How Virgil Abloh Conquered Streetwear And Took Men’s High Fashion By Storm

Virgil Abloh is restless. We’re sitting upstairs in the white-walled Paris offices of Louis Vuitton, in a studio packed with sketch-strewn worktables, and, as we speak, the designer wheels to and fro in an office chair across the floor. Yesterday was the luxe, sunny debut of Abloh’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection, his first show since being named the fashion house’s new artistic director of men’s wear, in March. Put another way: it’s the morning after Abloh made history, so pardon the jitters. Abloh is the first black man in Louis Vuitton’s 164-year history to debut a men’s-wear line. He’s also, he might point out, the first man in his position to hail not from New York City, or even the suburbs, but from Rockford, Illinois—a far midwestern cry from the majestic largesse of Paris’s Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, where, the previous afternoon, his meteoric rise was capped off with a Wizard of Oz-themed rainbow runway. Abloh’s technicolor, multicultural parade of models and artists donning mohair jumpers and bright leather trench coats, all of them affixed with L.V. monograms and Abloh-esque flourishes, was a decisive statement: we’re not in Kansas anymore. Read more at Vanity Fair.