Robin Givhan’s book charts Abloh’s rise and reign in the fashion world before his untimely death in 2021.
In March 2018, when Louis Vuitton named Virgil Abloh its first African American menswear artistic director, Robin Givhan, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, quipped that she hoped the storied French
Givhan posited then that Abloh’s experience and success helming his own brand (Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh), his relationships with celebrities, his time as a DJ and his “ability to distil pop culture, the zeitgeist, the aura of cool, the glamour of celebrity” would lead to success for Louis Vuitton.
She was right. Over the next three years, Abloh helped the brand connect with its evolving customer base and, in the process, cemented his place as an icon in fashion history. Though Abloh died young, at 41, of a rare cancer, his work and legacy remain.
Givhan’s new book, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh, grapples with this legacy, chronicling its subject’s life from his childhood in Rockford, Illinois, to his jet-setting and interning days with the controversial rapper Kanye West, to the memorial in Miami following Abloh’s death in 2021.
While the book centres on Abloh and his influence – the cover is a simple yet striking black-and-white photo of the designer – Make It Ours is more than a biography of Abloh’s rise and reign in the fashion world. Givhan deftly balances her intimate portrait of him with analysis of how the fashion industry has dealt with race and racism over the past century. She shows how Black men who have made it to the apex of fashion managed to do it.
In a world full of celebrity memoirs and biographies, Make It Ours stands out because of the sheer volume and quality of reporting it’s built on – from census data revealing the extent of segregation and disparities in Abloh’s hometown and how that shaped his decisions starting in childhood, to financial reports sent to investors from Givenchy in 2004, which showed how the house benefited from Black designer Ozwald Boateng’s first ready-to-wear men’s collection.
Perhaps the most rewarding part of Givhan’s strong reporting is her many interviews with Abloh’s bosses, peers, fans, friends and family. Conversations with the likes of Michael Burke, a top executive at LVMH, Louis Vuitton’s parent company, help readers understand how Abloh was perceived in rooms where the fashion world’s power lived. Similarly, her conversations with Abloh’s parents, Nee and Eunice, as well as his widow, Shannon, give a more intimate understanding of what drove Abloh from a young age and what he hoped for in his final moments.
From the start of the book, readers know that it ends with the death of the man at its heart and that his story cannot be told without confronting racism. As such, one might expect a heaviness to loom over the book, but Make It Ours has no shortage of delightful moments. Many of these come in the form of Givhan’s deep cultural memory and experience. Remember Lindsay Lohan’s unfortunate foray into fashion design with Ungaro in 2009? Or the NBA’s attempt to limit the influence of hip-hop on the sport? (“The league’s dress code was intended to cloak the players in White middle-class respectability,” Givhan writes, but it ultimately “transformed the corridors of sports arenas into catwalks and the players walking through them into fashion trendsetters.”)
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Advertise with NZME.Givhan cites interviews she’s done in recent years specifically for this book as well as her own columns throughout the decades. Reading Givhan is like going on a tour of Black fashion history with a local guide.
Where a less experienced writer might be tempted to focus only on the positive parts of their subject’s life, Givhan adds complexity by addressing the more controversial moments of Abloh’s life. In 2020, when protesters took to the street after the killing of George Floyd, Abloh found himself at the centre of a social media firestorm. After designer Sean Wotherspoon’s store in Chicago was looted, Abloh commented on an Instagram post, criticising those responsible for destroying the store. Givhan puts his property-focused response to the protests in broader context, writing, “Abloh wasn’t quite reaching back to an era of respectability politics, but he was making an abbreviated case for nuance, for working within a system rather than destroying it”.
Movingly, Givhan includes not just the names of Black male designers who came before Abloh, but a detailed recounting of their lives and experiences. “No one breaks barriers on their own,” she writes. “They’re aided by folks who put cracks in glass ceilings.” These predecessors include Willi Smith, who designed the suit Ed Schlossberg wore when he married Caroline Kennedy in 1986; Mississippi-born couturier Patrick Kelly, who moved to Paris and used his work to comment on Black history; and Edward Buchanan, who had to navigate racism in Italy from the moment he arrived as Bottega Veneta’s first-ever design director in 1996. These men’s work requires no validation, but in centring their stories, Givhan ensures that their influence in the canon of Black fashion history (and plain history) won’t be erased or whitewashed.
At a time when those in power, from the halls of Washington to the runways of Paris, often appear to regret embracing diversity in recent years, Givhan offers a much-needed dose of optimism. Make It Ours is a comprehensive telling of one man’s life and a celebration of Black tastemakers, designers and luxury. It is simply a triumph.
Tariro Mzezewa is a travel, culture and style writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Cut, Vogue and elsewhere.
