“LIFE” VIRGIL

The Off-White founder and Louis Vuitton artistic director Virgil Abloh had an influence that ranged far beyond the world of fashion, writes Luke Leitch

- Luke Leitch

“I’ve been on this focus, in terms of my art and creativity, of getting adults to behave like children again. That they go back into this sense of wonderment—they start to stop using their mind and they start using their imagination.”

SHORTLY BEFORE 6PM on Tuesday, November 30, 2021, Virgil Abloh’s voice came over the P.A. Approximately 1,500 of us had, at last, settled into our seats on the floating runway at the Miami Marine Stadium to the haunting opening notes of Mansur Brown’s ‘Want You’. (According to chatter backstage, the organisers at Louis Vuitton had been expecting only 600 guests, mostly local clients to celebrate the opening of a new Louis Vuitton men’s store, for what was essentially a high-end trunk show, entitled 7.2, which coincided with the Art Basel fair.) Just two days earlier, the news had hit us: Abloh, only 41, was dead.

After the immediate shock came action as, from far and wide, those whom Abloh had touched in his cut-short life scrambled to get to Miami. A near-full set of Arnaults, the family which oversees Louis Vuitton, was joined by Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West (with their daughter North) reunited to pay their respects. Rihanna, Pharrell Williams, A$AP Rocky, Jonathan Anderson, Nigo, Silvia Venturini Fendi, Samuel Ross, Kerby Jean-Raymond, Bella Hadid, A$AP Ferg, Joan Smalls, and many others dropped everything to attend. It was a matter both of paying respects to a man and designer who opened so many doors for others, as well as being able to see with our own eyes a show that—because the door had slammed with such sudden cruelty on him—he had overseen until almost the very last.