The Off-White founder and Wizard of Oz fan isn’t just making clothes. He’s blazing his own Yellow Brick Road from nowheresville to the Emerald City of Paris and reprogramming Louis Vuitton in the process.

Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh is an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, and fashion designer. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019 – one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Currently, Abloh is the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton.

Abloh founded his first fashion house and second business overall in 2013 with the high-end streetwear brand Off-White. Based in Milan, Italy, the company was described by Abloh as “the gray area between black and white as the color off-white” to investors and fashion critics. He launched the company’s women’s wear line in 2014 and showed the collections at the Paris Fashion Week. His line was selected as a finalist for the LVMH Prize, an industry award, but lost to Marques’Almeida and Jacquemus. Abloh launched his first concept store for Off-White in Tokyo, Japan where he started the company’s furniture arm, Grey Area. In 2017, he was asked to design a new collection in conjunction with Nike entitled “The Ten” where he re-designed a variety of the company’s best-selling shoes. Virgil also partnered up with the Swedish furniture company IKEA to design furniture for apartments and houses. The collection will be named Markerad which is a Swedish word meaning “clear-cut; crisp; pronounced” and is scheduled to release in 2019. Abloh employs quotation marks stylistically in order to convey ironic detachment from society and social norms.

During the rise in neo-nationalism in 2017 Abloh worked with conceptual artist Jenny Holzer to create a line emphasizing the positive aspects of immigration, cultural integration, and globalization.[10] In December 2017, he worked with Holzer again to design t-shirts for Planned Parenthood in response to the Women’s March on Washington.

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