Tracing Virgil Abloh’s career through his most definitive designs (2024)

Courtesy of Def Jam

WATCH THE THRONE

In 2011, Kanye West hired Abloh as the creative director of his creative agency, DONDA, where he was responsible for designing a slew of album covers – among them “Yeezus” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”. Of Abloh’s kinship with the rapper, however, the artwork for “Watch the Throne” is perhaps one of the most memorable. With the help of Riccardo Tisci, Abloh conceptualised the gold-foiled artwork for Jay Z and Kanye’s project, scoring the designer a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package.

PYREX PLAID

In 2012, Abloh debuted his first label. Named Pyrex Vision, its main premise was screen printing logos onto Champion t-shirts and deadstock Ralph Lauren flannels, and despite the exorbitant price tags (the flannels sold for in excess of $500) it sold out, forming Abloh’s debut platform and audience. “Pyrex was super, like super, short-minded. You know, it was like the opposite of what all this is…,” the designer told Dazed as he took Off-White to Paris Fashion Week. With pieces emblazoned with block “23” lettering – a nod to Michael Jordan – Pyrex established Abloh’s graphic-heavy language. “This show – being in Paris and showing a collection and everything – is all triggered by that decision to print one t-shirt, you know – instead of leaving it on illustrator on a laptop. It’s like, just go out and do it.”

THE OFF-WHITE BELT

2013 saw the inception of Abloh’s Off-White label. A cornerstone of hypebeast culture, Off-White propelled streetwear into high fashion and its yellow, Hacienda-striped industrial belts became an era-defining accessory. They were ubiquitous throughout the mid to late 2010s and embodied Abloh’s ability to engender demand and capture the zeitgeist by megamixing high and low brow culture. Revered as much as it was later reviled, the Off-White belt was Abloh wielding his entrance into the mainstream.

KANYE’S “LIFE OF PABLO” MERCH

Alongside Cali Thornhill DeWitt, Virgil Abloh had music fans, as well as hypebeasts, queuing round the block for Kanye’s “Life of Pablo” merch. This, plus a strategy of short-lived pop-up shops and scant product drops, meant that band merch had, for the first time, aligned itself with all the kudos of streetwear. Throughout his career, Abloh bends the tenets of luxury fashion away from craft and towards concept – a move exemplified by the must-have-ification of merch.

THE NIKE TEN

In 2017, Virgil Abloh found himself at the helm of Nike’s biggest collaborative project, remixing and red-plastic-tagging Nike’s iconic styles, including the Vapormax, Airmax 90, Air Jordans, and Air Max. As streetwear infiltrated runways and redefined the meaning of luxury, Abloh’s relationship with Nike helped cement the sneaker as a legitimate resident of the realms of high fashion and art. “What we're talking about here is larger than sneakers, it's larger than design culture,” Abloh said at the time. “These 10 shoes have broken barriers in performance and style. To me, they are on the same level as a sculpture of David or the Mona Lisa.”

THE IKEA COLLABORATION (2018)

“In the same way you might hang a piece of art work on your wall, art can bleed into objects like a chair, table, or rug,” Abloh said on unveiling his collaboration with IKEA in 2018. Crafted so that younger, less moneyed fans could buy into Abloh’s brain, the Markerad range comprised receipt rugs, “SCULPTURE” bags, and “WET GRASS” green mats. Ironic, and performatively so, Abloh often likened himself to Duchamp,the postmodernist associated with meta-irony and urinals. In fact, Alboh joked that Duchamp was his lawyer, explaining his ability to absorb pre-existing intellectual property into his own reference system.

Photography Christina Fragkou

ARC'TERYX TULLE GOWN

In July 2021, LVMH acquired a 60 per cent stake in Off-White, which is not a result of, but rather in spite of the hype that surrounded the brand. In his last collections, Abloh evolved and improved as a designer – silhouettes became more intriguing, he eschewed some of the graphic-heavy garments of the earlier collections – and, as a result, former critics were converted into fans. The Arc'Teryx gown of SS20 is quintessentially Abloh (the attention seeking copy-paste construction, the lampooning of genre, the zeal for new forms) but evidences a sweeter, perhaps more graceful side to the brand, which came to define the past few seasons – lest we forget his tribute to Princess Diana for SS18.

SERENA WILLIAMS’ US OPEN KIT

Abloh dressed Serena Williams in a black, ballerina-style tennis dress for the 2018 US Open, a piece from his Queen Collection with Nike, which was described by Abloh as “blurring the lines of sport and fashion”. Complete with a flaring tulle skirt and mismatched arm lengths, the kit was tenacious and whimsical, exemplifying the ways in which Abloh repeatedly put an onus on the Black protagonist – even outside of fashion. “It's not about bells and whistles and tricks,” Abloh said of the design. “It's just about it living on the body, and expressing Serena's spirit with each swing of the racket.”

Photography Arnaud Lafeuillade

THE LOUIS VUITTON HARNESS

A history-shifting moment came in early 2018, when Abloh was announced as the new artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. Sending out a collection on the backs of Kid Cudi, Dev Hynes, Steve Lacey, and Theophilus, Abloh’s offering saw hulking accessories transmorphed into vests and shirts while amply-cut tailoring traced the colours of the rainbow – his own reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. The designer’s monogrammed harness became the It-item of the show and cropped up on various red carpets throughout the following year, heralding a new era for the French fashion house. As he settled into his role at Louis Vuitton, you could almost feel Abloh’s role shift from culture shaper to educator; he invited thousands of fashion students to that first LV show, marking the occasion with a picture of himself during the finale captioned with “You can do it too.”

Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

THE LOUIS VUITTON CITYSCAPES

Virgil Abloh was only just beginning to come into his own at Louis Vuitton, which makes his death all the more heartbreaking. The pandemic saw the designer produce some of his most beautiful and revealing work to date. A slew of short films –Perfect Contrast, Perfect Light and Amen Break – were deft in their reconstruction of male archetypes, the Black protagonist, and subculture. In Perfect Contrast, Perfect Light, models were dressed as literal cityscapes, with 3D buildings tacked onto skyline jackets like leathery Lego. They were crowded and jam-packed, often pushing against each other and veering off at different angles, which might have seemed clumsy, but it was characteristic of Abloh’s worldbuilding. Of the one million ideas at once, of the way design could stop The Scroll.

Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

THE TRACK-SUITS OF AMEN BREAK

As Abloh evolved, so too did his hypebeasts. Those who may have been sucked in by Off-White’s hazard belts are now debating Rick, Demeulemeester, and Yohji on HFT. He knew this. And for these people (who may only see his work in 2D) he made the act of thinking luxurious. His shows, or films, were laden with hidden references, easter eggs, and kernels of knowledge which the internet scrambled to decipher. Together with Dazed editor in chief IB Kamara – who he brought on as stylist– Abloh transformed subculture into something solemn. Even in the aggressive mishmashing of countercultural tribes in Amen Break (his last show while he was alive) the designer imbued metalheads and acid ravers with feeling. Here, Abloh’s wide-legged, belted tailoring, which he has been playing with since his first season, reached its zenith. Pieces he wore throughout Paris Fashion Week SS22, marking his final public outings. Somewhere between a traditional business suit and a tracksuit, it’s perhaps the designer’s most enduring and instantly-recognisable creation – distilling his borderless approach to design into its purest form.