Robin Givhan

Make It Ours is the best book on the luxury business since Teri Agins’ Hijacking the Runway

A remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race

Toggling between biography and cultural history, Givhan . . . offers an illuminating analysis of [Virgil] Abloh’s middle-class, first-generation American upbringing, one that suggests his quiet confidence and seeming unflappability were deliberately cultivated

Robin’s look into the life and work of the late, great, Virgil Abloh is thoughtful, intelligent, honest and masterfully crafted. Virgil’s freethinking and influence on the possibilities of what creativity can be was a tour de force.

Virgil was a rule breaker who always had his finger on the pulse, and Robin Givhan’s unique perspective and meticulous research expertly chronicles his unconventional path and meteoric rise in fashion. Thought-provoking, emotional, and illuminating, this book is a definite must-read!

Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

From Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan comes a groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry transformed our ideas about the connection between who we are and what we wear 
 
In 2018, shockwaves were sent around the fashion industry when Virgil Abloh was appointed the head of menswear for Louis Vuitton. Despite no formal training in pattern-making or tailoring, Abloh had become the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s 164-year history. 
 
Make It Ours tells the story of how that moment came to be and how Abloh came to symbolise and embody the industry’s way forward. Using Abloh’s surprising path to the top of the luxury establishment, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the cloistered, exclusive fashion world faced a revolution from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gate, and how a simple t-shirt came to hold as much cultural power as a haute couture gown. 
 
With unparalleled 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. This 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.

Robin Givhan

Praise for Make It Ours

Make It Ours is the best book on the luxury business since Teri Agins’ Hijacking the Runway

A remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race

Toggling between biography and cultural history, Givhan . . . offers an illuminating analysis of [Virgil] Abloh’s middle-class, first-generation American upbringing, one that suggests his quiet confidence and ...

Make It Ours is the best book on the luxury business since Teri Agins’ Hijacking the Runway

A remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race

Toggling between biography and cultural history, Givhan . . . offers an illuminating analysis of [Virgil] Abloh’s middle-class, first-generation American upbringing, one that suggests his quiet confidence and ...

Make It Ours is the best book on the luxury business since Teri Agins’ Hijacking the Runway

A remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race

Toggling between biography and cultural history, Givhan . . . offers an illuminating analysis of [Virgil] Abloh’s middle-class, first-generation American upbringing, one that suggests his quiet confidence and ...

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