He was variously termed kaleidoscopic, a Renaissance man, a protean force in the history of fashion, and yet, looking back on his brief tenure at the apex of the business, what seems clear is that the word that best describes Mr. Abloh was there all along.
Mr. Abloh was prismatic, a designer capable of capturing the varied colors and lights of an evolving culture, refracting and then beaming them out to a waiting world.
Yet rather than promoting his own Off-White label, Mr. Abloh used his stipend to engage the artist Jenny Holzer in a collaboration that saw the two of them excerpting fragments of poems by exiles caught up in the global immigration crisis and projecting them onto the walls of the ancient Palazzo Pitti.
Two years later, at the Vuitton studio on the afternoon of my visit, models of varied colors milled around trying on designs for seemingly every permutation of gender.
Mr. Abloh, whose fingernails were painted gray that day, had just returned to work from what he referred to as a period of rest and reflection — a break from a punishing schedule that had once kept him on planes at least once a week for years — and that may in fact have been for the cancer that eventually claimed his life.
Yet right from the start he created cool “stuff,” in volume, through regularly timed drops and with a maximalist aesthetic that was often far from the sleek refinement of those designers that dominated the upper reaches of men’s wear when he was on his way up.
He was notably liberal in his samplings from other designers — to wit: a cloud print collection Italo Zucchelli designed for Calvin Klein in 2014 turned up again on a Vuitton fall 2020 runway in pretty close replica — or uninflected by invisible quotation marks.
For his Louis Vuitton men’s show debut in 2018, Mr. Abloh covered the gravel paving at the Palais Royal gardens in Paris with an ombré rainbow carpet and then opened the gates to a guest list including 600 students from local architecture, art and fashion schools.
From this critic’s vantage, what will distinguish Mr. Abloh’s truncated career in fashion most durably may not be the goods he had a hand in creating — his sneaker collaborations, his fashion collections or his highly coveted accessories.