Virgil Abloh is radically closed off about certain aspects of his life—being Kanye West’s creative director, for instance, the ﬁrst rule of which is never say anything about being Kanye West’s creative director—and radically transparent about others. He will give you his personal phone number. He will in fact give you his actual personal phone to hold, brieﬂy. Holding Virgil Abloh’s phone is like entering a dystopian hellscape where every possible alarm for every possible app—texts, e-mails, WhatsApp—is going off at once, all the time. I wonder how he sleeps. The answer, it turns out, is that he sort of doesn’t. Off-White, his fashion label, is based in Milan. Its only retail stores are in Hong Kong and Tokyo. (Next up? New York, Singapore, and Toronto.) Kanye, his constant collaborator, resides in Los Angeles. “I’m not on any real time zone,” Virgil says, sitting on a rooftop in the city where he actually lives, which is Chicago.

I can vouch for the time-zone thing. By this point I’d already seen him in New York, on the ﬂoor of Madison Square Garden, at the premiere of Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 collection and new album, The Life of Pablo. I’d met up with him in the lobby of his New York hotel the next day, where he drank two different-color juices while coordinating a Kanye West music video, an Off-White sneaker launch, and his new women’s line—which he was designing on the ﬂy, using an app on his phone. In the months that followed I’d tracked him, through his various social-media accounts, through DJ gigs at clubs in Miami and Korea and at his regular residency in Las Vegas. He sold T-shirts at a pop-up store in downtown Los Angeles and went to the Philippines with Kanye. In early June, a Virgil Instagram post—suggesting a surprise late-night Kanye show in New York that never actually happened—nearly caused a riot. And his clothes tend to show up even in the few places he doesn’t. Off-White’s designs—brash and loud and graphic, branded with black-and-white diagonal stripes you can recognize from 30 yards away—are everywhere. Gigi Hadid was photographed wearing a pair of distressed denim boots from Off-White’s collaboration with Doc Martens. Kendall Jenner was pictured wearing an Off-White shirt on Kylie Jenner’s Instagram. Right now, Virgil is ubiquitous with people who are ubiquitous.

At this point, Virgil's signature stripes are almost as recognizable as Rita Ora.

He’s perpetually got the distant disposition of a man who just ﬂew in from somewhere else, even if right now he’s on his second week at home. He stands tall and still in his uniform—black hoodie, ripped jeans, black sneakers. Maybe that’s your uniform, too, or some variant of it? If so, thank Virgil Abloh, who has spent the past ﬁve or so years developing, perfecting, and mainstreaming casual clothes in uncasual situations. It’s sort of his grand project: turning his own lifestyle—350 plane rides a year, major fashion line, DJ side hustle, full-time position in Kanye’s brain trust—into something bigger, something aspirational. A way of being creative and also moving product out the door while never putting on a suit, basically. At the moment, he’s in motion, as usual: We’re descending the elevator from the rooftop of Chicago’s Soho House, ﬂeeing all the other people who use “creative” as a noun, on our way to Volume Gallery, a design-centric space around the corner whose owner, Sam Vinz, is a friend of Virgil’s.

We arrive and look at the art, sorta. Mostly Virgil just talks. He says he’s having a “young-life crisis.” (He’s 35—old to still be medaling in the Cool Guy Olympics, though medal on he does. But now he also collects art. It’s a transitional time.) He shows Sam, an amiable guy in a white oxford, a series of photos of his newest furniture designs, which Sam nods at politely. Virgil’s got a way with a monologue, like Kanye, but without that manic edge. He still sounds like the chill, ambitious graduate student he used to be.

He mentions he’s teaching an online class on streetwear. The theme of the class, he says, is simple: “There was couture. And then there was Yves Saint Laurent. Like, ‘Hey, news ﬂash: No one wears these clothes.’ So here comes ready-to-wear. And now: streetwear.” These days a hoodie is pretty much the new suit jacket, he says. That’s what Off-White’s about.

“That shift in fashion? I’m pointing straight at that.”

Virgil often says the moment he realized he was ready to go into the industry was in 2012, when Balenciaga did a graphic T-shirt that superimposed the phrase JOIN A WEIRD TRIP over a screen-printed image of a sphinx—pure streetwear, with a high-fashion label stitched on. It was the type of thing, give or take the price point, Virgil had been making and wearing all his life.

He grew up middle-class in Rockford, Illinois, the son of Ghanaian immigrants who let him DJ on the weekends but also made sure he went not only to college (at the University of Wisconsin, where he got an engineering degree) but also to graduate school (at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied architecture—“I wanted to build skyscrapers because I ﬁgured if you could build the tallest building, you could design a spoon, you know?”). Virgil was young and already certiﬁed cool in Chicago at the exact moment Kanye was becoming Kanye; the day they started working together in 2003 was the day of Virgil’s ostensible graduation, when he skipped most of his own ﬁnal critique to take a meeting with Kanye’s then manager, John Monopoly. He offered his own good taste and a willingness to design merch; Kanye, perpetually drawn to people who know what he doesn’t, and who’d already met Virgil a few times around Chicago, put him on the payroll. Like the people who wear Off-White now, both Virgil and Kanye aspired to a cool they hadn’t quite attained yet. “There’s no line between a designer and consumer,” Virgil says today. “I’m also a consumer.”

His sales pitch these days is a love story. He likes to describe his target customers: the girl who wears Céline, the guy who wears Supreme, but they’re together, they share a closet, their high-low match mirrors Off-White’s vision of the world. Virgil, who collects Birkin bags and vintage streetwear, could easily be talking about himself. Virgil and his young-blood peers—Demna Gvasalia at Vetements and Balenciaga, Alessandro Michele at Gucci—are the product of a decade’s worth of collapsing distinctions between designer and consumer, fashion and streetwear. In Virgil’s own designs for Off-White is a pocket history of this whole movement—from his very ﬁrst “collection,” a series of dead-stock Rugby Ralph Lauren shirts that he bought up at discount, screen-printed the word PYREX on, and sold for $500; to the early Off-White clothes, graphic and logo-heavy; to his most recent output, which is subtler, more adult, while still having that slightly casual quality that distinguishes Off-White from its more august peers. “The graphic shirts from three years ago were loud,” Virgil says. “Now I make a high heel that’s nice, and the Off-White label inside [the shoe] gets at all the DJ shit, the black-kid-in-Chicago shit, all that.”