In June of last year, during Paris Men's Fashion Week, Fonzworth Bentley paid a visit to Louis Vuitton's headquarters. It had been nine years since he had set foot in the place as a member of Kanye West's squad, but this time there “was a completely different vibe.” Trap music was playing, “kids with face tattoos” were wandering the corridors, and the fashion intelligentsia were preparing to watch Playboi Carti walk down a quarter-mile rainbow runway. The man behind the festivities had been a member of that same 2009 entourage: Virgil Abloh, the newly appointed men's artistic director of Louis Vuitton.
The story of Abloh's ascent to the apex of one of fashion's pre-eminent houses is also the story of the industry's collisions with celebrity, streetwear, and social media. The Chicago-born creative director was one of the architects (literally: he studied architecture) working on Kanye West's endeavor to merge rap, contemporary art, and high fashion. With his own brand, Off-White, he bulldozed the brick wall between graphic tees and “designer” apparel and partnered on one of the hottest Nike collaborations ever. He has designed furniture for Ikea and taught classes at the prestigious Architectural Association School in London. And then his appointment at Louis Vuitton marked the arrival of an entirely new era in fashion.
He has become an extremely public figure, but he's remained genuinely mysterious. He moonlights as a DJ and constantly references his background as an engineering and architecture student. He is omnipresent on social media, hopping instantaneously from country to country, seemingly opening for Travis Scott in Houston one moment and rendezvousing with Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam the next. Even the résumé line for what he does—“creative director”—is as impossible to define as it is alluring. So to better understand who Virgil Abloh is, what he does, and how he does it, we spoke to him—and to 39 of his closest friends, colleagues, admirers, and mentors.
Aspiring Architect
Abloh grew up outside Chicago, where his earliest glimpses into culture came from skateboarding, his father's soul records, and the graffiti books he special-ordered via the local Barnes & Noble. During his time studying architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he began making shopping trips to New York City and eventually started blogging about a wave of brands selling skate clothing without the skateboarding. It was around this time that he went from designing buildings to designing T-shirts.
Virgil Abloh: I often reference the 17-year-old version of myself, because I'm doing in large part the same thing today. Back then, I used to DJ and get my hands on my dad's records—Fela [Kuti] to James Brown to Miles Davis. I was only into the fashion that intersected with the niche cultures I was into—my favorite “fashion” brands were [skateboard companies like] Alien Workshop, Santa Cruz, and Droors. Then there were Nikes. My friend Chris Eaton and I used to be so obsessed with Jordan that we were drawing Nike shoes and sending them to Nike. And Nike would be like, “Oh, we don't accept designs.”
Christopher Eaton (artist and childhood friend): As soon as we found out about graffiti, maybe in sixth grade, all we wanted to do was draw. Virgil's tag was CEAS1. There wasn't any Internet, so anything we saw in magazines, we would cut out and stick in a manila envelope. Then we started with books—Spraycan Art, Bomb the Suburbs. Back in the day, we special-ordered them from Barnes & Noble.
Abloh: I went to a shop in New York called Alife, on Orchard Street, back when it was the real window into this culture that was an extension of skateboarding. There was this message board for the downtown scene at the time called Splay, and if you weren't involved with it, you couldn't message on it, you could only view it. But everyone was on it—A-Ron, Roxy Cottontail, Leah from Married to the Mob—the whole Orchard Street retail mafia.
Leah McSweeney (designer, Married to the Mob): Virgil always talks about the early days of streetwear and how he was in Chicago watching us do our thing on this message board called Splay. It was run by Sam Spitzer, who is the guy who does Supreme's e-commerce and their website, and you had to get approved to get on it.
Abloh: I came back to Chicago, and me and Chris Eaton started this thing called FortHome. I made a business card using the laser cutter at architecture school and made my first T-shirt. It had Edwardian script, which was the only script that was in Adobe at the time, that said FORTHOME, and on the back it had a big X. I'm just realizing it now: It looked a lot like the back of an Off-White T-shirt.
