Virgil Abloh, Off-White and the Age of Quotation Marks

The red zip tie came first. When Nike and Virgil Abloh confirmed their collaboration in late August 2017, every shoe in the project carried one, a plastic loop printed with the date, the collaboration name and the words "zip-tie" in bold white letters. A piece of packaging had been promoted to a design feature and labeled as such. It was about as close to a thesis statement as Abloh ever wrote down.

He rarely needed more than that. A word in quotation marks, a tag left where a tag should not be, a factory detail made visible. The tricks were small. The ambition behind them was enormous, and for a few years in the late 2010s nobody in fashion moved faster.

The architect in the room

Abloh was born on September 30, 1980, in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian parents. He earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002, then a Master of Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. That training explains a lot. He thought in templates and systems, in the idea that one rule applied consistently becomes a style, and he talked about clothing the way architects talk about a facade.

Fashion arrived through music. In 2009 he and Kanye West were in the same intern class at Fendi's Rome office, and the same year he opened RSVP Gallery in Chicago with Don C, a shop that put streetwear next to designer labels. His cover art for Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne was nominated for the Grammy for Best Recording Package in 2011. He was already working as a creative director in everything but title.

Pyrex, then Off-White

In 2012 he launched Pyrex Vision. The method was blunt. He bought deadstock Ralph Lauren flannels for around $40, screen-printed them and sold them for upward of $550. He closed the label about a year later. Read cynically, it was a markup scheme. Read generously, it was a seminar on what a logo is worth. Both readings hold up.

Off-White followed in 2013, based in Milan. The logo, built on alternating parallel diagonal lines, borrowed a graphic language that designer Ben Kelly had popularized decades earlier, a lineage that has been argued over ever since. The quotation marks became the house signature, the device that turned a hoodie or a handbag into a comment on itself. In 2015 Off-White was a finalist for the LVMH Prize, losing to Marques'Almeida and Jacquemus. Losing did not slow anything down.

The approach sat comfortably next to the downtown logic that Supreme built with its weekly drops. Both understood that young buyers wanted to be in on the reference. Abloh simply printed the reference on the product.

The Ten

The Nike project is still the best argument for his method. Abloh took ten existing models, deconstructed them and sorted the results into two packs. Revealing held the Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Blazer Mid, Air VaporMax and Air Presto. Ghosting held the Air Max 97, Air Force 1, Converse Chuck Taylor, React Hyperdunk and Zoom Vaporfly. Laces were printed "SHOELACES." Material names like AIR sat on the midsoles in quotation marks. The main release ran through October and November 2017, and Draymond Green wore the React Hyperdunk in the NBA season opener that October.

The Jordan 1 in that set is now part of the same story as the original 1985 shoe told in our Air Jordan 1 history. The Air Force 1, the most ordinary sneaker in America, became something you photographed before you wore it. The Ten itself wound down in December 2018, though Nike and Off-White kept releasing shoes together for years after, and the resale prices it generated helped build the platforms covered in our look at the sneaker resale economy. The full list lives on the Wikipedia page for The Ten.

Paris calls

On March 25, 2018, Louis Vuitton named Abloh artistic director of menswear, making him the first person of African descent to lead the line. His first show came that June in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, with Playboi Carti, Steve Lacy and Kid Cudi on the runway. It was the clearest signal yet that the energy hip-hop had pushed into menswear now set the agenda at the top of the business.

He kept the side projects going. In 2019 IKEA released Markerad, a collection of chairs, tables, rugs and mirrors, and its Frakta-style bag printed with "SCULPTURE" became the joke everyone understood. The same year the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago staged Figures of Speech, his first solo exhibition, which later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. In 2020 he raised $1 million for the "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund for Black students, administered by the Fashion Scholarship Fund.

After Virgil

In July 2021 LVMH took a 60 percent stake in Off-White, with Abloh keeping 40 percent. Four months later, on November 28, 2021, he died in Chicago at 41. He had been diagnosed with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer, in 2019 and had kept it private. Louis Vuitton turned its planned November 30 show in Miami into a tribute titled "Virgil was here."

Off-White has been looking for its next sentence since. Ib Kamara joined as art and image director in 2022 and later held the creative director title. In September 2024 LVMH sold Off-White to the brand management firm Bluestar Alliance. The Impression reported in August 2026 that Kamara was leaving after four years, with no successor named, and that the brand plans to work with ten outside collaborators reinterpreting its archive through April 2027. The same report said Bluestar had closed the New York flagship and the China stores.

That plan sounds a lot like Abloh's own working method, which was to treat an archive as raw material and hand it to friends. For more on the people who carried that idea forward, browse our culture section and the streetwear and luxury fashion hubs.

Look inside a pair of 2017 Air Prestos and the print is still there, small and deadpan: Off-White for Nike, Beaverton, Oregon USA, C. 2017. He even footnoted the inside of the shoe.