Who Was Virgil Abloh? Louis Vuitton Designer – Wife and Death Cause. 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 such as 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 transformed not just what consumers wanted to wear, bridging hypebeast culture and the luxury world, but what brands wanted in a designer — and the meaning of “fashion” itself.
For him clothes were not garments but fungible totems of identity that sat at the nexus of art, music, politics and philosophy. He was a master of using irony, reference and the self-aware wink (plus the digital world) to re-contextualize the familiar and give it an aura of cultural currency.
“Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself,” his wife quoted him as saying in an Instagram post. He believed deeply, she wrote, “in the power of art to inspire future generations.”
“Virgil was not only a genius designer, a visionary, he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom,” Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, said in a statement.
A workaholic who maintained a punishing schedule and moonlighted as a DJ and a furniture designer, Mr. Abloh nevertheless seemed to glory in having his fingers in as many pies as possible. Indeed, he referred to himself not as a designer but as a “maker,” in acknowledgment of his own omnivorous creative mind.
Just last July, he had been promoted to a new position within LVMH that would allow him to work across the group’s 75 brands, making him the most powerful Black executive in the most powerful luxury group in the world.
It was a nontraditional job for a nontraditional personality who was more interested in carving a new path in an old industry than following in anyone’s footsteps.
“Virgil is incredibly good at creating bridges between the classic and the zeitgeist of the moment,” Michael Burke, chief executive of Louis Vuitton, told The New York Times when Mr. Abloh was named to the luxury brand.
Ikram Goldman, the owner of an eponymous Chicago boutique, described him as a “hero.”
Virgil Abloh was born in Rockford, Ill., on Sept. 30, 1980, to Nee and Eunice Abloh, Ghanaian immigrants, and grew up immersed in skate culture and hip-hop.
Though he did not formally study fashion — he studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology — his mother was a seamstress, and she taught him the basics of her trade.
When he was 22 Mr. Abloh met Kanye West. That relationship set him on the road to Paris when, in 2009, Mr. West signed a deal for a sneaker collaboration with Louis Vuitton, and he and his creative team, including Mr. Abloh, headed off for fashion week and became the talk of the season. (A group photo of Mr. West, Mr. Abloh and their collaborators outside a show went viral online and was even satirized on “South Park.”)
“Streetwear wasn’t on anyone’s radar, but the sort of chatter at dinners after shows was like ‘Fashion needs something new. It’s stagnant. What’s the new thing going to be?’ That was the timeline on which I was crafting my ideas,” Mr. Abloh later told GQ. That was also when he and Mr. West began a six-month internship at Fendi, making $500 a month, and learning the business from the inside out.
In 2010 he became creative director of Donda, Mr. West’s creative incubator, helping turn Mr. West’s ideas into actuality (his laptop was described by the rapper Pusha T as “a library of everything that was aesthetically beautiful and relevant”).
Two years later Mr. Abloh and two other men he had met through Donda, Mr. West’s creative incubator, teamed up to create Been Trill, a DJ and creative collective. That later mutated into a brand called Pyrex Vision, originally conceived as an art project with clothes, which then became Off-White — a twisty, collaborative creative journey that became a trademark of Mr. Abloh’s, along with his use of quotation marks and winking allegiance to what he called in The New Yorker “the three percent rule” and in a Harvard lecture “cheat codes”: the idea that you can take an existing design and change it just a bit, and it will qualify as new.
Virgil Abloh’s Celebrity Influence
Virgil Abloh, the visionary creator of Off-White and the head of Louis Vuitton men’s wear, died on Sunday at 41, after a two-year battle with a rare form of cancer.
Here are some memorable moments from his barrier-breaking career →
And though the fashion world was happy to initially categorize Off-White as a streetwear brand and shove Mr. Abloh into that box, from the beginning, he told GQ, “I was adamant: This isn’t a streetwear brand. This isn’t a contemporary brand. This is designer, just the same way that X, Y, Z are designer, where you say their name and it carries this whole esteem and emotion to it.”
To that end, he brought his runway shows to Paris, applied for the LVMH prize for young designers (he was a finalist in 2015), and embraced both women’s and men’s wear.
Though his work met with a mixed critical reception and raised eyebrows among the designer community, some of whom considered it more “copying” than “creative,” his influence was unarguable, spreading in part through his early and astute embrace of Instagram (at his death he had 6.5 million followers). Rather than go to the establishment, he understood he could go straight to consumers, and then the establishment would come to him. By 2018, Louis Vuitton had. Not long after, Time magazine named Mr. Abloh one of the most influential people of the year.
In 2019, Mr. Abloh — who seemed to be always in the air between Illinois, where his family continued to live, and Paris — was briefly grounded due to what was attributed to “exhaustion.” While that may have kept him in one place, it didn’t seem to slow him down at all.
He opened a major exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago titled “Figures of Speech,” and the next year, after the social justice protests of 2020, established the “Post-Modern” Scholarship Fund, raising $1 million to encourage Black students in fashion. Earlier this year LVMH increased its stake in Off-White to 60 percent, a sign that the brand had the backing to move to the next level. In May, he dressed Spike Lee for his role as Grand Jury president at the Cannes Film Festival in bright pink and sunset-toned suits, and made him the talk of the festival.
Even as Mr. Abloh was hospitalized with the illness that would kill him, he had plans to travel to Miami for a Louis Vuitton men’s wear show.
