.jpg)
Wow, this guy can talk. Great thickets of verbiage tumble forth as Virgil Abloh thinks out loud in long, run-on sentences—often doubling back to critique himself or to add further thoughts or rephrase. He’s so excited to explain, to be understood, that he sometimes cuts himself off to get to his next thought. (He’s also such an eager and attentive listener that he often anticipates what you’re about to say and says it for you.) As Serena Williams, who collaborated with Abloh on the tutu dress she wore at the U.S. Open last summer, says, “He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever had a conversation with. You find yourself thinking, Wait: Are you 90 years old? How do you have so many stories?!” Or as his friend Kim Kardashian told me back in February, “There is no other way to describe it: He’s the nicest person you’ll ever meet. He’s a genuinely kind soul. You’ll see.”
None of which explains why someone who only recently emerged, at 38, onto the main stage of international fashion—as the artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, the first African American to helm a major global luxury brand—deserves a major museum retrospective. “Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech,’ ” which opens June 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, will begin by detailing the obsessions of a seventeen-year-old skateboarder from Rockford, Illinois; wend its way through the work Abloh did as Kanye West’s creative director and the 2013 founding of his label, Off-White; and end in the upper echelons of Paris ateliers.
Abloh’s work feels so utterly of-the-moment not only because he seems to work at the speed of social media (where he has an uncanny instinct for harnessing the attention of a rapt audience) but because he’s also the kind of cross-disciplinarian polymath who designs furniture for Ikea and DJs at Coachella, all the while appropriating the work of those he admires through collaborations with everyone from Williams to Jenny Holzer and John Baldessari. “It’s a very contemporary way of working,” says Michael Darling, the chief curator at MCA, “where someone is absolutely fearless about crossing boundaries and genres. A lot of what pushes culture forward is absorbing and recognizing things that already exist, nudging them further along. Virgil sees all of this as one big collective, generational effort.”
“From the beginning, I approached the idea of design from a grassroots level,” Abloh says. “I removed this idea that it’s somehow detached from the consumer.” Abloh gives great metaphor, in this case to explain how his process differs from that of designers of the past. “You don’t have to sit in your studio and throw a dart and hope that it lands on the bull’s-eye. If you actually walk up to the dartboard, you can just place it in the bull’s-eye. I think that’s the success of Off-White. I haven’t made a distinction between the design world and the real world—I’ve just immersed myself in both. And because I came from outside the fashion industry, I don’t have the luxury of creating collections in a traditional way.”
It’s no accident that Abloh’s ascent has mirrored the rise of the social models, like Kendall Jenner and Gigi and Bella Hadid. “I think fashion is really diving into a streetwear place,” says Jenner, “just this really cool, easy, laid-back moment. And I think Virgil embraces that—embodies that. He’s just the happiest, nicest guy. He has perfectly good reasons to be stressed out and overwhelmed, but he never is. And it makes you feel like you should be that way—more loving and open.”
Abloh feels a certain kinship. “There’s this insurmountable mountain of legends that precedes us—this guardianship that doesn’t allow new to come in,” Abloh says. “It’s often an old guard reinforcing the old days. I think we’re both trying to bridge the gap between the old and the new: They’re recalling the glory days of the biggest supermodels, but they’re doing it the modern way. I’m trying to do the same thing with design.”
It’s a freakishly warm late February in Paris, which means it’s a bit stifling in the loft on rue d’Uzès in the Second Arrondissement that Abloh rents to prep his Off-White shows. In one room, quiet and mostly empty, I catch a glimpse of his upcoming resort collection taking shape: There’s an inspiration board covered in pictures of women carrying and wearing scuba gear next to a rack dangling with dainty macramé dresses that look like something Jacqueline Bisset might have worn in The Deep. The other room is a kind of giddy, happy chaos, with tables covered in Day-Glo gloves and belts, bags that look like traffic signs, a rack of puffer coats the size of igloos. When Abloh suddenly appears—tall and gangly and with a shiny bald head, wearing complicated black trousers, a shirt made of blue bandannas, and those Nike sneakers fixed with a luggage tag that he’s made into a thing—there are soon fashion editors swirling around him and models showing up for fittings with stylist Stevie Dance. The predominant sound, aside from Frank Ocean coming through the speakers, is the big, warm laugh of Abloh, a man who appears to be utterly relaxed and happy with just 24 hours to go before Off-White’s fall 2019 ready-to-wear show. (Indeed, the next night, just moments before the show began, I caught him dancing backstage with a group of his friends.)
