Emerging alongside key collaborator Kanye West, Abloh launched his experimental brand Pyrex Vision in 2012, screen-printing bold graphics and Caravaggio masterworks onto deadstock Champion hoodies and Ralph Lauren flannels. This provocative act of readymade transformation ignited modern luxury streetwear and served as the direct incubator for his landmark brand, Off-White, founded in Milan in 2013. Defined by signature quotation marks, diagonal industrial stripes and meta-textual irony, Off-White redefined luxury. Building on the success of his own label, Abloh made history in 2018 as the first African American artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection.
Abloh's prolific output spanned fine art, industrial design and music. His seminal 2017 collaboration with Nike, 'The Ten', deconstructed ten iconic sneaker silhouettes through his '3%' lens, while his major retrospective, Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech, debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019. Following a private battle with cardiac angiosarcoma, Abloh died in Chicago in 2021 at the age of 41. Today, his legacy is celebrated in permanent museum collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Vitra Design Museum.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI (B. 1962) AND VIRGIL ABLOH (1980-2021)
DOB and Arrows: Patchwork Skulls
TAKASHI MURAKAMI & VIRGIL ABLOH (B. 1962) & (B. 1980)
Glance Past the Future
TAKASHI MURAKAMI (B. 1962) X VIRGIL ABLOH (B. 1980)
Glance Past the Future