A fashion icon has died at the age of 41, representatives confirmed.
Designer, DJ and entrepreneur Virgil Abloh died after a long, private battle with cancer, LVMH announced on Nov. 28.
“LVMH, Louis Vuitton and Off White are devastated to announce the passing of Virgil Abloh, on Sunday, November 28th, of cancer, which he had been battling privately for several years,” LVMH released in a public statement.
Abloh founded the popular fashion house Off-White in 2012.
“We are all shocked after this terrible news,” Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, said in an official statement. “Virgil was not only a genius designer, a visionary, he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom. The LVMH family joins me in this moment of great sorrow, and we are all thinking of his loved ones after the passing of their husband, their father, their brother or their friend.”
He is survived by his wife Shannon Abloh and children Grey and Lowe Abloh.
The first Black figurehead of LVMH, Abloh wanted to make a change in the lack of diversity in the fashion world.
“I now have a platform to change the industry with this show,” Abloh told GQ in a 2018 interview. “So I should do that. It’s no secret: we’re designers, so we can start a trend, we can highlight issues, we can make a lot of people focus on something or we can cause a lot of people to focus on ourselves. I’m not interested in [the latter]. I’m interested in using my platform as one of a very small group of African-American males to design a house, to sort of show people in a poetic way. The [models are] artists first, in my mind; they’re not Black.”
