Virgil Abloh was the first Afro-American to become Creative Director of Menswear at Louis Vuitton, but remembering him just for that would be enormously reductive.
Abloh was above all the symbol of a new world, a young and technological world free from the old patterns that inexorably made its entry into fashion, eclipsing the previous one now obsolete.
Virgil Abloh was an entrepreneur, stylist, architect, deejay, industrial designer, and extraordinary communicator. The first capable of offering the street world of children, hyper-technological millennials, curious, experimenters, and hyper-connected within the temple of luxury; in a Maison that has always been a symbol of elegance and exclusivity, and today closer to consumers.
The fashion creator is no longer distant but open to life to music, to the new. More significant, but not by much, than any generation Z boy, their older brother: as they queued in front of the Supreme store for hours, in New York, waiting for the next “drop”, the release of some new object of desire, and then share it on his iPhone, “my portable office”, he called him, with his gentle ways as a Midwestern boy. Since yesterday on social media, on the profiles of the most influential fashion houses in the world, from Gucci to Fendi, to Dior, everyone has been talking about this kindness and delicacy of soul that has made it the most distinctive trait.
To us today remain his collections, many, I collabo even more, and his book. He taught us with his fashion to be free. And the awareness that talent and creativity can overcome any obstacle.
