Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh became the first Black American to serve as artistic director of a major French fashion house when Louis Vuitton appointed him to lead its menswear division in 2018. He was an architect, DJ, designer, and cultural polymath who dissolved the boundaries between streetwear and high fashion, proving that a Black kid from Rockford, Illinois, could reshape the most exclusive industry in the world.

Born in Rockford in 1980 to Ghanaian immigrant parents, Abloh studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He interned at Fendi alongside Kanye West in 2009, and the two formed a creative partnership that influenced fashion, music, and art. In 2013, Abloh founded Off-White, a luxury streetwear brand whose signature quotation marks and industrial aesthetic became one of the most recognizable design languages of the decade.

Abloh's appointment at Louis Vuitton was a seismic shift. His debut show, featuring a rainbow-colored runway and models of every background, was a statement about inclusion that moved attendees to tears. He worked at a pace that was both inspiring and unsustainable — running Off-White, Louis Vuitton, and dozens of collaborations simultaneously while privately battling cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer. He joined the ancestors on November 28, 2021, at just 41, leaving behind a body of work that permanently changed what fashion looks like and who gets to create it.