At one point, Bella Hadid shows up and disappears with Dance into a fitting area before emerging in a pair of silky black briefs, serious heels, and a black-and-white checked jacket. Abloh takes it in, quietly nods in approval. A few minutes later she reappears in a school bus–yellow gown with a train that fills the room. She walks for Abloh. “Sick,” he says, with a smile from ear to ear. Abloh and Dance and Hadid are now standing in front of a board with all the looks from the show tacked to it trying to decide what Hadid will wear.
“I love that first look,” she says.
“Yeah,” says Abloh. “Me too.”
“It’s major,” says Hadid. “And I love this, too. They’re just so different.”
“But if you were going to an event, which one would you wear?” Dance asks. “We can’t decide.”
“OK,” says Hadid. “On the count of three, say one or two. One . . . two . . . three. . . .”
“One!” everyone shouts.
“Woo-hoo!” shouts Abloh, laughing. “Decision made! That was easy.”
Later, I ask Abloh about letting Bella pick her own look for the show. “Part of what makes a great show,” he says, “is how Bella feels when she walks on the runway. She has an uncanny, powerful presence. And what I think is important is not her looks—it’s her personality, her brain, that makes her unique and compelling. So how can I capture that? Make her a part of the process. That’s how I had to find my magic trick. That’s what I want Off-White to be about: The brand is just as much hers as it is mine, or as much my intern’s or my assistant’s as it is mine. It’s an empowered brand. My job is not to control and grasp it, which is like trying to grab a feather. My job is to sort of be a spirit leader.”
With the fashion world trying to modernize and make way for new growth for some time now, the ascension of someone like Virgil Abloh—purveyor of hoodies and sneakers that can run in the thousands—seems inevitable. What still feels novel about his presence atop the industry, though, is that he comes to it from academia. (Did any other designer in history study structural engineering for five years and earn a master’s degree in architecture?) Perhaps because of all of those years in the ivory tower, Abloh reminds you of nothing if not your favorite hip professor—art history, perhaps, or comp lit—and is so laid-back about his accomplishments that he can also sometimes put you in mind of another black man from Chicago with an African father: Barack Obama.
When I suggest to Abloh that his hometown—despite its intractable problems of government corruption and police violence—seems unique in its ability to produce a kind of black optimism, he agrees. “Chicago’s this place that births a unique type of artist,” he says. “There’s some similarities between a lot of them, like [artist] Theaster Gates and Kanye West and [renowned Chicago house DJ] Frankie Knuckles, myself. It has such a strong black history rooted there, but it’s shielded. There’s no cosmopolitan tint to anything—it’s really just a big local community. I think it’s a place where you can find your voice without having to proclaim that voice. And there’s a strong sociopolitical lineage with the huge South Side, which forced black communities to organize. You either believe in the doomsday scenario or you want to effect change, and what we see in an Obama or an Oprah—that strikes a chord on the positive side with a number of us who are from there.”
“I know he’s extremely proud to be from Chicago,” says the creative director and DJ Heron Preston, who worked with Abloh on various Kanye projects in the mid-2000s, as well as a streetwear line, Been Trill. “He was shaped by the Michael Jordan era. At Coachella he had this big screen behind him of Jordan in his prime.” What impressed Preston about watching Abloh’s rise is “how clear his focus is. That’s how he made it to Louis Vuitton—he wanted that position and he just went for it, without letting any old rules get in the way. He’s actually rewriting the rules, and many kids look up to it. He’s really disrupted a conventional approach to a design career.”
Abloh chose the name Off-White to remind him that nothing is either black or white, male or female, mass market or aspirational: It’s often both—or neither. “I’m going to build a brand that’s related to me and my generation,” he told himself six years ago, when Off-White began, ever so humbly, in Milan. In high school, he says, “I could sit at any lunch table: the sports kids or the skate kids smoking weed or the preppy kids. I liked being in the middle, to veer in the space in-between. It’s almost like an unpoliced land. That’s why I love the millennial spirit. They’ll make an Instagram where they’re Goth, and the next week they’re dressing Harajuku. That’s freedom. One of the biggest premises in my practice is that it’s OK to contradict yourself; it’s human.”
