In the end, Mr. Lagerfeld’s most significant contribution to fashion was the way he changed everyone’s idea of what it meant to be a great designer, reshaping it in his image as a jack-of-all-brands, able to enter a heritage house and reinvent it with both a sense of history and a willingness to make it relevant for a new cultural moment. He was, as the influencer Bryan Yambao said, the pioneer of “the idea of the multitasking designer.” Mr. Abloh is broadening that, to be a jack-of-all-design. John Hoke, the chief design officer of Nike, also called him a “pioneer.”

Whether that becomes a new benchmark — whether Mr. Abloh really is, say, the Jeff Koons to Mr. Lagerfeld’s Warhol, as Mr. Tonchi posited — is still too early to say. Mr. Abloh has decades left to work. He may turn out to be a flash in the pan, someone who becomes a footnote in fashion history, rather than an era. It is not hard to imagine him leaving clothes behind and heading off into the pop culture-technology nexus.

In which case the final judgment may depend as much on how the world evolves as how his clothes evolve; whether we continue down the road of reality TV, of value systems shaped as much by convenience as closely held moral codes, of businesses run by likes and follower numbers as much as the desire to create something genuinely new — or change direction.

When people were trying to wriggle out of the comparison between Mr. Lagerfeld and Mr. Abloh in a diplomatic way, they often said, “fashion has changed so much, the world has changed” that they couldn’t possibly connect them.

That is true. Precisely because of that, though, Mr. Abloh may not be the Lagerfeld heir we want. But he may be the Lagerfeld heir we have made.