FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT

After a season like no other, Virgil Abloh remains fashion’s resident optimist By Kim Bhasin and Annmarie Hordern Photograph by Nolis Anderson

- James Gaddy

When Louis Vuitton unveiled its latest menswear collection, fashion felt normal for the first time in months: Models walked the runway in front of a chic audience, attendees cooled off with paper fans in between air kisses, and a surprise guest star—Lauryn Hill—serenaded the crowd.

Well, almost normal. The show was held in August, weeks before the standard time for next year’s spring-summer collection. It was also in Shanghai, thousands of miles from Paris, the typical location. Virgil Abloh, the designer, couldn’t make it to his own show because of travel restrictions between the U.S. and China.

“What we’ve learned through this year is that there’s subtle things that need to change about how we interface with the customer and interface with the world,” Abloh says a week after the show from his home outside Chicago, where he’s spent the past several months running his creative teams in Paris and Milan.

These days, Abloh’s designs are inescapable. He has a regular parade of collaborations, such as a February collection of wood-capped water bottles with Evian and, through his label Off-White, an upcoming pair of zigzag-laced white Nike Dunk Low sneakers. He’s also working with Mercedes-Benz AG to reinterpret the automaker’s G-Class luxury SUV.

Abloh has always been a busy guy, and the lockdown version of him isn’t much different. Before our interview, he’d just spoken with Marc Jacobs, his predecessor as Louis Vuitton’s head menswear designer and a mentor he can bank on to spark, as he puts it, explosive creativity.