25 Most Intriguing Chicagoans: Virgil Abloh

DESIGNER. ENTREPRENEUR. DJ. ARCHITECT.

The sprawling, eminently Instagrammable Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech at the Museum of Contemporary Art was billed as the third and final element of a triptych that included shows on David Bowie and Takashi Murakami. The former was a boisterous elegy for an innovative and edgy pop chameleon; the latter was an eye-popping display of a prolific colorist at the height of his global, midcareer powers. The Abloh show was something quite different, showcasing a very new sort of artist—one even more comfortable with commerce than his brethren; one whose readymades arrived with quotation marks attached. Indeed, the Abloh show was not so much a gathering as an image spliced out of a fast- moving film whose plot is not yet clear—and certainly won’t be linear. Friend of Kanye, Rockford kid raised by Ghanian immigrants, CEO, IIT-trained architect and—wait for it—artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear line, Abloh might produce work from any one of those positions or from all of them at once. Like the bustling crowds who are still flocking in to the MCA show closing Sept. 22, we can’t wait to see what happens next.