Shannon Abloh is ready to talk
In her first interview, Virgil Abloh’s widow steps out of the shadows and takes charge
In early November, a few weeks before the first anniversary of the death of her husband, Virgil Abloh — founder of Off-White, menswear designer of Louis Vuitton, Nike collaborator, artist, all-around design polymath and master of quotation marks — Shannon Abloh flew from Chicago to New York to accept an award on his behalf.
The award was being bestowed by the Council of Fashion Designers of America during a gala evening, and though Virgil Abloh had been nominated often during his lifetime and had always put on his tux and gone to the ceremony, Shannon Abloh had not. She had stayed at home with their two young children and dogs, just as she had stayed in the background when her husband went to the Met Gala with Kendall Jenner, or was a DJ at Coachella.
As public as Virgil Abloh had been, Shannon Abloh had been private. She had never given an interview. There are few photographs of the couple together. When Rihanna and A$AP Rocky and Lauryn Hill and Tyler the Creator went to Chicago for Virgil Abloh’s memorial service at the Museum of Contemporary Art last December, it was the first time many of them had ever been in the Ablohs’ home.
“It was never a thing that we discussed,” Shannon Abloh said as she was getting ready to go to the awards, referring to her decision to remain out of the spotlight. “It was just the way our relationship worked.” She was camped out at the Mercer Hotel, wearing faded boyfriend jeans and a T-shirt with a pair of Off-White x Air Jordan 4s that Virgil Abloh had dyed purple for her because purple is her favorite color.
“We knew we wanted to build this close family, and we needed someone to be the stable partner,” she said. “I was happy to do that.”
Now, however, the spotlight has found her. After a year of standing by politely as pundits and boldfaced names expounded on
Virgil Abloh’s life and work and what he would have wanted, Shannon Abloh,
41, has decided it is time to define her husband’s legacy herself.
“It belongs to me, it belongs to his children,” she said. “After his passing, so many people came up to me and said, ‘Virgil was my best friend.’ His best friend in the fashion industry, his best friend in the music world. A lot of his collaborators, or even people who maybe weren’t that close to him, feel ‘I can do this to help his legacy, or I can do that to help his legacy.’ It’s like this train that’s going 500 miles per hour, and I just thought: I have to stay on this train, because if I don’t, I don’t know where it’s going to go. That’s my place and my position.”
Last May, she created Virgil Abloh Securities, to unite his creative ventures, including Alaska Alaska, which is a creative studio in London, and a joint venture with Nike called Architecture; she is chief executive. A four-day festival, organized by VA Securities and Nike, during Miami
Art Week was designed to celebrate Virgil Abloh’s life and open-source his ideas. She hopes it will become an annual event.
“It’s a stake in the ground,” said Howard Feller, who became Virgil Abloh’s business adviser in 2017 and now works with Shannon Abloh. A notice to the world she is in charge.
Then, in the spring, as president of the Virgil Abloh Foundation, she will host an inaugural summit of his closest collaborators, who will brainstorm ways to increase creative opportunities for the next generation of minority students. She is creating an archive. And she is ready to talk about what it all means.
‘I knew every inch of his brain’
“Something you have to understand is, there wasn’t a plan,” Shannon Abloh said, sitting on a couch at the Mercer. On one hand was a large, emerald-cut engagement ring Virgil Abloh gave to her when he re-proposed at a joint birthday party in August 2021. On the other was his wedding band and a silver ring he had commissioned from Chrome Hearts that said “Ablohs” and that had arrived after his death. On one wrist was the gold Cartier love bracelet he gave her when she was pregnant with their first child, Lowe, now 9, and a gold Cartier nail bracelet he gave her for Christmas in 2017.
Amid the Cartiers was a child’s alphabet bead bracelet that reads: “I love you.” Their son Grey, 6, made it for her in September on what would have been Virgil Abloh’s 42nd birthday, because, she said, he “knew I was sad.”
“I’m going to cry now,” Shannon Abloh said, clasping her hands. Her friend Marcie Haley, who had come along to keep her company, jumped up and handed her a tissue.
“It wasn’t like we knew that he was going to pass,” Shannon Abloh said. Virgil Abloh learned he had cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare heart cancer, in July 2019, but they decided to keep his illness secret from all but his closest friends.
“Even though we knew the challenge of what he
was fighting, it went a lot faster than we thought it was going to,” Shannon Abloh said. “So we never had the ‘this is the legacy that I want you to work toward’ discussion. But because I was with him for so long, I knew every inch of him. I knew every inch of his brain.”
The two met at a high school soccer game when she was 17 and he was 18. They were both living in Rockford, Illinois, going to different schools. She was dating someone else, but the next week Virgil Abloh put two dozen red roses on her car with a letter explaining why she should dump her boyfriend and start dating him.
After that they stayed together.
Eventually Virgil Abloh started working for Kanye West. When Virgil Abloh was flying around the world with West, she was working at Yahoo and would join him when she could. She stopped working after the birth of their daughter, but “Virgil and I talked about everything,” she said.
In July 2021, Virgil Abloh sold Off-White to LVMH, mostly to ensure its future and to take on a larger role in that organization, but also because it meant Shannon Abloh and the children “would be taken care of,” Burke said.
The 5 0 -year plan
The basement of their weekend house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is crammed with turntables and art and Birkin bags and awards and records, Haley said. Shannon Abloh said she used to call Virgil Abloh “squirrel” because he was forever tucking away pieces of paper with his ideas on them. John Hoke, the chief creative officer of Nike who worked with Virgil Abloh on their collaborations, said there is at least a year’s worth of Off-White x Nike products already in the pipeline, and Nike is planning with Architecture for what comes next. At Alaska Alaska, Shannon Abloh said there are “hundreds of projects that he worked on that he never put out,” that she wants to bring to fruition.
“We are on the 50-year plan,” said Feller, the business adviser.
In the Mercer, Shannon Abloh was changing into a black Off-White dress for the CFDA gala. She would get on a plane the next morning at 9 so she would be home when her children got back from school. She was looking forward to Miami.
“I think that it’s important that my kids are able to see in 20 years what their dad was able to do and that Mom really stepped up,” she said. That “through everything, through all the grief, she was able to pull it together and move forward.”
Virgil Abloh used to laugh about her reluctance to go to big events, she said, and would say, “‘I’m going to get you there eventually, Shannon.’ ” She looked as if she couldn’t decide if she should laugh or cry. “Now here I am,” she said, “thinking, ‘Darn it, you got me.’ ”