When Virgil Abloh died in late November 2021, much of the international outpouring of grief focused on his creative mind. He was one of his generation’s great innovators, a civil engineering undergraduate from Chicago who conquered the heights of luxury fashion and broke down barriers for other Black creatives in the process. But what people didn’t talk about, at least not nearly as much, was his right brain – his ability to fuse strategy with creativity, to look at ideas as bricks to shuffle around, be replaced, thrown out and reordered. In many respects, his ability to consciously confound narratives became more important to his designs, or his DJ sets, than his cerebral shades: architecture informed his solo Off-White designs; streetwear was treated as a luxury item; handbags were treated as art (like his adaptation of Caravaggio’s altarpiece “The Entombment of Christ”), and clothing like wall hangings.
In the end, though his curriculum vitae spanned fashion, art, architecture and music, what he will be remembered for most, perhaps, is his refusal to be cornered by any one of these categories. By blending universes and smudging the creative canvas, he became a bridge between hypebeasts and these gilded industries: the ultimate multihyphenate, Abloh took on disparate fields under the assumption that all visual realms could be bettered with clear vision and intention.
Similar to Brian Eno, who devised his own strategies to spark brainwaves to break creative blocks (some of which were distilled into his
