Virgil Abloh, a trailblazing designer, died at the age of 41.

After a two-year struggle with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare illness, Virgil Abloh, the ground-breaking Black designer whose ascension to the top of the traditional luxury business altered what was possible in fashion, died on Sunday in Chicago. He was 41 years old at the time.

His family verified that he had died.

Mr. Abloh, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton men's wear and the founder of his own label, Off-White, was a frequent collaborator with outside brands like Nike and Evian, as well as a popular fashion theorist whose expansive and sometimes controversial approach to design drew comparisons to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons.

Mr. Abloh changed not only what people wanted to wear by bridging the gap between hypebeast culture and the luxury sector, but also what brands desired in a designer — and the definition of "fashion" itself.

Clothing, for him, was a fungible emblem of identity that resided at the intersection of art, music, politics, and philosophy. He was a master at re-contextualizing the familiar and imbuing it with cultural currency through sarcasm, reference, and the self-aware wink (along with the digital world).

In an Instagram post, his wife cited him as stating, "Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of me." "He believed profoundly in the potential of art to inspire future generations," she wrote.

Mr. Abloh, a workaholic who kept a demanding schedule while moonlighting as a DJ and a furniture designer, seemed to take pride in having his fingers in as many pies as possible. Indeed, he referred to himself as a "maker" rather than a designer, recognizing his own omnivorous creative mind.

He was promoted to a new role within LVMH only last July, allowing him to work across the firm's 75 brands, making him the most powerful Black executive in the world's most powerful luxury group.

It was an unconventional job for an unconventional personality who preferred to forge a new route in an old business rather than follow in the footsteps of others.

When Mr. Abloh was named to the luxury company, Michael Burke, chief executive of Louis Vuitton, told The New York Times, "Virgil is extraordinarily skilled at forging bridges between the classic and the zeitgeist of the moment."

He was characterized as a "hero" by Ikram Goldman, the proprietor of an eponymous Chicago shop.

Virgil Abloh was born on September 30, 1980, in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian immigrants Nee and Eunice Abloh. He grew up steeped in skate culture and hip-hop.

His mother was a seamstress, and she taught him the basics of her profession. Though he did not technically study fashion — he studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and obtained a master's degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology —

Mr. Abloh met Kanye West when he was 22 years old. When Mr. West negotiated a deal for a sneaker collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2009, he and his creative team, which included Mr. Abloh, travelled to Paris for fashion week and became the buzz of the season, it was because of that friendship. (A photo of Mr. West, Mr. Abloh, and their colleagues outside a show went viral online and was mocked on "South Park.")

"Streetwear wasn't on anyone's radar, but the talk at dinners after shows was like, 'Fashion needs something fresh.'" It's at a standstill. 'What will the new thing be?' Mr. Abloh later told GQ, "That was the timescale on which I was creating my ideas." That was also the start of a six-month internship at Fendi, where he and Mr. West earned $500 a month while studying the industry from the ground up.

In 2010, he was named creative director of Donda, Mr. West's creative incubator, where he assisted in the realization of Mr. West's visions (his laptop has been described as "a library of anything that was visually stunning and relevant" by rapper Pusha T).

Mr. Abloh and two other men he met through Mr. West's creative incubator, Donda, teamed together two years later to form Been Trill, a DJ and creative collaborative. Mr. Abloh's use of quotation marks and winking allegiance to what he called "the three percent rule" in The New Yorker and "cheat codes" in a Harvard lecture became trademarks of his, along with the idea that you can take an existing design and change it just a little bit, and it will qualify

"I was adamant: This isn't a streetwear brand," Mr. Abloh told GQ, "even though the fashion world was glad to label Off-White as a streetwear brand and put Mr. Abloh into that box." This isn't a modern company. This is designer in the same manner as X, Y, and Z are designer in the sense that when you utter their name, it evokes a sense of regard and feeling."

To that purpose, he staged runway shows in Paris, filed for the LVMH prize for new designers (where he was a finalist in 2015), and focused on both women's and men's clothing.

Though his work drew mixed reviews and raised concerns among the design world, with some calling it "copying" rather than "original," his effect was undeniable, thanks in part to his early and clever use of Instagram (at his death he had 6.5 million followers). He realized that rather than going to the establishment, he could go straight to the customers, and the establishment would come to him. Louis Vuitton had by 2018. Mr. Abloh was named one of the most influential individuals of the year by Time magazine not long after.

Mr. Abloh was momentarily grounded in 2019 owing to "exhaustion," since he seemed to be always in the air between Illinois, where his family continued to live, and Paris. While this may have kept him in one spot, it did not appear to slow him down in the least.

He organized a major exhibition titled "Figures of Speech" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the following year, following the social justice protests of 2020, he established the "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund, raising $1 million to encourage Black students to pursue careers in fashion. LVMH boosted its share in Off-White to 60% earlier this year, signaling that the brand was ready to take the next step. He made Spike Lee the topic of the Cannes Film Festival when he outfitted him in bright pink and sunset-toned outfits for his role as Grand Jury president in May.

Mr. Abloh had planned to travel to Miami for a Louis Vuitton men's wear show even as he was hospitalized with the sickness that would kill him.

His wife Shannon Abloh, his daughters Lowe and Grey Abloh, his sister Edwina Abloh, his parents — and a legacy he defined during his first Louis Vuitton show, staged in the gardens of the Palais Royale in front of an audience that included Mr. West, Rihanna, ASAP Rocky, and 1,500 students.

"There are people that look like me in this room," he told The New York Times. "You've never seen that in fashion before." People have changed, and fashion has got to change as well." He was the one who made it happen.

Written by: Ladarius "El Pablo 1x" Trotter

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