Abloh died last November after a private battle with cancer.
Virgil Abloh's widow, Shannon, is opening up about her family and her late husband, one year after the fashion designer's tragic death. Virgil died last November at age 41 following a two-year battle with cancer.
Marking her first interview, Shannon spoke with The New York Times about their private relationship and why she's largely remained out of the spotlight.
"It was never a thing that we discussed," Shannon shared. "It was just the way our relationship worked."
Family was important to the couple, with Shannon telling the outlet that she was "happy" to be the stable partner at home while Virgil built his fashion empire.
"We knew we wanted to build this close family, and we needed someone to be the stable partner," she said. "I was happy to do that."
Shannon and the Off-White founder share two children, daughter Lowe, 9, and son Grey, 6, whom she says his legacy belongs to.
"It belongs to me, it belongs to his children," Shannon maintained. "After his passing, so many people came up to me and said, 'Virgil was my best friend.' His best friend in the fashion industry, his best friend in the music world. A lot of his collaborators, or even people who maybe weren’t that close to him, feel 'I can do this to help his legacy, or I can do that to help his legacy.' It’s like this train that’s going 500 miles per hour, and I just thought: I have to stay on this train, because if I don’t, I don’t know where it’s going to go. That’s my place and my position."
Taking charge of her family's life and what the late designer left behind, Shannon started the Virgil Abloh Securities to unite his creative ventures, including Alaska Alaska, which is a creative studio in London, and a joint venture with Nike called Architecture, where she is chief executive.
Additionally, the mother of two is heading a four-day festival, organized by VA Securities and Nike, during Miami Art Week, designed to celebrate Virgil's life. It's something she hopes becomes an annual event.
While Virgil suffered from cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare heart cancer for over two years before his death, Shannon said the family held out hope that he'd beat the disease.
"It wasn’t like we knew that he was going to pass," Shannon said, adding that despite getting the diagnosis in July 2019, the couple chose to keep his illness secret from all but his closest friends. He didn’t want people to look at him and think, "Are you OK?"
She continued, "Even though we knew the challenge of what he was fighting, it went a lot faster than we thought it was going to. So we never had the 'this is the legacy that I want you to work toward' discussion. But because I was with him for so long, I knew every inch of him. I knew every inch of his brain."
The pair had been together since high school, meeting at a soccer game in their hometown of Rockford, Illinois, when she was 17 and Virgil was 18. From then on, the pair was inseparable, from their college years in Madison, Wisconsin, to days in Chicago when Virgil started working for Kanye West.
While she often flew around the world with him, supporting everything from his fashion shows to his DJ sets, the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be a special time for their family -- two and a half years they were able to have to themselves.
"I know that Covid was an incredibly hard thing for so many people," Shannon said. "But for us it was an amazing time because Virgil didn’t have to make excuses to get out of shows or D.J.-ing. No one could go anywhere. So we were able to have those last two and a half years."
As for what's next, John Hoke, the chief creative officer of Nike who worked with Virgil on their collaborations, told the New York Times that there's at least a year’s worth of Off-White x Nike products already in the pipeline.
And at Alaska Alaska, Shannon said there are "hundreds of projects that he worked on that he never put out" that she wants to help release as well.
In the end, Shannon said she wants their kids to see what their dad was able to do, and understand what their family was able to endure.
"I think that it’s important that my kids are able to see in 20 years what their dad was able to do and that Mom really stepped up," she stressed. "That through everything, through all the grief, she was able to pull it together and move forward."
For more on the late designer, check out the links below.
RELATED CONTENT:
