“It’s going to happen the way he wanted it to happen, or it’s not going to happen at all,” said Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, who planned Mr. Abloh’s exhibition with him and then worked with Ms. Abloh after his death. But, Mr. Burke said, she’s “not Yoko Ono.” Ms. Haley just calls her very “loyal.”
Ms. Abloh has mostly stepped away from Off-White, which is being led by Ibrahim Kamara. Though Mr. Abloh was perhaps most famous because of his work in fashion, he didn’t really think of himself as a designer. (He famously called himself a “maker.”) Design was just a means to an end, which had to do with visibility and representation — the idea that nothing was off limits to a creative mind, no matter where that mind came from, not commercial icons like Coke or Ikea or artists like Takashi Murakami or even the Chicago skyline. That was the crux of his art, and that is what Ms. Abloh sees as the essence of the Virgil Abloh Foundation.
“He didn’t want to be the only Black man in the room sitting at the table,” she said. He wanted not just to model a future for “kids that didn’t know they could be an architect, or the designer of Vuitton instead of a basketball player or a football player,” she said, but also to help make that happen. So while he may have been the first, he won’t ever be the last. “That’s what the foundation will focus on: 12- to 17-year-olds, to give them the portfolios they need. I know what he would want, and I feel just as strongly as he did about it — even though I’m a white female.”
She talks regularly to a therapist who was also Mr. Abloh’s therapist and who, she said, “knows how he thought,” and she is building a house. The house her family lives in now “has beautiful memories,” she said, “but it has a lot of sad memories, too.”
In the Mercer, Ms. Abloh was changing into a black Off-White dress for the CFDA gala. Later she would be hugged by Kim Kardashian, who was also getting an award, and the designer Jerry Lorenzo, who had worked with Mr. Abloh when they were starting out with Mr. West. She would get on a plane the next morning at 9 so she would be home when her children got back from school. She was looking forward to Miami.
