How Virgil Abloh Broke the Codes and Rewrote the Matrix

This story is a complementary profile to the 2025 Hypebeast100, our annual recognition of the creatives shaping fashion and culture today. Explore the full Hypebeast100 list, award winners, and this year’s Next class of emerging designers here.

There are many designers who have created aspirational lifestyles, transcending the collections they make and informing other aspects of culture. Ralph Lauren set the archetype, willing himself into the very embodiment of upper crust American life that his clothes were inspired by. Hedi Slimane’s exacting proportions and continued fascination with rock bands and club culture is a high still being chased by modern archive kids. But Virgil Abloh did something else entirely — he rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a designer in the modern era, and in the process also redefined what kids could aspire to.

His unlikely story is practically textbook knowledge by now. A young kid born to Ghanaian parents in Rockford, Illinois eventually becomes fascinated with music, subculture, architecture, and design. He studies architecture at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and gets his master’s at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he concurrently discovers a love for art history, Mies Van Der Rohe, screenprinting T-shirts, and blogging for an IYKYK website called The Brilliance! Even before he started working with Kanye West, Abloh’s stream-of-consciousness style of creativity was already taking shape.

“Virgil’s creativity was like a constant stream of light. It wasn’t confined to fashion or art; it spilled into every corner of life. He could look at something ordinary — a chair, a sneaker, a DJ set, a book — and transform it into something extraordinary, rooted in vision. Each project carried the same energy: a refusal to be boxed in,” says Shannon Abloh, the Founder and Board President of the Virgil Abloh Foundation and the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Virgil Abloh Securities.

Virgil Abloh and Shannon Abloh met in high school and were married in 2009. After his untimely passing in 2021, Shannon Abloh took on the arduous task of not only helping preserve her late husband’s legacy, but stewarding it towards the future. The Virgil Abloh Foundation and Virgil Abloh Securities are organizations set up to offer everything from educational youth programs to retrospective exhibitions like the recent “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” exhibit at The Grand Palais earlier this year. It marked the debut of the Virgil Abloh Archive, itself a testament to the kind of open-source creative spirit and attitude of accessibility that Abloh had, meant to foster more equitable and inclusive spaces for underrepresented young creatives.

So many people have had the opportunity to step into Virgil Abloh’s shoes in a literal sense, but the exhibit offers the opportunity to do so in an artistic one. For the first time, Abloh’s holistic practice is juxtaposed with another big inspiration for him: a keen collector’s mindset and personal archive of objets d’art, fashion grails, and other ephemera. Everything from magazines, unfinished prototypes, pitch decks for projects that never came to fruition, to custom Chrome Hearts pieces speaks to the novel way in which Abloh’s mind toggled between a constant state of output and a constant state of input.

“His deep, obsessive collecting became a mode of learning, a way to absorb as much as possible about the disciplines he loved. This practice fueled his creativity, allowing him to cross-pollinate ideas from different fields and historical periods,” adds Shannon Abloh. “His enthusiasm for collecting was inseparable from his creative process. It was how he remembered, how he learned, how he produced, and how he built a community that continues to shape culture today.”

Virgil Abloh’s canon is unique in that it reflects the creative output of the era in which it was created. Bridging mediums, platforms, and audiences, he gave feedback as freely on WhatsApp as he would in a physical studio. If the seasonal collections he put out for both Louis Vuitton and Off-White were his major label albums, all of the projects in between were a combination of hot-in-the-street mixtapes and surprise, self-released singles. He embodied the digital DIY spirit that begat a new generation of content creators, while also managing to gain validation and acclaim from the highest echelons of old-school fashion.

Although the so-called “high-low” mix had existed in the creative world before, it really was Virgil Abloh who connected the two in a very real way. People who had Louis Vuitton bags certainly wore Air Force 1s, but he was the one who broke that final barrier of collaborative partnerships, and did it in a way that felt authentic to all the parties involved. But it was Abloh’s adept understanding of nuance that set his novel approach to design apart.

In a world increasingly ready to adopt artificial intelligence as a means of drafting and refining ideas, it’s important to remember that Abloh’s 3% approach was built on a foundation of both encyclopedic knowledge and sincere reverence for the initial soul possessed by a design — whether it was the Evian water bottle, Air Jordan 1, or Mercedes-Benz G-Class. Ever the architect, his deconstructive design first began with a fundamental understanding of how something was built in the first place, and then like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, offering parallel ideas inspired by other artists or brands where he could feel there was untapped synergy. You simply can’t write an algorithm for being able to accurately pinpoint the vibe.

“His imagination wasn’t just about making things; it was about connecting people, cultures, and ideas,” says Shannon Abloh. “To me, it felt like he was always building bridges between past and future, mass and luxury, personal and universal. That was the gift he carried and shared with the world.”