OFF Virgil Abloh Natural Habitat black leather neon cat print crossbody tote bag

In 2013, after having already worked for Fendi at the Italian label’s headquarters in Rome, Virgil Abloh (1980–2021) founded the Milan-based streetwear house Off-White, which is lauded for its hip collaborations and range of sneakers and shoes, shirts, hoodies and bags that are frequently emblazoned with bold graphics and the iconography of America’s metropolitan centers.

Four years later, Abloh released the first Off-White furniture line, Grey Area. In 2018, he became the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear division, making him one of the first Black designers to head a French luxury fashion house. By the time he celebrated his 40th birthday, the Illinois native had, seemingly, triumphed in every corner of the fashion and home design worlds. 

Yet even with the Off-White and Louis Vuitton jobs, Abloh had time for a seemingly endless list of collaborations: designing shoes for Nike and Jimmy Choo, making furniture for Vitra and Ikea (“a super-dream project”), creating art with Takashi Murakami and Jenny Holzer, dressing Serena Williams and Beyoncé, co-branding with Levi’s and Evian, deejaying at Coachella and Lollapalooza.

Growing up outside Chicago, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, Abloh was neither cool nor controversial. He was, he told the New York Times, “an average sort of suburban kid, born in 1980, into watching Michael Jordan or listening to Guns N’ Roses.” He learned about design, fabrication and color from his mother, a seamstress, and his father, a paint company manager. Abloh earned a master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where his thesis was a skyscraper that leans out over the Chicago River to maximize light and views. 

Abloh's process was incredibly innovative — he explained that if he was inspired by an object, he didn’t want to alter it any more than necessary. “I’m only interested in editing an idea or a concept by three percent,” he said. Not surprisingly, he flirted with the limits of permissible appropriation. His first clothing line consisted of flannel Ralph Lauren shirts on which he printed the word “Pyrex.” (Abloh’s Pyrex Vision label would later become Off-White.)

And his collaboration with Vitra included a version of Jean Prouvé’s Antony chair that has Plexiglass where Prouvé used plywood. In 2017, the Belgian designer Raf Simons told GQ that Abloh’s work was unoriginal. A month later, Abloh presented an Off-White collection cheekily titled Nothing New.

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