Of all the countless lines that Virgil Abloh repeated often enough to become an “Abloh-ism,” his idea that “everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself,” made clear how much thought and effort he put into fueling the creative ambitions of young people.
Enter “Abloh Air.” An extraordinary pilot program from the Virgil Abloh Foundation, Abloh Air was conceived to give 10 students with creative interests from underrepresented backgrounds in his hometown of Chicago the transformational opportunity to spend nine inspiring days in London and Paris. Flight 000, otherwise known as “the cohort,” departed on March 22 and returned on April 1. In that time, the trip functioned like a nonstop masterclass, a reality show (minus the scheming and elimination rounds!), and a teen tour. Just as Abloh was the ultimate multi-hyphenate, Abloh Air spanned design, fashion, art, architecture, music, and photography. And the itinerary of immersive activities was made even more impressive by the talents, thought leaders, and brands involved, all participating because of some connection back to Abloh.
The cohort spent their spring break in hands-on workshops: brand mood-boarding with Tremaine Emory of Denim Tears; music concepting with Benji B; making a fashion collection video with Ross Westland of Billionaire Boys Club and photographer Fabien Montique; logo designing with Alaska Alaska; learning creative direction from Metallic Inc; T-shirt printing with Pablo T-Shirt Factory and snowboarder Russell Winfield; and building chairs with the Max Lamb Studio. Different panel talks featured Martine Rose with Sami Janjer, Clint419, and Olivia Singer; Sir Jony Ive and the Royal College of Art’s Zowie Broach; Samuel Ross, Yi Ng, and Adrian Lahoud; and Nike Room 72 with Air Afrique, among others.
Site visits included the Louis Vuitton family home in Asnières, the Galérie Kreo manufacturing ateliers, and a sneak peek at a Gabriel Moses exhibition. There were tours of the Tate Modern, the Barbican, the Louvre, the Bourse de Commerce, and the Paris Saint Germain Stadium (where they left with custom jerseys). Requisite tourist attractions—double-decker buses, the Eiffel Tower, and a dinner cruise along the Seine—were included in the mix, as well as more local haunts such as Brick Lane, Les Puces (flea markets), and the Palais Royal Gardens. The days were packed and stacked; the access was amazing.
Before Aarion, Eric, Julian, Dereon, Marlon, Jalen, Jasmin, Jasir, Jailynn, and Moriah touched down in London—most of them traveling internationally for the first time—they had already linked up on three previous occasions in Chicago to discover the broader scope of Abloh Air, which includes monthly virtual meetings with a designated creative mentor (several from the names mentioned above) and will culminate with a graduation around the same time they graduate from high school. The Virgil Abloh Foundation will remain in their lives once they have headed off to college and university, too.
Abloh Air exists in part as a love story. Abloh met Shannon Sundberg at exactly the age of this cohort; he was a senior and she was a junior. They began dating in high school and never broke up, and went on to marry and have two kids, Grey and Lowe. One summer while Abloh was studying engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he took a solo trip to Paris. As he recounted, and as Shannon remembers, he stayed at hostels and spent his days walking and absorbing the city. When he returned, he told her, “I am going into the arts. My whole life has changed.”
We all know, at least in some sense or other, what came next: a staggering story of Black success in which Abloh represented not only our generation’s Renaissance Man but also a cultural innovator who used his many platforms to platform others. Following his death in 2021 from a rare cancer, Shannon established Virgil Abloh Securities to carry on his various business and creative projects with the Virgil Abloh Foundation functioning as the philanthropic arm. She remains CEO and works with executive director Dana Loatman and newly appointed chief creative officer Athiththan Selvendran. Anyone who was close with Abloh knows Athi as his longtime right-hand, rising from assistant to chief-of-staff and then to chief operating officer at VAS.
As the first initiative, Abloh Air has been two years in the making, beginning with a summit that Shannon organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (where Abloh’s “Figures of Speech” retrospective took place in 2019) to envision the mission of the Foundation. Friends, collaborators, and people from non-profits branched off and brainstormed, with one group jotting down a trip-slash-cultural exchange on a piece of paper. From the start, Align Social Impact played an essential role in building the infrastructure to arrive at this moment.
If you are wondering how the students were so fortunate, the selection process was rigorous: First they were nominated through local partner organizations (shout out to My Brother’s Keeper, The Gray Matter Experience, Chicago Scholars, Little Black Pearl Art & Design Academy, and Yollocalli Arts Reach/National Museum of Mexican Art). Then came the Zoom interviews with the Foundation board including a specific question about Virgil. “I paid very close attention to how they answered it, and whether they did research on him,” Shannon told me. “I just wanted them to be authentically inspired by him.”
During the kick-off reception in London, Shannon welcomed everyone, noting, “[Virgil] cared about opening doors. He cared about keeping them open and making the impossible possible. And so, when I look at all of our hosts and our mentors and our friends in this room, I see his spirit and I know that it’s still alive and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”
I began covering Off-White collections from the brand’s launch in 2014 and met Abloh slightly earlier when his Pyrex Vision graphic hoodies and T-shirts were generating serious heat. Over the years, as his collaborators expanded, so did his conception of creative community, which proved the main message of the Abloh Air experience. With one day in London and a few in Paris where I live, I drifted in and out of the activities, joining the ones where the cohort were in peek creation mode, harnessing their existing skills and developing new ones, plus some visits and talks. Even with my reduced itinerary, there was far too much material to include here. Rather than a play-by-play, let’s take a cue from V, as he is affectionately known, and call these impressions the Abloh Air “cheat codes.”