It is the day after his Off-White show in Paris, and we are now at Louis Vuitton HQ on rue du Pont-Neuf, sitting in nearly the exact same spot where, eight years ago, I interviewed another American designer in Paris known for an expansive, hyperarticulate view of fashion: Marc Jacobs. At the time, Jacobs was closing in on the end of his triumphant seventeen-year reign as Vuitton’s creative director. Indeed, Abloh’s desk is precisely where Jacobs’s was.
When Abloh was in his late 20s and mostly DJing and “nerding out on the details” of what he calls “lifestyle”—still a consumer, not yet a creator—he saw the 2007 documentary Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton. “That was the very moment when I started to pay attention to fashion,” he says. “Back then I knew of Fashion with a capital F, as this thing that happened in far-off places that was intellectual, high culture, not for me, not for the masses. I thought of fashion as hard to describe—and it was supposed to be hard to describe, because there should be that barrier for it to feel important.” And then: “Marc Jacobs—an American—came along and made his own articulation of high and low and somehow broke down the mystique and the barrier. That’s my North Star.”
Delphine Arnault, the director and executive vice president of Louis Vuitton, is just a few years older than Abloh. She is the 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 “disruptive 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 table 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 nothing more than an appropriator—not an original thinker: “That way of designing—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 paper 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 retrospective. 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 related 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 equity 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 disorient 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 occupies 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 loquacious as ever. “I was on two planes today for nine hours,” he says. “I fly back and forth between Paris and Chicago like it’s Uber.”
His family—his high school sweetheart, 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 constant 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 whirlwind—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 nearly 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 welcoming 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 language of Accra, the capital of Ghana—at home. They cooked traditional African 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 superappreciative—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 sewage 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 zero thoughts about it,” he says. “I just wanted to skateboard and listen to rap and Guns ‘N’ Roses. I remember going to orientation and my dad was like, ‘I always wanted a son who’s an engineer.’ I was like, ‘Sure.’ ”
He plodded his way through five years of dreary coursework as a B student. His introduction to culture came “through hip-hop, through fashion, through GQ and Vibe magazine.” He took his very first art class—painting—in his senior year. “That was on the other side of campus, where I should’ve been from the beginning,” Abloh says. “But I started using the art library, which was in this beautiful Brutalist building—the perfect color, with furniture covered in velvet, leather-topped tables. Empty. Superquiet, with all these art books. And you had to walk through these exhibits to get to the library. That was the first interaction that I had with art.”
Back in his studio at Vuitton two weeks earlier, Abloh and I had sat and talked on a curvilinear sofa that he had just had reupholstered in what he described as a “cream-colored bouclé, like a Chanel fabric,” with a celadon-green Celine throw draped across it just so. “The fact that you can change your art and buy a different couch is still new to me,” Abloh says. After nearly two hours, our conversation was winding down and we got to talking about self-belief. “That’s what a large part of the constantly working and never sleeping was about,” Abloh said, “to disprove that little voice in my head that was like, ‘It’s impossible.’ Because that was almost destructive to me.”
Before Off-White had really taken off, Abloh reached out to the British graphic designer Peter Saville, who’s perhaps best known for creating hauntingly beautiful album covers for Joy Division and New Order. Abloh was looking for a mentor—someone who could tell him the truth. “I was calling out of a fear that my design voice was cheap,” he says, “and since I had placed him on such a pedestal, I assumed that he was going to say, ‘Hey, yeah—raise the level of design.’ And he actually said the opposite: He was like, ‘When I see your generation—meme culture, streetwear—your best thing is to keep that going, instead of trying to turn back to tradition.’
“At the time I thought you were only good if you’re Margiela or Rei Kawakubo. And I was struggling because that’s not me. I was very well aware that as a fashion designer, I was a square peg in a round hole. It’s like someone who is really messy and tries to clean their place up to throw a dinner party. Everything is in order, but then you go to the bathroom and you’re like, Why is there a cereal box in the bathtub?” Abloh could not try to be something he was not. “That became when I owned the thing,” he says. “With that, I could sleep at night. I just needed to check. I already had my plan anyway. But sometimes you need to rearrange the furniture in your head.”