Virgil Abloh: The Man Who Previewed the “METAVERSE” IRL
Like most of us, I’m still trying to process the recent news of Virgil Abloh’s unexpected death. Two years ago, he was diagnosed with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare type of cancer, and chose to keep the diagnosis private.
It’s hard to pin Virgil down to just one title or genre in terms of his cultural contributions. What he accomplished in such an abbreviated time across so many disciplines will have a lasting impact on generations of creators to come.
As the head of engagement planning (a signature practice focused on cultural context and social engagement) at Translation + UnitedMasters, my fascination for connecting brands and culture runs deep. So naturally, I’ve witnessed Virgil’s influence on consumer behavior as sort of a real-time masterclass.
His definition of Off-White as the “grey area between black and white” speaks directly to his ability to not only exist, but to thrive in juxtaposing spaces. Streetwear + high fashion. Hip-hop + punk rock. Accessibility + exclusivity… Virgil cracked the code.
This became more evident as I scrolled through my Instagram feed last Sunday and saw countless screenshots of texts and DMs between Virgil and folks from all walks of life and follower counts.
Virgil’s mission was bigger than material output. He redefined relationship dynamics between brands, fans, and creators, and reassigned roles and responsibilities in the process. This paradigm shift reimagined value creation coming from a creator cosigning a brand rather than the other way around.
This explains why his partnerships were so wide-ranging and spanned industries from apparel to auto to furniture and more. The role of brands in Virgil’s model simply served as a platform to help scale and stretch the creator’s original vision, while the role of the fan was to buy into an augmented product experience all c/o Virgil Abloh™️.
As I was posting an IG Story of my daughter’s Off-White Air Force 1s, I realized that the word “SHOELACES” is literally printed on the toddler-size shoelaces…💡
That moment served as a reminder that Virgil was meta well before Facebook. His design language was persistent, self-referential and intentionally ironic.
He treated the medium as the message and made the viewer question the perceived value of the product simply by writing its name in quotation marks.
Disclaimer: I’m no self-proclaimed expert in the metaverse (I don’t know if anyone technically is at this point), but I’ve been in my Kathy Hackl podcast bag recently, and a few parallels began to naturally emerge. To quote the man himself, the real world is just the part-time metaverse.
There are tons of floating definitions for the metaverse, but from what I can piece together, it’s simply the next generation of the Internet. It’s where the physical and digital worlds merge to create new experiences for us with the people, places and things we love. Below are a few key concepts to the metaverse with “real world” examples where Virgil masterfully showed us how it’s done:
- World-building — To paraphrase Craig Donato, the Chief Business Officer at Roblox, the metaverse is a place that is both immersive and social, and uses a shared fabric across experiences. That description immediately takes me to Virgil and Nike’s Off-Campus event series. By design, it was immersive and social, and invited fans into the creative process as a kind of performance art. According to Virgil, the design ethos behind “The Ten” was to intentionally treat each shoe as if it were half done. In essence, Virgil was introducing a sense of creative freedom within an established framework that included his signature brand elements, like the quotation marks, zip ties, barricade tape, and capital letters. That same framework became the world that he would build and expand on for his brand experience through countless partnerships he’d add a fingerprint to.
2. Co-creation — In the metaverse, IP ownership isn’t always limited to one creator. In fact, world-building comes from diverse thinkers collaborating to make things that simply wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t joined forces (e.g., the shoe customizer for avatars in Vans World on Roblox). Aside from the countless classic album covers that Virgil designed, this takes my mind to a couple of game-changing collabs he helped usher in.
The first being the Been Trill x 40oz Van snapback hat, which was inescapable on the streets of NYC circa 2013. The hat featured an inverted Yankees logo alongside the brand’s design language of hashtags and drippy type fonts. And the second being the highly coveted Air Jordan 1, which Virgil deconstructed and reconstructed to imbue his sense of creative freedom into a pre-existing framework. Rather than simply recoloring a hat or sneaker, he would go on to re-contextualize products by localizing them to speak his own language, all while preserving their core DNA.
3. Community — Subcultures will grow and thrive in the metaverse, because experiences will no longer be bound to geography. Stans from all over the world will be able to visit an NFT gallery, go graffiti bombing, or attend a virtual concert together despite the difference in time zones.
Virgil deeply understood the power of community, as evidenced in his approach to concepts like badging and belonging. He turned the proverbial “grey area between black and white” into safe spaces for his people to congregate. He used his platforms to help his communities feel seen, heard, and most importantly, validated.
It’s playing Roc Marciano and Westside Gunn as the runway music during his OFF-WHITE F/W 2020 show in France. It’s joining Angelo Baque of Awake NY to host a mentorship series called Social Studies for the next generation of creators. It’s saluting Dem Dare by enlisting Reggieknow as a creative consultant for numerous Louis Vuitton endeavors. It’s inviting Charlie Doves TCK to the Met Gala to airbrush “Modernism” on his perfectly white-on-white ensemble before the event. Virgil had the unique gift of making his communities feel like they were supposed to be there rather than feel like they were lucky to be there.
4. Interoperability — The concept of interoperability is about having the freedom to migrate your avatar(s) and possessions across different metaverse experiences. To put it in Web 2 terms, imagine being able to port all of your followers from Instagram to your newly created TikTok page the way you can easily roll your phone number and contact list from one wireless provider to another. It’s a popular concept that’s gaining traction and can revolutionize the way people carry both themselves and their belongings in the metaverse. Virgil demonstrated the concept of interoperability on multiple occasions, but two examples bubble up when I think of him in this context. The first is when he joined forces with nearly 20 streetwear brands for the aforementioned Social Studies program to create tee shirts that would benefit local youth organizations.
The second is a recent photo leak Virgil shared of a Nike Air Force 1 with LV co-branding along with a Ghanian flag he’d placed on the shoe’s heel. The two brands collaborating on a shoe felt surprisingly expected, but the addition of the flag is what unlocked another dimension in terms of being able to swiftly carry your personality and possessions into a product experience.
5. Identity — The metaverse will allow people to discover and display new dimensions of their identity. For instance, you may create a specific avatar to hang with your sports tribe that’s different from the ones you use to run with your gaming and fashion tribes. Avatar fluidity is a concept Virgil expertly embodied.
Depending on his context, he would seamlessly switch from being a family man to an architect to a designer to a DJ to a graff writer…and the list keeps going. He defied genres and generations, and refused to be defined by singularity — with the exception of using one name consistently across all of his disparate identities.
Virgil was courageous enough to conquer his imposter syndrome in the physical world, but I expect many more to follow his footsteps when they can do the same from the comforts of their screen.
To conclude, I’ll admit again to not being an expert on neither the metaverse nor the complete life legacy of Virgil Abloh. However, as a student of contemporary culture, I was deeply moved by the parallels and decided to get this published vs. perfected.
Virgil blazed new trails for creatives of color to infiltrate corporate America and start “tagging buildings up from the inside.” As a Dominican kid from Queens with the privilege to sit in the rooms I occupy, these words are gospel.
There’s one level of the work that is designing at Louis, but my real job is to make sure that there’s like 6 young Black kids that take my job after me. — Virgil Abloh
To the brand leaders who had the fortune of working with Virgil, and to those who were simply inspired by his work: it’s up to us to build new and equitable worlds that account for diverse perspectives by co-creating with the very communities we’re looking to grow with.
I welcome all readers, leaders, fans, and futurists to weigh in and add on to this perspective. In the meantime, I’ll continue to explore the grey area between black and white in the metaverse c/o Virgil Abloh™️
