‘Virgil Was Here’ – a Poignant Show Pays Tribute to the Designer

As the robin’s egg blue sky turned to deeper blue, then dove gray with streaks of darker clouds, the reprise show of Louis Vuitton’s men’s spring 2022 collection began — and what had been planned as an uplifting celebration turned into a tribute to the late designer Virgil Abloh, who died Sunday at age 41. “Oh boy — this is the hardest speech I have ever given,” Michael Burke, chairman and chief executive officer of Louis Vuitton, told the hushed crowd of about 1,500 people, who had taken ferries over from the mainland for a 30-minute ride to a wharf where the show was held (the celebrities arrived by chic gray speed boats with the LV logo and monogram stenciled on the side in blue along with the numbers 7.2, representing the repeat of Abloh’s seventh show for the brand). Burke emotionally talked of meeting Abloh with Kanye West in Tokyo when fashion designer and founder of A Bathing Ape Nigo introduced them; Burke then invited the two to intern at Fendi. Their relationship developed to the point where, by the time Abloh joined Burke at Vuitton, the CEO considered him “like a son” whose passion “was inconceivable to me….But know through

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