TIME Magazine Name Virgil Abloh one of the World's Most Influential People

Continuing what is already shaping up to be his most important year to date, Virgil Abloh has been announced as one of TIME Magazines top 100 most influential people on the planet for 2018.

Following on from his recent appointment as creative director at Louis Vuitton menswear - an important milestone for people-of-colour on the global design scene - TIME further cements Virgil's position as a multi-hyphenate cultural icon at the very cutting edge of shaping contemporary culture.

Following their recent art-show collaboration, TIME tapped Takashi Murakami to write Abloh's entry for the list. Read what Murakami had to say about the OFF-WHITE founder below:

"A little over 10 years ago, Virgil Abloh, relatively fresh out of graduate school, visited my office in Tokyo while working with Kanye West. I had no way of recognizing the shy youth’s talents that were to blossom in the years to come.

Fast-forward to June 2017. Virgil visited my exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago the day before it opened and told me how he had been inspired by my multicolour monogram collaboration with Louis Vuitton. I proposed a collaboration between us, and we quickly realized our art exhibition at Gagosian London. Through our collaborative and creative process, I came to know the nobility of his character. Every­thing from the way he works to how he uses his time to how he makes his judgments is principled. The foundation of his value, or branding, is humanity itself, not a superficial trick.

Kids’ fervour for the stripe patterns and arrow marks he created for his fashion label, Off-White, is not a passing trend; rather, it shows how Virgil’s young followers, with their unclouded eyes, have been seeing right into the core of his creativity all along. With his appointment as artistic director for Louis Vuitton’s menswear, his full merit will be understood even more widely around the globe."

- Takashi Murakami