That was Virgil Abloh.Ībloh rose through the ranks of fashion as designers almost never do his was more like a musician’s route to overnight stardom than a designer’s. Fairy tales happen in their own universe with their own logic, too pure for our cynical world. What they also share: strangeness magic a respect, even love, for the obvious. What all those stories share (like all fairytales, really) is a hero who, against all the odds, gets everything he’s ever wanted. For his most recent Vuitton show, he reworked the visual and aural mechanics of GZA’s classic Liquid Swords. The symbolism was blunt, but no less powerful for it: Abloh, a Black American designer at a Paris men’s luxury house, had made it to that magical other side of the rainbow. Then there was his debut as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, in 2018, which was his take on The Wiz. Soon after, he built an Off-White runway show themed around Princess Diana-another great believer in fables, and a pure spirit with an unwavering conviction that whatever she dreamed could and should be made real. His “The Ten” collaboration with Nike, in 2017, saw him run rampant like a kid in the Nike archive, cross-pollinating Nikes with Converse (which was then a big no-no), and remixing the canon of Air Maxes, Air Presto, and VaporMaxes with his already signature deconstruction, quote marks, and zipties. Virgil Abloh, who died on Sunday of a rare form of cancer at the age of 41, believed in fairytales.
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