Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh (1980–2021) trained as an engineer and an architect — civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then a master’s at the Illinois Institute of Technology — before turning to fashion with Pyrex Vision in 2012 and Off-White in 2013. As artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear from 2018 he became the first Ghanaian-American to lead a French luxury house, and kept a Chicago studio practice that treated design as a system of codes.

That method travelled into industrial design through MARKERAD for IKEA, editions with Vitra and Alessi, pieces with Nike and Evian, and the “tourist and purist” principle he set out at Harvard in 2017: an object must speak to specialist and newcomer alike. Since his death the Virgil Abloh Archive has catalogued it, and “The Codes” opened at the Grand Palais in Paris on his 45th birthday.