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first woman and the youngest person
ever to be on the board of LVMH,
and she and Abloh understand each
other; when I ask why Vuitton hired
Abloh, she says that it was his “dis-
ruptive approach” that sealed the deal.
But she also talked about Abloh’s first
show for Louis Vuitton as a “cultural
event—a celebration of people around
the world” that highlighted “values that
are at the center of our generation’s
concerns: diversity and inclusivity.”
(Abloh describes the show, which began
with all-white clothing worn by models
grouped by skin color, as “not about
inclusivity, or black and white—it was
about all the colors. And as the show
went on, the clothing hit a prism and
went into a rainbow effect, which was
derivative of the birth of Technicolor in
The Wizard of Oz—a movie that starts
in black-and-white.”)
In many ways, Jacobs set the table
for Abloh by doing the hard work
of changing the values of a very old-
fashioned company—one that had
been making monogrammed trunks
for 150 years before he got there. One
of the ways he did that was through
daring, blockbuster collaborations
with modern artists: Stephen Sprouse,
Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince,
and, perhaps in a foreshadowing of
what was to come, Kanye West. Abloh
has taken note, and the evidence lies all
around the room: “grid” chairs of his
own design that look like metal cages;
bright-orange blob furniture designed
by his friend Max Lamb; a marble ta-
ble with antlers by Rick Owens; pieces
of the furniture he did in collaboration
with Ikea that “a nineteen-year-old can
move through three apartments,” he
says. Sitting in one corner is a $40,000
vintage Prouvé daybed with candy-
colored swatches of fabric draped over
it. “That’s a project I’m working on
with a gallery,” he says. “I’m doing 30
of them, and I’m dyeing each bed a
different color of the rainbow—the
whole thing, when exhibited, will be the
full spectrum.”
As for the criticism levied at Abloh
by those who accuse him of being noth-
ing more than an appropriator—not
an original thinker: “That way of de-
signing—to develop everything from
zero—comes from a different time,” he
says. “For me, design is about whatever
I find is worthy to tell a story about. I
don’t believe that culture benefits from
the idea that this line on a piece of pa-
per has never been drawn in this exact
way ever before. My goal is to highlight
things—that’s why I collaborate a lot,
that’s why I reference a lot, and that’s
what makes my body of work what it is.”
All of which brings us back to the
question of how a 38-year-old who
has been a fashion designer for only six
years gets a 20-year museum retrospec-
tive. Abloh jumps up off the couch and
leads me over to an elaborately detailed
model of the museum exhibition that
he made. “It’s not just all the years of
Off-White,” he says. “I obviously have
much more going on than people might
assume. What I was doing when I was
a teenager will be in the very first room.
Then you’re going through fashion and
music and fine art and design.” And
then he points to a room in the model
with a miniature Newport cigarette ad
hanging on one wall. “This one is relat-
ed to race,” he says.
That section of the exhibition—“The
Black Gaze”—“really looks at the
emerging political content in his work,”
says Darling, the MCAC curator,
“where he’s bringing up issues of equi-
ty and inclusion and access—structural
racism.” There’s a neon piece in the
show that reads, you’re obviously in
the wrong place, which he used in one
of his early fashion shows. “It’s kind of
a surrealist gesture that’s trying to dis-
orient you in the gallery,” says Darling,
“but it’s also very much a reflection of
the sense of exclusion that he has felt as
he’s tried to move his way through the
fashion world—and also, maybe, this
kind of in-between space that he occu-
pies in terms of his national identity.”
Two weeks later, I meet Abloh—fresh
off an hours-delayed flight from Paris
—in Chicago. By the time we finally sit
down to talk at Soho House, it is past
8:00 p.m. He is unfazed—and as loqua-
cious as ever. “I was on two planes to-
day for nine hours,” he says. “I fly back
and forth between Paris and Chicago
like it’s Uber.”
His family—his high school sweet-
heart, Shannon, whom he married in
2009, and their two kids (a daughter,
Lowe, five, and a son, Grey, three)—
lives here in Chicago, hence the con-
stant transatlantic travel. When I ask
Abloh about this part of his life, he
becomes uncharacteristically reticent.
“I met Shannon early on, but I am
the same person now as I was in high
school. I like the consistency. For me,
to chart this course in a creative whirl-
wind—you need a solid family life, a
support system. It would not work if I
was distracted.”
Sitting in front of him is a mock-up
of the coffee-table book that will serve
as the catalog to the MCAC show.
Now that the work for the show is near-
ly done—and as Abloh creeps up on
40—he’s been thinking a lot about what
comes next. “I’m sort of in this midlife
phase where I’m pondering becoming
more content sitting on a couch,” he
says. “As a workaholic, that’s the central
conundrum. I’m sort of absorbing these
milestones in my career, but I’m also wel-
coming the idea that, yeah, maybe I don’t
travel so much; maybe I don’t take on
as many projects; maybe I spend more
time at home with my kids. Now that I
see what my trajectory is, who knows? I
might be open to being boring.”
He’s wearing a one-off leather jacket
created for Vuitton that didn’t make the
final cut. Emblazoned on the back is
a hand-painted cowboy standing on
Mars, looking back at Earth, with the
cowboy himself wearing a jacket with
a logo that reads from afar. It’s easy
to read this all as metaphor not only
for the dislocation he must feel from
working so far away from his family, but
also what his parents—who left Ghana
in the seventies for Chicago, where his
father worked at a paint factory—must
have experienced. His older sister, now a
nurse, was born in Chicago before their
father got a better job at another paint
factory in nearby Rockford, where Virgil
was born in 1980.
His parents spoke Ga—a local lan-
guage of Accra, the capital of Ghana—
at home. They cooked traditional Afri-
can food and listened to African music.
“There was no drama or trauma around
it,” he says of the kind of dual existence
he led. He simply absorbed his parents’
work ethic. “I have vivid memories of
going back to Ghana and looking out
the window and being superapprecia-
tive—but being, like, twelve—like, What
if my dad hadn’t made this one decision
to take this leap of faith to go to this new
country? I would be the kid on the side
of the street in Africa with no clue what
was going on in the rest of the world.
And the thing about Ghana: The sew-
age flows along the side of the street in
an open gutter. So I had no bone to be
rebellious. If my dad was like, ‘Do your
math homework,’ I did as I was told.”
Abloh had no interest in going to
college, no clue what he wanted to do
with his life, but his father insisted—he
even picked his major for him. “I had
