly good rea-
sons to be stressed out and
overwhelmed, but he never is.
And it makes you feel like you
should be that way—more
loving and open.”
Abloh feels a certain kin-
ship. “There’s this insurmountable mountain of
legends that precedes us—this guardianship that
doesn’t allow new to come in,” Abloh says. “It’s
often an old guard reinforcing the old days. I
think we’re both trying to bridge the gap between
the old and the new: They’re recalling the glory
days of the biggest supermodels, but they’re
doing it the modern
way. I’m trying to
do the same thing
with design.”
It’s a freakishly
warm late Febru-
ary in Paris, which
means it’s a bit sti-
fling in the loft on
rue d’Uzès in the
Second Arrondisse-
ment that Abloh
rents to prep his
Off-White shows.
In one room, quiet
and mostly empty,
I catch a glimpse of
his upcoming resort
collection taking
shape: There’s an
inspiration board
covered in pictures
of women carrying and wearing scuba gear next to a rack
dangling with dainty macramé dresses that look like some-
thing Jacqueline Bisset might have worn in The Deep. The
other room is a kind of giddy, happy chaos, with tables
covered in Day-Glo gloves and belts, bags that look like
traffic signs, a rack of puffer coats the size of igloos. When
Abloh suddenly appears—tall and gangly and with a shiny
bald head, wearing complicated black trousers, a shirt made
“Because I came from outside the
fashion industry,” Abloh says,
“I don’t have the luxury of creating
collections in a traditional way”
TOP: VIRGIL ABLOH FOR IKEA, “W
ET GRASS” RUG PROTOTYPES (UNRELEASED), 2018. PHOTO COURTESY OF IKEA. BOTTOM
: VIRGIL ABLOH,
COLOR GRADIENT CHAIRS, 2018. PAINTED M
ETAL, FOUR PIECES, EACH: APPROXIM
ATELY 36
̋ X 24
̋ X 24
̋. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
