Virgil Abloh has suddenly passed away at the age of 41.
Revealed in an Instagram post published in the early afternoon of November 28 to Abloh's personal account, the designer had long battled a rare form of cancer known as cardiac angiosarcoma.
Abloh chose to keep his battle with illness private, never allowing the myriad of treatments to publicly affect his creativity, or famously prodigious work ethic aside from an enigmatic health-related break he took from work in 2019 when first diagnosed with the disease.
A massive global audience remembers Abloh for — among other things — founding and directing his fashion label Off-White™, pioneering a new era of luxury design as the first-ever Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton — one of the first Black men to ever lead a luxury label at a comparable level — and for Abloh's innumerous collaborations with brands like Nike, IKEA, and Levi's.
It's more than fair to say that Abloh was one of the most influential fashion personalities of the last 50 years.
In a September post celebrating his birthday, we noted that Highsnobiety had already published 40 articles about the designer in 2021 alone, demonstrating Abloh's enormous, far-reaching output.
Abloh leaves behind his parents Nee and Eunice, sister Edwina, wife Shannon, and two children, Lowe and Grey.
"We are all shocked by this terrible news," Bernard Arnault, CEO of Louis Vuitton parent company LVMH, said in a statement.
"Virgil was not only a genius designer and a visionary, he was also a man with a beautiful soul and great wisdom. The LVMH family joins me in this moment of great sorrow and we are all thinking of his loved ones on the passing of their husband, father, brother, son and friend."