Benjamin Edgar (co-founder, thebrilliance.com): Chuck Anderson and I had a blog, and Virgil reached out to us as a reader, probably in 2006, and was like, “Hey, I'd love to write for your site.” At the time, we got a decent amount of those e-mails, and we were like, “No.” But I kept in touch. One of the first times Virgil and I hung out in person was at the [Manhattan] Louis Vuitton store. Louis Vuitton had the Wapiti: It's a little, tiny trunk. We were still very much on a budget, but it was iconic, so I bought the traditional monogrammed one, and Virgil bought the white one.
Abloh: When I was studying architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, the student center was just getting finished by OMA, the firm run by [architect] Rem Koolhaas. One of the mentors that was giving lectures on campus was a man named Michael Rock. Rem and Michael together made up two-thirds of the think tank surrounding Prada. That's how I first made the bridge between architecture and fashion.
Rem Koolhaas (architect): We worked with Prada. We were asked to work with ideas related to branding. We wrote a book on shopping [Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping]. But it was beyond fashion—we've worked on projects about politics. I think what made Virgil interested in our work was this idea that architecture was not limited to its own field—that it could answer other questions.
Abloh: At the time, I had this professor named Thomas Kearns. He was younger, and he put me under his wing. I remember him telling me, “Learn these programs and don't use these programs just to make architecture.” So that was how I learned 3-D programs and Adobe Suite, and it was during that class that I started making T-shirts instead of just making architecture.
Thomas Kearns (architect; Abloh's professor at IIT): The class I taught Virgil in was called Network Technologies, and it was about things that were happening in the world that we needed to understand and have a hand in as architects. The advent of social media. The implications of living in a connected world. We watched films in the class. We watched music videos.
By the mid-2000s, Abloh's interest in design led him to another Chicagoan: Kanye West.
Eaton: There was this screen-printing store in Chicago called Custom Kings, and Virgil had submitted some work there. Virgil gave the screen-printing store the art files in such perfect format that they literally just hit “print.” Since he formatted the files perfectly, the screen-printing store offered him a job. A couple weeks later, Don C went into the store and asked if they had any designers. The store said, “Actually, this young man, Virgil, came in here, and he's probably somebody you might want to get in touch with.” So then Don C commissioned Virgil to do some stuff. Virgil knew who Don was, so he came up with half a dozen design ideas for Don by the next day—he worked just as hard on that as he did anything else, but there was a little more excitement, as Kanye was a potential client.
Don C (designer): It was my cousin Monop [music manager John Monopoly] who first met Virgil through Custom Kings. And then Monop introduced me to Virgil. When I first met him, we vibed right away because we could talk about ideas. And at the time, you could only bring people around Ye who he'd vibe with.
Abloh: Kanye wasn't going to put his art form in the hands of the art department at the record label. So he was like, “I am going to hire you, and let's literally work on this 24–7, laptop in hand, nonstop.” So more than any title, I was just his assistant creatively. I believed that this was going to be another chapter in hip-hop.
The Kanye West Years
In 2007, West hired Abloh to help the rapper realize his growing ambitions beyond music. In 2009, West's sneaker collaboration with Louis Vuitton led him and his team to Paris, where they wound up in a squad photo that was parodied mercilessly—first online and then on ‘South Park.’ For Abloh, the ridicule was worth the opportunity. He and West could tell that the party they were crashing was missing something—and that they could provide it.
Taz Arnold (musician and West associate): In June 2008, Kanye and I went to Fashion Week in Paris, just the two of us. We took a lot of pictures with Karl Lagerfeld, and there was such a great response that Kanye was like, “I have to bring more people.” So January 2009 was our second time going. The agenda was really to let our clothes speak for us.
Fonzworth Bentley (West associate): Kanye's perspective was “I've got this Louis Vuitton collection. I'm going over to work on that and go to these shows. Let's treat Paris Fashion Week like the Olympics and we're representing the United States of America.” And we were just bum-rushing all of the shows, daring anybody to ask us to leave.
Don C: I remember Kanye saying, “We're going to look back on this and it's going to be similar to the civil rights movement, because we're standing up to have a voice.” At the time, I was like, “Dude, I can't compare this to Rosa Parks.” But in hindsight, it is comparable, because we've encouraged new people to participate.
Tommy Ton (photographer): We were the only photographers sitting at the Comme des Garçons men's show, and this van arrives, and they all come out. If you look at that image, you can see the amount of thought that these guys put into their look.