He is survived by his wife Shannon Abloh, his children Lowe Abloh and Grey Abloh, his sister Edwina Abloh, his parents — and a legacy he identified during his first Louis Vuitton show, held in the gardens of the Palais Royale in front of an audience that included Mr. West, Rihanna and ASAP Rocky, as well as 1,500 students.
“There are people around this room who look like me,” he said to The New York Times. “You never saw that before in fashion. The people have changed, and so fashion had to.” He made it so.
Inside fashion designer Virgil Abloh’s private life with wife Shannon
For many in the fashion world Virgil Abhol, 41, was a maverick, a fashion outsider who shot to fame for his headlining-making catwalks. Dubbed the “Karl Lagerfeld for millennials” he climbed from relative obscurity to the top of his game. He was down with the coolest kids, hanging out with best friend Kanye West, “crashing” fashion weeks, disrupting the industry and founding one of the world’s hippest streetwear brands, Off-White — a label which became as famous for its designer hoodies and t-shirts as its huge social media following. In 2018 he became the first African-American artistic director for French fashion house Louis Vuitton menswear.
The shock news of the 41-year-old’s death from cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare, aggressive form of cancer, sent reverberations around the fashion world last night. “We are devastated to announce the passing of our beloved Virgil Abloh,” his wife of 12 years, Shannon Abloh, said in a statement on the designer’s Instagram page. “He chose to endure his battle privately since his diagnosis in 2019, undergoing numerous challenging treatments.” He is also survived by his children Lowe Abloh and Grey Abloh, his sister Edwina Abloh and his parents Nee and Eunice Abloh.
As news spread around the world, tributes came from far and wide, with A-lister friends including Pharrell Williams, Victoria Beckham and Kanye paying their respects. But if his fashion career was star-packed, his home life was the complete opposite. Born in Rockport near Chicago, Abloh was the son of Ghanaian immigrant parents. His father worked at a paint company and mother, Eunice, as a seamstress. She taught Abloh how to use a sewing machine, and at a young age he began designing T-shirts.
He met his childhood sweetheart Shannon (née Sundberg) when they were both still at school. Later the pair moved to Wisconsin where Shannon studied management and marketing at Edgewood College and Abhol began a civil engineering degree at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before studying for a Master’s of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Virgil rarely spoke about his wife in interviews, but there was never a doubt how strong their bond was. According to reports, after a 10-year courtship, Abloh decided to pop the question but realized he would have to be creative in taking her by surprise. He asked if she could drive with him to the airport for a work trip like she normally did and while they were swapping over driver’s seats, he caught her completely off guard and got down on one knee. “I was completely surprised – I couldn’t believe it!” Shannon said at the time.
The pair married in 2009 at the Chicago Four Seasons, the same year as Abloh decided architecture wasn’t for him after all and found a job interning at fashion label, Fendi. It was a big family wedding, with Abloh reportedly leaving most of the arrangements to the bride, while still playing a “supportive role.” The bride wore ivory-hued Amsale and violet-blue shoes, the bridegroom, a tux and white tie, and the pair sat at different guest tables for each course to make sure they chatted to all their family and friends. During the ceremony the pair read out emotional special promises to each other. “The funny part is that we wrote them separately — and didn’t share them with each other — but they were very similar!” Shannon told bridal magazine, Inside Weddings, at the time.
Recalling her husband’s wedding speech, she said: “His words were so heartfelt and sincere. He had everyone laughing, crying, and then smiling… it’s the one moment I was dying to see on our wedding video.” Virgil humbly added that one of the best parts of the wedding was the people who helped make it happen: “The stress and strain never outweighed their good-natured hearts. More than anything, this was what created the most special evening of our lives, and we are so thankful.”
Throughout Virgil’s meteoric rise, Shannon, 41, largely kept out of the limelight. She was, however, a staunch supporter of her husband’s career, attending shows and red carpet events, later with their two young children, son, Grey and daughter, Lowe in tow. While her career went down a different, more conventional, path — she first worked as a media planner for Yahoo and then later as a program manager for Monster — she continued to be a regular front row fixture at all his shows.
The family based themselves mainly in Chicago, with Abloh shuttling back and forth, clocking up formidable air miles. If fitting family life in with manning the helm at Vuitton menswear was a balancing act, he never showed it. His private life was by and large a closed book. “I don’t want to be a celebrity designer,” he once said. “I want to keep my personal life out of it.” He was famous for his formidable work ethic — it is said he never sat still, refused to have an office and did all his work on the go by iPhone. But despite this, his million-mile-an-hour lifestyle seemed to take a toll. Under doctor’s orders, the designer announced in 2019 he was taking three months off from traveling and public appearances. “I’m shifting gears,” he said at the time.
Shannon’s post on her husband’s Instagram page describes him as a “fiercely devoted father, husband, son, brother, and friend.”
The unwaveringly loyal support of his wife and family was no doubt key to his success. “Through it all, his work ethic, infinite curiosity, and optimism never wavered,” the tribute said. “Virgil was driven by his dedication to his craft and to his mission to open doors for others and create pathways for greater equality in art and design. He often said, ‘Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself,’ believing deeply in the power of art to inspire future generations.”
Virgil Abloh – Death Cause
Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton and the first African-American to head a French luxury fashion house, has died of cancer at the age of 41.
LVMH, the French holding company that owns Louis Vuitton, said on Sunday that Abloh had passed away earlier that day after several years’ private struggle with the disease.
“We are all shocked after this terrible news,” said LVMH boss Bernard Arnault. “Virgil was not only a genius designer, a visionary; he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom.