After a Summer Like No Other, Virgil Abloh Remains Fashion’s Eternal Optimist

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’s 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.

Nonetheless, this summer has been a roller coaster for Abloh. He’s been expanding his Off-White business, not to mention holding down his duties at Louis Vuitton, while the economic fallout wrought by the coronavirus pandemic devastated the fashion industry and government-mandated shutdowns kept stores around the world closed for months. The $380 billion luxury goods sector could see sales fall as much as 45% this year and not fully recover until 2023, according to an analysis by Boston Consulting Group.

Several household names have gone bankrupt, including Brooks Brothers, J.Crew, and Neiman Marcus. LVMH, the parent company of Louis Vuitton, as well as Céline, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Loro Piana, and others, saw a 38% drop in revenue last quarter, from roughly €12.5 billion ($14.8 billion) in second quarter 2019 to less than €8 billion over the same period in 2020. It expects Covid-19 to stifle sales and earnings for some time. “We can but hope that the recovery will occur gradually,” Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bernard Arnault told investors in June.

The summer protests that roiled the U.S. following the police killing of George Floyd have also presented challenges. When Abloh said he was disgusted by the looting of two Los Angeles luxury shops, the backlash on social media was swift and predictable.

Abloh says the criticism doesn’t bother him. “It motivates me,” he says. “Life is a series of trials and tribulations, and I think how you handle those are what shapes you as a human being. It shows me that there’s room to grow.” He apologized on his Instagram account (and Twitter) and announced the creation of a scholarship fund for Black students that’s focused on career development for those entering the fashion industry.

The “Post Modern” Scholarship Fund raised $1 million upon its inception, financed by Louis Vuitton, Farfetch, Evian, and Abloh’s own money. He says he’s entering a new phase of his career, one that gives all his fashion projects a greater purpose. “What’s next for me is eradicating systemic racism,” he says. “I’m taking on the task of raising Black voices—and that, to me, is a new chapter of my career.”

Abloh considers himself an optimist, and the joyful clothes he showed in Shanghai were a marked contrast from the grief that other designers have displayed in 2020. (In Alessandro Michele’s fall show for Gucci, the models’ mascara was applied in a way that made it look as if they’d been crying.)

Another pleasant surprise from the Louis Vuitton show was a lot of tailored suits, which in itself felt like an objection to giving up on how life used to be before people began to work from home. The jackets had bright pops of red and yellow, or jaunty checked patterns. The stars, though, were Abloh’s pandemic-era “Zoooom With Friends” stuffed toys, which clung to clothes and bags and filled the presentation with childlike cheerfulness.

Abloh grew up in Rockford, Ill., in a Rust Belt neighborhood outside Chicago known more for bolt and screw factories than couture shirts and crossbody bags. Watching Michael Jordan as a kid taught him perseverance and excellence, he says. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and got an internship at Fendi in Rome, where he first met Michael Burke, now the CEO of Louis Vuitton.

The son of Ghanaian immigrants, Abloh has positioned himself as a champion of granting access to those who’ve been shut out. He often talks about unlocking and opening doors—for both designers and consumers. Fashion has always been done clandestinely, within studios hidden from prying eyes.

But Abloh chronicles what goes on behind the scenes and teases sketches of upcoming projects to give his fans a window into the design. Last week, he posted a detail of a wheel from that Mercedes SUV. Shoppers, he says, need to be close to the creative process. “That’s the modern attribute of fashion. Maybe if it’s no longer mysterious, the consumer can understand the ethos of the designer.”

Home base remains Off-White, the fashion label he started in 2012. Last year, U.K.-based Farfetch Ltd. acquired the brand’s parent, Milanese licensing company New Guards Group, for $675 million in a deal that also netted the publicly traded luxury retailer such companies as Palm Angels and Heron Preston. Farfetch CEO José Neves said at the time that he’d scored a “creative tastemaker.”

Off-White’s top executive, Andrea Grilli, who’s known Abloh since 2012, says the designer has an aura of unpredictability that lures people into perpetually wondering what he’s up to next.

That’s not to say that Abloh is unstable or kooky. Rather, Grilli sees him as feverishly data-driven, trying to bridge a long-held divide between creative and business. “Virgil talks to every single level of seniority,” Grilli says. “He likes to absorb.”

He’ll need to. Off-White is looking to expand into becoming a billion-dollar revenue brand over the next 10 years, says Grilli, who declined to share current revenue numbers. To do this, Abloh will need to alter the business model, and his designs will have to stretch into new product categories.

Over the next three years, management wants Off-White to expand its e-commerce revenue to become 30% of the business and also skew more female, so that women’s clothing account for 40% of sales.

While Abloh is helping Louis Vuitton maintain its dominance, he’s also positioning his Off-White label to enter the hallmark areas a typical fashion brand such as Louis Vuitton would play in. “Handbags, shoes, fragrance,” Abloh says. “Those are all segments that I will grow into.”

The brand has been selling more handbags lately, but it’s plates, towels, and other home goods that are seen as the next big revenue generator. Grilli says a new collection is on the way, set to be introduced this fall. There’s also talk of getting into cosmetics.

It’s an old formula for such a visionary mind, and all these products face a long road back to normalcy—a sudden reality that Louis Vuitton and its boss know too well. But for LVMH, there’s reason for hope, as the business remains fundamentally sound. Executives saw nascent signs of a luxury revival in June, just in time to seal a $16 billion deal to buy U.S. jeweler Tiffany & Co.

Ever hopeful, Abloh hasn’t given up on the retail experience, either. One week after the Shanghai show, he opened a new Off-White flagship store in the Miami Design District. (He hasn’t seen it in person yet.) He’ll also open a new female-focused Off-White store in London this fall. And he’ll put on another Louis Vuitton show in Tokyo on Sept. 2. “To me, as a creative,” he says, “it’s a time to show resilience.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.