Abloh: When Kanye and I were first going to fashion shows, there was no one outside the shows. 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.
Bentley: We had a meeting at Le Meurice after all the shows were done, and we talked about our favorite designers. The summary of the meeting was “Hey, guys, we need to make this happen. Our voices mean something.” It didn't matter that it felt like the community was not fully embracing who we were or our point of view. We knew that we had put a dent into the armor of that ironclad idea that is fashion.
Abloh: There was a professor by the name of Louise Wilson, who was the head of the [master's program] at Central Saint Martins in London, and she was the teacher for some of the greatest designers of our time. Kanye and I sat with her, and we were like, “Hey, we want to learn the right way.” And she basically said, “You guys are idiots. You know more than my students. Why on earth would you want to go to fashion school?” But that process was sort of how we ended up interning at Fendi. And when we were there, we did all the meetings. We were off the radar in Rome, getting to work at 9 a.m. on a Monday. We did all the intern shit, and this was in the midst of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. We went to Hawaii after this period.
Pusha T (rapper): I met Virgil at the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions in Hawaii. And here's this guy always in the studio, and he's pulling every reference under the sun from his computer—architecture, fashion. His laptop was like a library of everything that was aesthetically beautiful and relevant.
As West's aspirations grew, Abloh would become a collaborator in DONDA, a company named after West's mother. For years, what DONDA actually was remained mysterious, and Virgil Abloh, the laptop-wielding body man seen with West everywhere, became a human stand-in for West's ambitious project.
Arnold: Anyone who collaborated with Kanye worked with Virgil—Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Daft Punk. Anybody.
Michael Rock (founding partner, 2x4 agency; West collaborator): Virgil's role at DONDA was to figure out how aspiration could be turned into actual projects. It was about going from minute details to the broadest possible reach: You create music for a show, then you create a stage for the show, then you create the media for the show, then you create the effects for the show, and then you create merchandise for the whole thing, then maybe you create a pavilion that travels with an art project by Vanessa Beecroft.
Pusha T: Ultimately the DONDA project was a mission to raise the taste level of the world. It was about showing the youth that it's possible for them, and I felt it gave inspiration to the kids of this Internet generation—those who learn beat-making on the computer as opposed to in band class.
Don C: In the early days, Virgil was just designing, designing, designing. We would go places, and Virgil would stay in the hotel and design.
Es Devlin (stage designer): I have a very clear image of my first meeting with Virgil. He was crouching low in the corner of Kanye's studio with a laptop on his knees, composing photographic collages at a furious pace, barely looking up.
Pusha T: They were changing the aesthetic, right in front of my eyes.
Devlin: It was August 2011, [Watch the Throne] was about to come out, tickets for the shows needed to go on sale, and the design had to be finalized. We had abandoned the Giant Stone Angel Head version and the Roman Forum version and were on version 28 and hadn't found the visual language yet, so we agreed to meet at my studio in Peckham and not leave the room until we had reached a conclusion. It was the week of the London riots, shops in Brixton were on fire, and Virgil and Kanye managed to get to the studio late in the evening. They played the album. We worked all night, iterating cardboard sculptures. Kanye and Virgil were cutting and gluing with my studio team, replaying the album until we reached the design. It was the sound of “No Church in the Wild” blaring over Peckham.
Don C: Watch the Throne was when we really saw it moving. That's when Virgil came up with the concept of gravitating towards the youth. The Kanye camp was very close-knit, but Virgil encouraged us to welcome kids that wanted to hang with us. And that's what built the community more and more.
The most tangible legacy of DONDA—which may or may not still be active today—was the generation of designers it incubated. Abloh, Matthew Williams (Alyx), and Justin Saunders (JJJJound) all did stints with the company. In 2012, the three teamed up with a Nike employee named Heron Preston and soccer player Florencia Galarza to form Been Trill, a DJ and party-night collective that would go on to open for A$AP Rocky and eventually West himself.
Cali Thornhill Dewitt (artist): Virgil once told me that music is his source code. I really liked that way of putting it.
Matthew Williams (designer, Alyx): We were living between London and Paris [working for Ye], and we'd go out after work, and we weren't hearing the music we wanted to hear in the clubs. So we contacted some friends and just started playing music off our computers and iPhones.
