Shining drones spelling out “Virgil was here” lit up the Miami, Florida sky on November 30th, 2021, as fashion house Louis Vuitton paid tribute to Virgil Abloh. After privately battling cancerous cardiac angiosarcoma for years, Abloh died on November 28th, 2021 at only 41 years old. Named the “designer of progress” by Vogue, Abloh is remembered for his pivotal work as Louis Vuitton’s Creative Director of Menswear and for founding the designer brand Off-White, stitching the worlds of couture and streetwear together in a masterpiece like none before.

Abloh was born in 1980 in Rockford, Illinois to Ghanian immigrants Nee and Eunice Abloh. His mother, a seamstress, taught him how to sew at a young age. In his childhood, he developed a love of skateboarding, which he credited as his first exposure to the world of streetwear. 

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008, Abloh received his Masters of Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, before starting a career in the fashion world.

Fresh out of college, Abloh interned for designer brand Fendi, where he earned $500 a month and worked alongside Kanye West. A year later, in 2010, Abloh became the creative director of Donda, West’s creative incubator, before moving on to launch his first solo fashion endeavor two years later, which he named Pyrex Vision. Through redesigning vintage Champion and Ralph Lauren pieces, Abloh’s line served as his representation of youth culture — which saw older pieces as outdated but still great foundations for future fashions. Though it was discontinued only a year later, Pyrex Vision was a segway into his next venture: Off-White.

Infamous for its use of zip ties and barricade tape, Off-White quickly took the fashion world by storm. Perhaps the brand’s most iconic element was its incorporation of labels in quotation marks that corresponded to their item, for example, shoelaces decorated with the word “shoelaces.” Bringing streetwear to the forefront of the contemporary fashion scene, younger generations resonated greatly with Abloh’s innovative designs — especially his sneakers, a cult favorite.

“Streetwear wasn’t on anyone’s radar, but the sort of chatter at dinners after shows was like ‘Fashion needs something new. It’s stagnant. What’s the new thing going to be?’ That was the timeline on which I was crafting my ideas,” Mr. Abloh told GQ in 2019. 

Pulling from his background in architectural design, the designer cited Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s floating Farnsworth House and the German design studio Bauhaus as his inspiration behind Off-White. Abloh founded the Milan, Italy-based fashion house in 2013. By 2018, it boasted an LVMH Prize nomination and had expanded to Paris, China, the United States, and Japan. That year, Abloh was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. 

Months later, on March 25, 2018, Louis Vuitton named Abloh as Artistic Director of the menswear ready-to-wear line, making Abloh one of only two prominent Black designers for a Parisian fashion house. In a statement following Abloh’s death, Louis Vuitton Chairman and CEO Michael Burke remarked that Abloh was “not only a friend, great collaborator, creative genius, visionary and disruptor, but also one of the best cultural communicators of our times.”

Though groundbreaking, Abloh’s designs only scratch the surface of the legacy that he leaves behind. Abloh was also influential in initiating social change through utilizing his fame and his platform. In 2017, when the recently immigrated Parisian soccer team Melting Press was excluded from playing in official competitions due to their lack of residency, Abloh created a custom uniform for the team and later invited them to an Off-White show. Following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, Abloh launched his “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund to support Black students, providing scholarship awards to Black students and pairing them with creative mentors. Abloh was also known to support skateboarders in Ghana, where his parents grew up.

In an interview with Vogue, Abloh explained the reasoning for his outreach. “It’s not just about making art or fashion for its own sake: there are kids in Accra who can become attached and engaged in the skateboarding community if someone builds a bridge. And there are kids in the South Side of Chicago that need education and health: how does what I’m doing tie into that? What’s the bridge for that? That’s sort of the ethos of my career,” Abloh said.

Abloh made it a priority to diversify the fashion industry: an industry that in recent years has gained an increasing amount of backlash surrounding its lack of diversity, especially regarding race. Under scrutiny in 2020, for example, the global mass media company Codé Nast (home to Vogue, the New Yorker, and GQ among others) made its first steps in publishing their first-ever diversity report, in addition to hiring Yashica Olden as their Global Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. 

At his debut Louis Vuitton show in 2018, Abloh said, “There are people around this room who look like me. You never saw that before in fashion. The people have changed and so fashion had to.”

In many ways, Abloh’s rise to prominence in the fashion industry is an inspiration to the next generation of designers — not only because of what he created but because of the intentions he put behind his work. Through bridging the gap between the established world of high fashion and the rising demand for streetwear, Abloh combined tradition with a new reckoning of the youth. 

Virgil Abloh gave the world a pair of quotation marks. His gift to the next generation is the potential to fill them.