The fashion designer Virgil Abloh is dead. The luxury goods group LVMH announced on its social media channels, for whose company Louis Vuitton Abloh worked as the chief designer of the men’s line. “We are all shocked by this terrible news,” said Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, in the statement. “Virgil was not only a brilliant designer, a visionary, he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom.”
For more than two years, Abloh fought a rare, aggressive form of cancer, a tumor in the heart, according to his own Instagram page. Nothing had been known publicly about his illness. When he was diagnosed in 2019, Abloh decided to fight the disease privately, the post said. He had undergone several difficult treatments while continuing to work.
Virgil Abloh was born in Rockford, Illinois in 1980, the son of Ghanaian immigrants. He completed a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and completed a master’s degree in architecture. He started designing t-shirts while still a student. Abloh, who never attended a fashion design school, became known as the creative director of the US rapper Kanye West.
In the world of haute couture he was initially viewed as an intruder, he once described himself as a “tourist” in the fashion world. But his luxury streetwear label Off White, which he founded in Milan in 2012, went through the roof. Teenagers all over the western world tore over his hoodies and jackets with the bold cross-arrow logo – if they or their parents could afford it. Just like the sneakers that he designed in collaboration with Nike, the carpets in collaboration with Ikea, the water bottle with Evian.
He arrived in the established luxury fashion world by 2018 at the latest: Louis Vuitton appointed Abloh as chief designer of the men’s line – as the first African American of a French luxury fashion label. That Time Magazine in the same year counted him among the 100 most influential people in the world. A few months ago, LVMH had only announced that Abloh would take on other tasks in the group.
On Sunday, the designer, who also worked as a DJ, succumbed to cancer at the age of 41. He leaves behind a wife and two children – and a huge crowd of young fans, because Abloh managed to win over Generation Z like no other designer. “Everything I do, I do for my 17-year-old me,” he liked to say, it says in the farewell post on his Instagram page. He believed deeply in the power of art to inspire future generations. He probably succeeded in doing that.