Abloh: When you have creative people all working on laptops, you listen to music. So Been Trill was more like a group chat that turned into something for the public sphere.
Arthur Kar (car dealer and friend): The day Virgil and I met, we listened to Waka Flocka together. It was in Paris around ten years ago, and no club in Paris was playing any hip-hop like Waka Flocka back then.
Heron Preston (designer): One day Matt Williams, Justin Saunders, and Virgil came up to me and were like, “Yo, do you wanna start throwing parties with us?” At the time, I thought they were playing with Osama bin Laden's name. So I was like, “Oh, you guys are crazy.” But it turned out to be Been Trill, spelled B-E-E-N.
Florencia Galarza (former Been Trill DJ; soccer player): I get a call from Virgil, not ever having met him or really knowing who he is, and he was like, “You sound dope. Heron says you're dope. People think you're dope. You're in.” Two thousand twelve was really awesome.
Don C: Been Trill was when Virgil—I won't say came out of his shell, but it was how he became a public figure.
A$AP Rocky (rapper): Standard Hotel. I was like 20 or 21, and all my friends were like 17, 16, and shit. The door was fronting on us, and then we see Virgil and we were like, “Yo!” He helped us get in and started hanging with us on the regular. We'd be at A$AP Lou's house, and we'd be smoking and talking about clothes, and Virgil would be on the Serato, just spinning. I remember Virgil used to pull up wearing Red Octobers with holes from skateboarding all day in fucking Yeezys. Everyone was like, “What are you doing?” But it was fly.
Justin Saunders (founder, JJJJound): I've never heard Virgil say a negative thing in my whole life. What I knew about creativity was saying no to things, but he's on the opposite flip. It's like when Virgil convinced me to be a DJ—I still don't know how to use a mixer. I said to Virgil, “I don't know how to DJ,” and he said, “It doesn't matter. Let's just go have some fun.” And then eventually we were DJ'ing at Coachella.
The Future Is Fashion
In 2012, Abloh started his first clothing label, Pyrex Vision. Although it was met with underground acclaim, he thought of it as more art project than fashion brand—so a year later, he decided to try something else.
Abloh: I didn't make a conscious decision one day that I wanted to be a designer. I made Pyrex, which in my mind was more like an art piece. It was a ten-minute film that I wanted to make, and I needed clothing to support this idea of a team with no sport. I was very intent on stopping it before it really got started.
Marcelo Burlon (fashion designer and DJ): Virgil and I met backstage at Givenchy, back in the days when Riccardo [Tisci] used to be the creative director. I asked what happened to [Pyrex Vision], and he said, “You know what, the glass company Pyrex wants to sue me. But I have a project in mind, and I am looking for someone to produce my new idea.” And I was like, “You should come over to Milan and meet with my business partners.” That happened on a Friday, and the next Monday we were already meeting Virgil and his lawyers.
Davide De Giglio (co-partner, Off-White): After six months, we had a company. When we were opening the first Off-White store, in Hong Kong, Andrea Grilli and I were in Milan; our artist was in New York; our contractor was in China; our partner was in Hong Kong; our graphic designer, Samuel [Ross] from A-Cold-Wall*, was in London; and Virgil was traveling the world 24–7. We made that Hong Kong store with one group chat and all met for the first time at dinner the day of the opening.
With simple gestures like setting phrases in its signature “double quotes,” Off-White was designed to test the boundaries of how little you need to change an object before it becomes fashion. But from the beginning, Abloh insisted on premiering Off-White's collections at Paris Men's Fashion Week and working with world-class colleagues. Pyrex, this was not.
Abloh: 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.” And a lot of people asked, “Why do you do women's? And why are you selling things on this floor and not that floor?” I remember meeting with the stylist Stevie Dance at Café Select in New York, and I was like, “Hey, I'm going to do a show. Are you able to come on board?” And from there it went from three people working for Off-White to like 40.
Stevie Dance (stylist): The way Virgil operates is very in the moment, like his reflections on Instagram. It's not this long, logistical written-out thing. His brain works with so much fluidity, and after years working with him, you learn all the Virg-speak and how to translate those innuendos into an actual thought.
