Virgil Abloh x LCF: The Death of the Designer

This event took place on Friday 12 March to an audience of London College of Fashion, UAL students. In an age of ubiquitous branding, the era of the designer is long gone. Though, curiously, the common titles ‘artistic/creative director’ imply this new order, the perhaps most common criticism lobbed at Virgil Abloh by the fashion establishment is that he’s not a 'real' designer. So what gives? This conversation, between the artist, architect and designer Virgil Abloh and Vestoj founder and LCF research fellow Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, centres on this paradox: we uphold the myth of the lone designer genius in order to stoke values like authenticity and exclusivity, while also knowing that contemporary luxury fashion is a collaborative effort, and a fine balance between creative expression and consumer demand. What are the pros and cons of maintaining this cognitive dissonance, and what would fashion look like if it relied less on fantasy and more on reality as we know it? About Virgil Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh is an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, artistic director, industrial designer, fashion designer, musician and DJ, and philanthropist. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019 - one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Currently, Abloh is the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™️ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton.