A groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry embodied the cultural sea change transforming our ideas about the relationship between who we are and what we wear-from Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan.
Make It Ours is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury. Virgil Abloh's appointment as head of menswear for Louis Vuitton in 2018 shocked the fashion industry, as he became the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand's 164-year history. But as Robin Givhan reveals, Abloh's story encompasses so much more than his own journey.
Using Abloh's surprising path to the top of the fashion world, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the cloistered, exclusive fashion world faced a sea change from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gates-how their notions of what was luxury simultaneously anticipated and upended consumer preferences, and how a simple t-shirt held as much cultural power as a haute couture gown. As Givhan relays, Abloh rose during a time of existential angst for a fashion industry trying to make sense of its responsibilities to a diverse audience and the challenges of selling status to a generation of consumers who fetishized sneakers and prioritized comfort. The story of how that moment came to be, and how someone like Abloh-who had no formal training in pattern making or tailoring-could come to symbolize and embody the industry's way, is the story at the heart of this book.
With access to Abloh's family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng to Abloh's mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan weaves a spellbinding tale of a young man's rise amidst a cultural moment that would upend a century's worth of ideas about luxury and taste. Robin Givhan is Washington Post's senior critic-at-large, writing about politics, race, and the arts. Previously, she covered the fashion industry as a business, as a cultural institution, and as pure pleasure. She is the Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism and author of The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History. In addition to the Post, where she has also covered Michelle Obama, Givhan has worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue, and the Detroit Free Press.
