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Virgil Abloh, visionary in design and fashion, passes away at 41 following cancer battle

2021-11-28T15:43:00-05:00

The acclaimed designer Virgil Abloh has passed away at the age of 41 after a two-year battle with cancer. The American designer and entrepreneur was originally trained as an architect, but his impact on the design world was felt throughout fashion, interior design, music, and product design.

While a student of the Master in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Abloh developed an interest in fashion having been partly inspired by a Rem Koolhaas building under construction at the campus. Following collaborations with Kanye West, Abloh founded the high-end streetwear brand Off-White in 2013. In 2018, he become the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear ready-wear line, while one year later, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

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AMO-designed new flagship for Virgil Abloh's Off-White has opened in Paris

2021-07-06T20:57:00-04:00

A new collaboration between OMA/AMO and design icon Virgil Abloh has opened in Paris this past weekend, giving the 9-year-old Off-White brand a flagship location in the couture capital’s 1st arrondissement.

The store is the second project from AMO and the famed designer after opening a Miami location at the end of last summer. The two had previously paired on a retrospective exhibition of Abloh’s work held at the MCA Chicago in 2019.

Off-White founder and creative director Abloh told Hypebeast he views the new flagship as “an incubator for new talent, a cultural connector within the community, and an experimental laboratory of creativity and innovation.”

The three-floor retrofitted 19th-century space features a ground floor with a dedicated wing for Nike products, gallery space, and two contrasting retail areas meant to “amplify the voices of the community” and evoke bygone Parisian flea markets respectively.

The remaining two f...