Piotr Niepsuj (photographer): There's all these unwritten rules of fashion photography, but for Virgil, he feels like things should be more democratic. We'll shoot something without a makeup person or sometimes even a stylist. The campaign we did that I like the most, we shot on the street in 20 minutes.
Abloh: When I started, I couldn't beg a fashion writer to write about my project. But with Instagram, I took an open-source tool and made it my magazine. I once said to Kevin [Systrom, Instagram co-founder], “You made it possible for me to have a fashion brand without using the traditional system.”
Michael Darling (chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago): Virgil really designs on the cloud. He and his teams will be posting all kinds of different reference pictures. Then certain narratives or strong sets of imagery will emerge from that. I think you can trace that back to his work at DONDA, with Kanye and the team he had there. They would look at 50 different examples of a particular type of jacket, or shoe, or pant, or shirt, and then refine from there.
Jarrett Reynolds (senior design director, Nike): Let me open up my WhatsApp and read [our] most recent conversation. I sent a 21-page PDF. He replies with photos of his drawings. He's taken screen grabs of the PDF and has drawn over them, too. “I love this arm direction.” “I want the puffer like this.” “Can you add this thing in?” “Make the pocket squared off.” And then there's a screenshot of a T-shirt pocket that he found online.
Samuel Ross (creative director, A-Cold-Wall*; former Abloh assistant): I was working with him primarily on iMessage back then, because you could send heavier files and I didn't have WhatsApp for desktop yet. The first thing that hit me working for Virgil is that 90-to-95-hour weeks need to be normalized. We were ideating everything together. Like the Rimowa suitcase, or the Chrome Hearts bench from this year, these are ideas we were working on four or five years ago. He was using foresight to align those projects, so that when the opportunity came along and he was situated in the right place or hierarchy, he could get it done.
Alexandre Arnault (CEO, Rimowa): He reached out to Rimowa back when it was owned by the German owner who sold it to us, and he asked him to collaborate with them. They said no, and then the day we announced the acquisition, which was in October 2016, he reached out to me.
Peter Saville (graphic designer): [Before I met] Virgil, I was a little taken aback by how evident it was that my own history had been an influence to him. He had an interview I did as the voice-over for one of his shows, and then obviously the graphic elements of Off-White were also very familiar to me, associated with [Saville's design for the Manchester nightclub] Haçienda. But I was fascinated more than I was upset. I knew from the get-go that he was speaking to people that I never would.
As Off-White grew as a commercial force, anything touched by Abloh's signature paint markers became an extension of its creator, whose well-documented travels made it seem as though he lived in and worked out of airports. His work spread from Ikea products to university lectures to Nike's ten most iconic shoes. Quickly, Off-White began to seem like what Kanye West had imagined for DONDA. But unlike West's hyper-secretive endeavors, Off-White was painstakingly transparent. When Off-White released see-through luggage with Rimowa, you could peek inside Abloh's suitcase.
Fraser Cooke (senior director, Nike): We had our eyes on Virgil for a little while, but if you do things too early, it's actually just as bad as doing them too late. I had been running into Virgil in various places around the world, and when I was living in Los Angeles in 2012, he was DJ'ing there with the Been Trill crew. But we didn't start seriously talking about doing something until about 2016.
Abloh: As a full-time employee for Kanye, I was working on Yeezy for Nike, and then Kanye went to Adidas, so I was in a no-man's-land where no brand would contact me to do a shoe, and I was fine with that. Then one season I did this slight edit of an Umbro shoe, and I put that on the runway. Fraser Cooke from Nike and [my friend] Arthur [Kar] were sitting next to each other at my show, and Fraser saw these Umbros and he was like, “What the fuck?” And Arthur was like, “No one has ever called him to do a shoe.” That was when Fraser first began the dialogue. [Nike disputes this version of events.]
Cooke: The Ten actually came up from the Nike side and was instigated by our CEO, Mark Parker. We knew we wanted to re-interpret and re-imagine iconic silhouettes from across Nike, Jordan, and also Converse. [Virgil] and the footwear-design team went into a design area for a couple days and thrashed through each one of those silhouettes.
