A Seventeen-Year-Old in Rockford“Everything I do is for the seventeen-year-old version of myself.” Abloh would repeat this sentence like a mantra. He measured his accomplishments against the dreams and passions of a teenager teetering on the cusp of adulthood. He tailored his creativity and messaging to the wonder and skepticism of adolescence.
Many designers have used childhood memories as a source of inspiration. The tale of having been infatuated watching their mother or aunt or older sister or best friend prepare for an outing is practically a cliché. It is a stock element in the origin story of almost every male designer—the way they came to understand fashion as a transformative endeavor. But rarely has a designer spoken of his own teenage self as the inspiration for his adult work.
“When I was starting, I was very much to the left. Formality was at the root of what high fashion was, and I said, to make a name for myself, I’m not going to wave a magic wand and speak from that perspective. I’m going to speak from the perspective of what I was as a seventeen-year-old kid and what I saw from these brands that I could relate to,” Abloh said. “Instead of making my career about myself or the industry, it’s permanently focused on the seventeen-year-old that will be in my seat next.”
For much of his professional life, Abloh engaged in a conversation with his younger self and with the youth around him. This was a sign of his enduring optimism. It was also his savvy understanding of the power of a rising consumer.
It was a sentiment that made sense for a man whose career success relied on an intimate understanding of the desires and anxieties of young men. It was a way of acknowledging his constant engagement with youth culture. And it was a way of exempting himself from the industry’s traditional expectations of luxury. He was talking to the teenagers, not the suits. Indeed, he often said he still felt like an adolescent even as he was moving into his forties.
Abloh, a tall, lanky teenager, grew up in Rockford, Illinois, at a time when it was undergoing racial upheaval, demographic shift, and political tumult. A tenacious soccer player, he was surrounded by mostly White and Latino teammates. He was someone with a sense of community and an attitude of generosity. He was a style-conscious teenager at a time when it was almost impossible not to be. Fashion’s creativity—Ralph Lauren, Stüssy, Tommy Hilfiger, Nautica, FUBU—was colliding with youth culture and social responsibility in a way that it had not since the 1960s. He was a kid from nowhere America learning about the wider world of style from glossy magazines published in Europe and Japan—precious analog commodities ordered from the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Rockford was not a hotbed of experimental art and fashion.
Instead, for a time, Rockford had the ignoble title of Screw City. From the first World War through the Cold War, the modest Rust Belt town led the way in the country’s production of screws and bolts. This gave Rockford bragging rights of a sort, along with a sturdy economy built on manufacturing. Rockford proudly made things—until making things was no longer valued.
The city’s modern-day population is about 146,120 a number that has fluctuated by only a few thousand over recent decades. Outsiders sometimes referred to Rockford as a suburb of Chicago. But that only served to rile up locals who saw a unique identity in their city that others could not. Geographically and temperamentally, Rockford is closer to Dubuque, Iowa, and Beloit, Wisconsin, than it is to Chicago, which is about ninety miles southeast. Rockford is part of a swing county of centrist voters. Chicago has practically defined Democratic machine politics. Chicago sits on the sparkling shores of Lake Michigan; Rockford is bisected by the meandering Rock River as it flows from Wisconsin into the muddy Mississippi. Abloh grew up on the thriving, prosperous side of the river that delineated the town’s demographics.
Rockford was settled in 1834, by a group of White New Englanders. Over the years, the city’s population grew thanks to a steady stream of Swedish immigrants, who were skilled woodworkers and furniture makers, as well as new arrivals from Ireland and Italy. These immigrants, most notably the Swedish, dominated the population and culture of Rockford and helped to transform it into an industrial center.
The first wave of Black residents arrived during the years surrounding World War I. Their increased numbers sparked tensions and violence from the many Italian and Irish residents whose animosity toward Blacks grew out of their own striving toward Whiteness and the privileges that accompanied a higher rung on the country’s racial hierarchy. Still, the number of Blacks remained relatively modest, and thus unthreatening, until the Great Migration in the middle of the twentieth century, when scores of African Americans streamed in from southern states in search of more personal freedom and the greater financial opportunities afforded by industrialization. Ultimately, these Black Americans came north to claim their place in the civic life of their country. By 1949,
Life magazine described Rockford as “nearly as typical of the U.S. as any city could be.”
Rockford thrived economically for decades, thanks to the manufacture of cars, paint, light industry, and all those screws and bolts. But eventually its fortunes turned, and it was plagued by many of the same economic and social ills—unemployment, gang violence, and drug addiction—that hollowed out so many cities and tormented so much of the Black population. In 1991, Rockford even had its own Do the Right Thing–style protest and scuffle between an Italian American business owner and his mostly Black customers. Joe’s Dariette, a walk-up ice-cream parlor in the southwest part of the city, was housed in a small cinder block building. It had been in the neighborhood since the 1940s, when Italian immigrants dominated the area. As the surrounding modest homes changed hands and the neighborhood filled with African Americans and Hispanics, these new residents put more pressure on the family-owned ice-cream shop to hire Black workers and contribute to local charities. The flap was eventually settled—and without a trash can being hurled through a window. But the protests at Joe’s Dariette would be memorialized in the historical record and the community’s psyche as emblematic of the city’s embedded racial tensions. Eventually, Black residents would grow to 21.8 percent of Rockford’s population—the largest minority group in a city that is 55.5 percent White and with a significant Hispanic community. Abloh was a Black kid growing up in a predominantly White city with an undercurrent of racial animus.
In appearance, Rockford could be almost any medium-size city in the Midwest that saw the energy drain out of its central business district and flow into outlying neighborhoods, where much of the White population fled. Rockford’s cityscape was dominated by brick commercial buildings and warehouses from the first half of the twentieth century, along with the earnest rehabbing and unimaginative landscaping efforts that epitomized the tail end of it. The downtown bore the marks of a shrinking industrial city, one trying desperately to reclaim its lost stature in a country whose manufacturing economy had shifted to an information one. From a bird’s-eye perch, the city’s core appeared to fade into a horizon of . . . nothing. It was as though Rockford proper simply dropped off a ledge along with the setting sun.
Over the years, the Rock River separated the city not only geographically but also economically and racially. It served as the dividing line between the more prosperous east and the struggling west. There were so many lessons within Rockford’s geography about disparities of opportunity. Rockford was both urban and rural. It was struggling and expanding. It was Black and White. It was multiethnic. It was tilted toward a future of exurbs and big box stores; it was mired in the past of segregation.
Most Black residents lived on the west side of the river. The houses there were modest; neighborhoods quickly evaporated into open fields; and the lack of commercial vitality was striking. Most of the city’s public housing was also built on the west side of the river; the impacts of crack cocaine and gang culture were felt most acutely in that part of town. “The west side was not considered a safe place,” said Deryk Hayes, who grew up in Rockford during the 1980s and ’90s, the same time as Abloh.
Hayes graduated from Auburn High School, a large public high school founded in 1960 on the west side of town. At Auburn, student achievement was often overshadowed by the surrounding community, with its boarded-up houses, overgrown lots, psychic struggles, and day-to-day perils. But for every educator who viewed teaching there as professional purgatory, there were others who aimed to instill pride and possibility in their students. Auburn housed programs for the performing arts and gifted students. Among its graduates, it lays claim to Michelle Williams, who found success as part of Destiny’s Child, and more recently basketball player Fred VanVleet.
Copyright © 2025 by Robin Givhan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
