Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh was a Chicago-born artist and designer who founded the luxury streetwear label Off-White and later became artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. Trained as an architect, he worked fluidly across fashion, art, music, and furniture, approaching design as a form of cultural sampling and recontextualization. Hallmarks of his practice, such as typography-as-graphics, quotation marks, industrial tags, and collaborative “remixes” with brands from Nike to IKEA, were framed in exhibitions like the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s “Figures of Speech,” which cast his output as a single cross-disciplinary system rather than separate lanes. Abloh described his method as changing familiar objects by “three percent” to provoke new readings, a lens he carried from streetwear to the runway.