Virgil Abloh Designed Way More Than Just Clothing

Virgil Abloh was prolific enough in his too-short career that his side hustles added up to a lot. A fashion outsider who rose to helm Louis Vuitton, Abloh has been eulogized, rightly, as the connected man of his era: a hyperactive bridge between the disparate worlds of fashion, commerce, art, design and architecture.

But Abloh also practiced his pure design work—as in furniture, mass-produced physical products, accessories and just about everything that can be thought up and bought, but not worn—in a fairly traditional way. Armed with formal training in architecture and a seemingly endless library of references, he applied a modern, deconstructionist sensibility to all his projects, regardless of medium. Detailed, with an almost academic obsession over the quirks and meanings of goods high and low, he rolled out, on top of his fashion commitments, tons of commercial objects that, in a low-key way, all seemed to be connected.

Eventually, Abloh’s stamp—or quotation marks—covered not just clothing, but just about everything a person could buy, or aspire to own. There were Abloh-branded matcha lattes and Mercedes Benz sports wagons, Braun stereo, limited bottles of Evian and Moet Chandon, Rimowa suitcases—even a brick.

Abloh’s works shared a common thread. All seemed to offer comment on our exact point in time—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—and most tweaked the longstanding design traditions he recruited the items for. His remixes, whether for big or small items, felt both immediate, and direct. Mostly, they were superficial. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense—more that they attacked the surface of the thing he was working on. His interventions were grounded in how an object looked, less its function and meaning. Here was a classic, cool-looking thing; here was a thing Abloh thought should be classic. He would rework items slightly or wholesale, often following what he called his “3% rule”: that a minimal, almost invisible change was enough to confer authorship. Pieces important to a sloughed-off subculture—like skateboarding, or 9/11-era streetwear—might be left well alone, and simply replicated. Tonier items like luxury cars didn’t get such respect.

At a fundamental level, Abloh was very interested in shapes—ideally a few degrees off-center, but not avant-garde or especially difficult. Last year, he re-did a Benz wagon, updating a harsh Jeepish cube into a brutally simple rectangle. He smoothed off its edges, lowered it, like a drift car, and fonted its tires with Pirelli-type lettering. His new thing was half Formula 1, half cartoon: Speed Racer (the movie), or a big piece of candy. At first glance, the update had nothing in common with its source. But looking closer, it was a perfect distortion: a completely smooth version of a very rough car, connected only by their shared shape.

Abloh’s designs felt like statements about boredom—about the way we’ve become used to seeing so many designed things, perhaps on our Instagram feeds, such that only turning them inside out can get a reaction. Abloh, like Martin Margiela, loved exposed seams and guts. Consider his “Ten” collaboration with Nike from 2017, perhaps his most well-circulated collab, and his most anarchic. Each shoe was exaggerated, and stretched away from its root, pumped full of stockroom aesthetics—big, blocky letters, oxidized yellowing, a Post It-note/markdown-type orange square. Details were zoomed in on and put in sharp focus. An Air Max 97 became ridgeless, its small swoosh blown up to garish proportions; a once-boring basketball sneaker became a sculptural near-classic. Abloh placed middling models next to foundational ones, either creating a new canon, or commenting on whether there was even one to begin with. Stripping sneakers of their historical context, or flattening them, left just about every other item free to be questioned, too.

It’s difficult now to remember how strictured design was before Abloh began studying architecture. Before Instagram began putting staplers, trellises, and pickup trucks into the same shared conversation, aesthetic interests were siloed. You were either into architecture or streetwear; you liked fashion, or you did zines. Some people were exceptions, and others went through phases. But few people, in a capable way, could achieve depth in a few things at once.

But as subcultures began digitizing in the early 2000s, those firewalls began fading away. To be sure, design and architecture, both fairly white now, were even more so back then. But as knowledge—or at least knowingness—became more accessible, someone like Abloh, trained in architecture and interested in skateboarding and clothing, didn’t see contradictions. These worlds were each full of nice-looking things. Why pick one?

From a distance, Abloh’s career, sui generis among fashion designers, is not without precedent among the architecturally adjacent. Always vocal about carving a path similar to Raf Simons and Mies van der Rohe—giants who touched just about everything—he felt he could, and generally did, apply an architectural sensibility to consumer goods, too. His closest contemporary may have been Philippe Starck, the celebrated French designer whose immediate, sloughed-off style took over France for a while, and whose fame allowed him to attack massive projects while traipsing into small ones. Starck, who made generational contributions early in his career, doubled down on what he called “democratic design”: affordable items, like the Ghost Chair and the Aprilia 6.5 motorcycle, that were still nice to look at. Abloh might have done him even better. If you couldn’t afford a Louis Vuitton bag, you could pick up one of his from Ikea. If the Nikes sold out, an Evian bottle could be found on the cheap.

With his namechecks (and keen sense of his place in history), Abloh almost immediately became a design resource and educator, holding the door open behind him and encouraging many young, thoughtful people to approach the fusty design canon with the same excitement they might hold for sneakers and clothes. (When we spoke this winter, he was especially animated as he talked about Alaska Alaska, the art studio through which he mentored young Black designers.) It seemed, from my distant vantage, that he namechecked long gone, canonized greats and items for the same reason he kept his (pretty special) brand-building guide on his website—as a sort of educational effort. He’d talk about van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Kanye West in the same breath, without patronizing or pontificating. This was real inclusivity: a judgment-free, vibrant way to get young kids through the door, and in front of the good stuff.

In the dim light of grief, the criticisms that were sometimes leveled against his work now seem like misunderstandings: of course Abloh said yes to lots of things, and went beyond his comfort zone, showed up everywhere, and worked five jobs at a time. He took each day that he got and made something out of it, squeezing out the last drops of his outsize influence and access, and passing it on. Abloh kept working because he was excited about what he saw. How could he not be?