Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker:
For the polymath, there is always a cardinal subject, a chief preoccupation around which all the other interests spin. For the fashion designer Virgil Abloh, the polymath of his cohort, who died on Sunday of a rare cardiac cancer, offensively too young, the center was architecture. He studied as an architect, and the training never really left him, even as he ventured into other arts. Abloh’s thinking was organizational, spatial, and mind-numbingly lofty. He longed to build an intricately structured life for his muse, the young Black man. Abloh designed not only this man’s clothing but also his shoes, the music he listened to in order to prime himself for the workday, the furniture he looked upon before leaving for said workday, the shiny vernacular he used in his speech, the high-concept museum exhibition at which he could practice this speech. At forty-one years old, Abloh already did all that, and so the question coursing through the minds of his mourners, whose lives had been quite literally stamped with the fruits of his imagination, is this: What was next?
more here.