Born to Ghanaian immigrants who dreamed of having a son who was an engineer, Abloh read civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before going on to study architecture in Illinois and, after that, joining a small architecture firm. Then Kanye West entered the scene and things started to get interesting.
Abloh met the rapper in 2003, when Kanye was still, well, in the process of becoming Kanye – this was before The College Dropout and long before Kim. Abloh approached West, offering to design his merch and give his input on what he was doing. Fast forward a few years and they’re partners in crime, going to Paris Fashion Week and even spending a couple of months interning at Fendi together. Working as West’s Creative Director, Abloh also art-directed West’s and Jay-Z’s 2011 album, Watch the Throne, which earned Abloh a Grammy nomination. Luxury fashion was about to change. “The future looks different,” he has said.
In 2012, Abloh started an art project-cum-fashion label called Pyrex Vision, screen-printing logos onto Champion T-shirts and old Ralph Lauren shirts and selling them for up to $500 each. He quickly moved on from this, launching Off-White, which promptly thrust him into the limelight.
Then, in January 2016, he put on his first runway show at Paris Men’s Fashion Week. Here, frosty fashion editors sat sandwiched next to raucous rappers, including members of the A$AP Mob – one of whom (A$AP Nast) actually walked in the show. Abloh and the culture he represented had arrived, not just in Paris but in the fashion world at large.
Since then, Abloh has gone from strength to strength, now sitting at the helm of one of the most prestigious luxury houses in existence. So what’s the secret to his success? Well, the concept behind Off-White and his approach to fashion more generally is simple. Simple but genius: he reissues cool streetwear basics as luxury goods, which might not sound like rocket science, but it’s smart. Really smart. It’s what today’s men – specifically today’s young men – actually want. And I mean want, as opposed to much of luxury fashion, which is either too ‘avant-garde’ or traditional and geared towards an older demographic. “To me, luxury means value system,” he said in a recent interview with 032c. “To a younger group of people, you could replace the word ‘luxury’ with the word ‘coveted’.”