Tourist/Purist
This was a foundational Abloh concept about perspective: the enthusiast open to anything versus the expert with refined knowledge. The cohort and hosts were constantly demonstrating how this can really be a positive feedback loop, where, yes, the roles might seem obvious, but Benji B, Emory, and Westland all insisted they were the ones learning. At the campaign photo shoot, the group first considered a dark and moody concept until cohort-member Marlon proposed the idea of travel as reflection, which everyone got behind. “That’s one of the key things about travel—opening your eyes,” he said.
3% Rule Revisited
Another tenet that Abloh lived by—that an idea need only be changed by 3 percent to be original—applied across the experience. With Benji B at a music studio in South London, the cohort split into three groups to re-record the score of “Amen Break,” the fashion video for the Louis Vuitton men’s spring 2022 collection. The well-known British DJ and radio presenter, who described his time with Abloh as, “the most fun I have ever had in my life,” taught the students about the importance of non-attachment when working on these kinds of projects. Where he used “4th Chamber” by GZA for a key scene, they were trying out Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” or Madvillain’s “All Caps.” “The only thing that should ever exist is surrendering to the greatest idea,” he said.
Context is Everything
Just as Benji B pointed out that music can completely shape how people perceive a scene or situation, an encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain at the Tate Modern showed the students how a urinal can be repositioned as art—an idea that propelled Abloh throughout his career. As he said in his 2017 talk at Harvard, “I’m super obsessed with Duchamp; super obsessed with the readymade—with this idea that an artist overthought the game, understood the parameters, provided something provocative, something that became a launchpad for other forms of art.”
Owning You
The point of Abloh Air was not to birth a new generation of Virgils. Quite the opposite, in fact. This was an exercise in confidence building and the cultivation of individuality. For Align’s Sarah Acer, who was among the group accompanying the cohort, the transformation was remarkable—the students’ initial reserve giving way to an ease in being themselves within a group where everyone was supportive. Moriah, for instance, had considered modeling in Chicago; here, everyone encouraged her to be the main character in the photo shoot sporting a Billionaire Boys Club bomber jacket in deep blue. As Jailynn said, “If you don’t know who you are, no one is going to understand who you are, so I think it is beautiful when you know who you are completely.”
Making Things That Last
As the cohort made their way through the Louvre early Sunday morning, the wonder was palpable. Standing in front of Leonardo’s three paintings ahead of the Mona Lisa, Aarion said, “What’s interesting is how this has all survived so long. And it makes me think about whether my work is going to survive, going to be in a museum. It makes you think of the future… I want what I do to be tangible.”
“Fries” in Chicago, “chips” in London, “frites” in Paris
Cultural discoveries were both subtle and obvious. French may not have been their strong suit, but they showed openness to just about everything—especially the food. The cohort had meals at Soho House, Derrière, and Café Ruc, mainstays for people during fashion weeks. Shannon said this was essential. “I want to see them be in the same rooms that [Virgil] was in, and I want to see them break down the same doors that he did and be at those tables and have a show like he did in Paris, and just have all their friends around—it would just become a moment.”
Communication to Realization
Tremaine Emory guided the cohort through the research that goes into his Denim Tears collections before they got to work building their own mood-boards from magazines and art supplies. Upon reveal, some took a personal approach. Jalen manifested his goals and Dereon paid homage to his mother, while Marlon and Julian went in a visual direction and Aarion proposed the compelling concept of “A Man’s Garden.” As Emory gave his feedback, he noted how mood-boards serve as tools of communication. “The human mind is abstract and needs to communicate with someone who doesn’t have that idea. This will determine the level of work you get back.”
Brand Abloh Air
While Abloh Air has no official merch for the time being, at the opening reception a logo in the style of a sports team was printed on cocktail napkins and as decals, one of which Julian quickly added to his phone case. Notably, the cohort’s logo design workshop with Alaska Alaska in London and subsequent screen-printing at Pablo T-shirt factory in Paris provided glimmers of brand possibility as each student drew strong designs that ranged from Paris iconography to graffiti.
V stands for Love
“Virgil is the driving force; this is what he taught us to do,” said Athi Selvendran, who acted as the program’s de facto pilot, not only because he had been instrumental in the planning but also because he embraced a chief mentor role from one activity to the next. For Shannon, Abloh Air has allowed everyone who interacted with him to harness his energy. “It’s a way that I feel closer to him, honestly, I feel him in my home all the time. And I see him, my son looks so much like him, and he makes his facial expressions and Lowe has his hands and those types of things. But when I’m here, it’s a way that I feel closer to his work. That was such a big part of our life.” At the final workshop, Abloh Air’s resident photographer, Bogdan “Chilldays” Plakov, dialed up Abloh’s mother Eunice who was all smiles as everyone waved back.
Next Flight
Like any pilot program, much was being learned in real time. At the end of each day, the cohort provided their feedback as a “Daily Pulse,” covering everything from the guests to the meals, so that the VAF and the Align teams could come away with learnings for Flight 001, which is already underway with partners recommending a fresh batch of students. Meanwhile, the 000 cohort seemed supercharged, with what Selvendran called their “battery pack.” Eric and Jalen, who already collaborate, said they will be “off to the races” once home. “In my head, I always thought this was possible. But when you are seeing it, and you’re actually doing it, it’s absolutely possible. The thing is, with hard work, I feel like me and Eric always knew we could get there eventually,” said Jalen. “This is really us but it’s like a reassurance, helping us find our real passion. Some people don’t find that until later in life; the fact that we find that at 17 and 18 and then the fact that we’re the first cohort and this is how we are going to set the tone, I want to scale as a person and scale with the Foundation and come back and help the other kids. I could tell them, ‘I was in your shoes.’”
