Given the vast creative ground Virgil Abloh covered when he was alive, the world certainly won’t lack for landmarks to revisit, be it the relevance he injected into Louis Vuitton or his label Off-White’s clever brand of provocation. For Nike alone, the designer was extremely prolific; an endless font of sketches and ideas from which the company can draw from for years to come. 
Commemorating the milestones of a luminary is certainly posthumous par for the course. But like the designer himself, his wife Shannon has grander plans. 
“He didn’t want to be the only Black man in the room sitting at the table,” Shannon Abloh recently told the New York Times, which published a profile on the widow. As vividly as racial politics stood out in Abloh’s work (“I Support Young Black Businesses” emblazoned on Off-White sweatshirts, for example), wife Shannon stands steely in furthering the cause. 
Upon the designer’s passing, Shannon founded the Virgil Abloh Foundation. Its focus: give student minorities greater opportunity, helping build the portfolios of 12- to 17-year-olds. In honing the most effective way to do this, Shannon is gathering her late husband’s closest collaborators for a monumental brainstorm in 2023.
The conference is groundwork for what she envisions as a 50-year plan. It’s an appropriate time given the copious mines and stockpiles of designs, pending projects, and collaborations Virgil Abloh let flourish around him. For this purpose, Shannon founded Virgil Abloh Securities, a creative corporation that cultivates and open-sources the designer’s work. 
Shannon is also in the process of assembling an archive. It’s a Sisyphean task, but necessary to remind the world how dynamic creativity can be, never limited to just one sphere. Seen together, Virgil Abloh Foundation and Virgil Abloh Securities are proof that a creative legacy doesn’t rely on one man’s life—or one Black man sitting at the table. It lives, breathes, and thrives with the people who are moved to turn their dreams into designs and are welcome to show the world. 
Read more about Shannon Abloh’s plans via the New York Times. Or explore a legacy that includes Off-White’s Philippine presence at 8 Rockwell.