Before his death in 2021 aged 41, Virgil Abloh was often called the most important fashion designer of his generation. Not the best – not even close. Even at Louis Vuitton, where he became the first Black man to oversee the label’s menswear in 2018, he preferred to print on T-shirts rather than tailor them. But as a pop-culture-obsessed polymath who approached fashion with a teenager’s enthusiasm, his high-low take on streetwear sought to open up the rarefied world of fashion to kids like him who had historically been shut out of it, whether he was putting his stamp on Evian bottles, Ikea rugs, or £8,000 bags.
The scale of his impact on design can’t be measured in stuff, but Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first exhibition devoted purely to the late fashion designer’s whopping 20,000-item archive, demonstrates that he was as much a voracious collector of things – the titular codes – as he was a maker of it.