Reynolds: We were working on a running collection, and we had picked a graphic pattern—camouflage. Then I went to visit Virgil in Chicago wearing a tie-dye shirt I made, and he said, “That's the print we're going to use this season.” And that changed the course of the collection. He was laughing afterwards like, “Watch what you wear to our meetings.”
Dewitt: Sometimes I'll see something I think he'll like, not even for a graphic, and I'll just text it to him. And he does the same with me, and sometimes that turns into something wearable or printable, but often it's just about sharing stuff.
Arthur Jafa (artist): Virgil is a such a positive person, but he's affirmative in conjunction with being super discerning. The person he reminds me the most of in this respect is Andy Warhol, who adopted a default manner of just being positive, and people obviously underestimated him because of that. But it's impossible for a Warhol or a Virgil to operate the way they do without being discerning.
In 2018, news came that surprised everyone but Abloh: He was the new men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton. The appointment felt like the triumph of his boldest idea—that the young people who push fashion forward should also be the ones designing it. When the time came for the actual show, everyone from Rihanna to Takashi Murakami to multiple Kardashians gathered around a quarter-mile rainbow runway inspired by Pink Floyd's ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and the Yellow Brick Road. At the end of it all, Abloh made a beeline for his mentor, Kanye West, for a tearful embrace.
Abloh: When I was in college, Marc Jacobs was the American designer that went to Europe and injected life into Louis Vuitton by bringing Takashi Murakami or Stephen Sprouse. When I stepped into the role, my office is his exact same office. I'm coming in at a time to re-interpret or channel this brand into the modern era. And I'm very much following in the steps of someone who I admire and put a great deal of belief into. I was carrying on a tradition that I believed in.
Takashi Murakami (artist): In 2017, Virgil and I were on a panel together with Yoon [Ahn, jewelry designer] and Don C. And Virgil mentioned my collaborations with Louis Vuitton sort of in a historical context and talked about fashion and art bridging cultures. To be honest, people don't ever mention my collaboration with Louis Vuitton. I really thought it was important, but no one really took note of it, and I was kind of disappointed. But then Virgil mentioned it in that panel years later, and I realized that there were people who were actually paying attention to that collaboration.
Benji B (DJ, BBC Radio 1; music director, Louis Vuitton): I was in Miami, and Virgil said, “I need to meet you.” He said, “You're musical director.” And that was the length of the conversation.
Arnold: Virgil is the most qualified person to run a fashion house today. He has a global perspective, and when it comes to hip-hop and American fashion, he's the team captain.
Jean Touitou (founder, A.P.C.): I was not surprised at all that he got this job. Virgil is a new version of Karl Lagerfeld: a very talented and strategic director, as well as a very, very good master of propaganda.
Luka Sabbat (model and actor): Louis Vuitton felt like a team win. It was a milestone that was bigger than the clothes, or anything else. It was, like, the biggest linkup ever.
Playboi Carti (rapper): Walking the Louis Vuitton show was monumental. It was pure happiness, and it was historical for both me and Virgil. As I walked down the runway, it wasn't that hard for me, because it's a lifestyle that I live every day, and people like Virgil know exactly what we're doing.
Sabbat: I fucking cried, bro. Virgil is doing Louis Vuitton. Travis Scott is the face of Saint Laurent. The tables have fucking turned.
Bentley: When you're a pioneer, it's very harsh. You've got to go through the barbed wire. That's why the emotions hit when he and Ye saw each other.
Tremaine Emory (co-founder, No Vacancy Inn): Do you know what the Yellow Brick Road is? It's that picture from Paris with Virgil, Don C, Ye, Chris Julian, Taz Arnold, and Fonzworth Bentley that people made fun of: “Why are they there? Why are they dressed like that?” The Yellow Brick Road was the journey to where Virgil's at now, and where our tribe is at now, and where we're gonna go.
Jafa: Virgil and Kanye are two guys—two black men, in particular—who just don't see what they do in terms of external limitations. That Louis Vuitton show, for me, [is] an iconic moment equivalent to the athletes raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Because that's the thing that was so iconic: They were getting gold medals and at the same time being critical of American society. I don't think people have taken full measure of that Louis Vuitton moment yet.
