“Nothing you learn is actually useless,” said Virgil Abloh ’03, speaking to UW–Madison students in 2015. The fashion designer and entrepreneur had studied engineering at the UW, and though he didn’t end up building bridges or designing computer systems, he found a lot to use in what he learned.
“I use my engineering degree all the time,” he said. “That’s where I learned to multitask.”
Abloh was a rising star in the fashion world before his untimely death in 2021, and now a piece of his UW history — and his sense of style — is available for purchase. In July 2026, Sotheby’s USA is auctioning off a series of screenprints made from a UW T-shirt Abloh designed in 2015. The Virgil Abloh Foundation has dedicated proceeds from the auction to support scholarships at the University of Wisconsin, naming UW–Madison its inaugural Youth Impact Partner.
“Any [UW] alumni or any human being who’s interested in supporting education should really try and collect this very seminal piece,” says art professor Faisal Abdu’Allah, who helped create the prints.
Long before he became the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear division in 2018, Abloh was recognized within the fashion industry. In 2012, he founded the streetwear label Pyrex Vision, which the next year became Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh. In 2015, the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (WFAA) asked Abloh to design a special edition of its Red Shirt™, a T-shirt that releases a new design each year as a fundraiser for scholarships. Abloh created a series of designs, and when Abdu’Allah heard about them, he had the idea of turning them into screenprints.
“I knew he had a history of working in print,” Abdu’Allah says, “so I said, if he’s going to design the T-shirt as a fundraiser, then why don’t we do a screen print?”
Abdu’Allah didn’t have a history in fashion; rather, his background was in art. He’d been an artist-in-residence at UW–Madison in 2013, and he joined the faculty full time in 2014. When Abdu’Allah heard that Abloh was returning to campus to give a speech in October 2015, he quickly put a plan together. He worked with student Aaron David ’16 to make sample prints to show to Abloh.
“We made two or three, and then we showed them to him,” says Abdu’Allah. “He said they look incredible: ‘Let’s run the edition!’ We made a full run, and then he came in and signed every print.”
The prints then went into storage for more than a decade. Abloh’s career went from success to success, and he rose in prominence. He made designs for Nike and IKEA, and his Off-White label saw mainstream success. He used his increasing fame to draw attention to issues that he saw as important, including raising more than $1 million for scholarships.
“I now have a platform to change the industry,” he told GQ in 2018. “We’re designers, so we can start a trend, we can highlight issues, we can make a lot of people focus on something or we can cause a lot of people to focus on ourselves … I’m interested in using my platform as one of a very small group of African-American males to design [for a fashion] house, to sort of show people in a poetic way.”
But in 2019, Abloh was diagnosed with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer. He died in November 2021 at the age of 41.
For the five years following Abloh’s death, Abdu’Allah continued to wonder what to do with the prints of Abloh’s Red Shirt design. In 2026, the Virgil Abloh Foundation offered to have the prints auctioned by Sotheby’s USA to help fund further scholarships. That auction is scheduled to run in the first half of July.
To learn more about the scholarship program, contact Meg Sensenbrenner at WFAA.
