Virgil Abloh‘s cover for rapper Pop Smoke‘s posthumous album has been changed, after fans slammed the “lazy” artwork online.
The 39-year-old artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear collection unveiled the cover, a grayscale picture of Pop Smoke surrounded by metallic roses and barbed wire, in a since-deleted Instagram post on Monday.
Captioning the snap, Abloh wrote: “the last conversation i had with @realpopsmoke was about what we were gonna do in the future. this album cover was one of like 5 things we talked about. He mentioned his story felt like the metaphor of a rose & thorns growing from the concrete of his hood in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
“In your memory, I just finished it yesterday. As evidence of the whole idea, the t-shirt insinuates it’s mandatory we put an and [sic] to this cycle of violence that plagues us, we need to shoot for the moon & aim for the stars.”
But many fans of the 20-year-old rapper, who was shot and killed in L.A. in February, were quick to criticize the image.
“This is lazy. Pop Smoke deserves better,” on Twitter user wrote.
Minutes later, a petition was created on Change.org to get the artwork changed, with the description reading: “Virgil deada** was wild lazy with Pop Smokes Album cover and he needs to fix it.”
Heeding the backlash, Steven Victor, the head of the Victor Victor Worldwide label that signed Smoke, tweeted that the album cover would be changed and will be ready for the July 3 release of his album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon.
“HEARD YOU,” he tweeted. “MAKING A CHANGE. POP WOULD LISTEN TO HIS FANS!”