Abloh: This is going to sound weird, but I made sure that moment wasn't a big deal. I was doing something that most people on planet Earth would say is not possible, so that's where the emotion came from. But now I have more work to do, and I'm more interested in the work than everything else.
Abloh prides himself on keeping his work “open source”: teaching screen printing to the kids who lined up around corners to buy his Nikes and instructing architecture students at the Architectural Association School in London (where his hero Rem Koolhaas went to school). This summer, Abloh will return to Chicago for a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, an honor almost unheard of for a fashion designer. In a city plagued by youth gun violence, he is hyper-aware of the pull he has as “Playboi Carti's friend” or “the Kanye guy” to bring kids into museums. His stated aim is for the exhibition to produce five new Virgils.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (curator): Running a public art gallery, even when there is free admission, people don't go because they think museums are not for them. Virgil creates these kinds of access points—for a teenager who is not into art who suddenly encounters Jenny Holzer or Rem Koolhaas. And encountering these types of things as a teenager can change someone's world.
Saville: When Virgil says something like “Duchamp is my lawyer,” a thousand kids go home and find out who the artist Marcel Duchamp is.
Cooke: Virgil really wanted to bring people into the conversation, beyond just creating a product and having people line up to buy it.
Sabbat: Virgil surrounds himself with very youthful and relevant energy. A lot of this industry is so elitist, and they kind of just wanna use kids. They'll steal from skate culture but not want to pay homage. But Virgil fucks with anybody at any age—he's the only person who can have George Condo and Tom Sachs at a dinner with me and Bloody Osiris. He's tapped into so many different demographics.
Dev Hynes (musician and Abloh collaborator): Music has a big role in what Virgil does. With him, everything pulls from everything, and he's somewhat normalized the idea that you can be influenced by things outside of the specific field you're working in.
Playboi Carti: Virgil is just a big inspiration to everything, and it's got nothing do with music. We just talk about the future. He's going to be the creative director of my next album.
Pusha T: Maybe even unbeknownst to him, Virgil was part of my tutoring session, and it allowed me to spread my wings into a whole nother world of art and fashion. I always looked at fashion and rap as one, but [he] showed me it was beyond just the outfit on the corner. It was not only respected in the streets, but in big corporate fashion houses.
Dance: In the last Off-White womenswear show, Virgil was really able to bring together all these elements of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a professional, what it means to be a mother. Having a champion runner standing next to Kendall Jenner, and having everyone feel like friends—it felt like a momentous and ultimate event.
Eva Franch i Gilabert (director, Architectural Association School): In Virgil's unit, he actually takes the projects he's doing and brings them to the students. They'll be working on problems from Off-White, or Ikea, or Evian, or Louis Vuitton, and then will engage with them on the basis of project design all the way into the future.
Benji B: What is very important about Virgil's work is that the whole time he's doing it—whether you're a young budding designer, musician, or architect—he is “giving you the cheat codes,” as he likes to say. He and I are both of a generation that grew up with gatekeepers. In London, DJs used to steam the labels off their records, so you couldn't see what they were playing. But Virgil is not leaving anyone outside looking in.
Arnault: In luxury today, people that are in my age group are not the customers shopping for luxury goods, but it's become very important for brands to stay relevant to these people, because they will one day be the ones buying. Virgil is very inclusive, and that's what resonates with young customers who can feel when things are not organic. He's always collaborating with the right people in the right way at the right moment.
Rock: What exactly does a designer make? As an architect, you have a site, a program, a budget, and you have to create architecture that engages those different forces. [But] when you think about what Virgil does in the role of creative director, it's about the music he listens to, the parties he orchestrates, the brands he's associated with, the life he lives. So Virgil really becomes a personification of a world that people find really attractive and want to patch into. And you can do that by the very expensive method of buying an Off-White coat, but you can also do it for free by following him on Instagram. Either way, you feel like you're part of it.
Abloh: I feel like I'm figuring things out, but I don't feel accomplished yet. I still feel like I'm an intern.
Thom Bettridge is a writer, a consultant, and the executive editor of 'Interview' magazine. Additional reporting by Kevin Pires.
A version of this story appears in the Spring 2019 issue of GQ Style with the title “Group Chat: The Oral History of Virgil Abloh.”
