Veteran Fashion Journalist Robin Givhan's New Book Examines How Designer Virgil Abloh ‘Crafted A Career For The Ages'

Forbes

3 days ago

Robin Givhan
When Virgil Abloh died at just 41 years old in 2021, his passing sent shockwaves through the fashion industry—but it's his life, though far too short, that is the focus of veteran fashion journalist Robin Givhan's new book Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh.
Ultimately given the chance to only live half a life, Abloh did much with it: he opened the fashion label Off-White in 2013, and five years later was appointed artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection. He was a fashion designer, an entrepreneur, a trained architect, a husband, a father. He blended streetwear with luxury and was the first African-American artistic director for a French luxury fashion house—and also the first Black designer to serve as artistic director at Vuitton in the brand's 164-year history. Make It Ours—penned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Givhan—is certainly about Abloh, but it's about the cross-section of fashion and race, too, for starters. Abloh changed the way people thought about luxury, Givhan tells me on Zoom.
'Professionally, at his core, this was someone who had a really deeply rooted belief that he could move through and be successful in any space that he chose,' she says. 'And I think that is a really significant, amazing thing, because to me it suggests that you not only have confidence, but you also have this innate sense of optimism. You have a fundamental belief that there is some fairness in the world that you can tap into—that you are talented and that the specific talent that you have has a place, or you can make a place for it.'
Givhan started work on Make It Ours as 2022 merged into 2023, about a year after Abloh's death on November 28, 2021 from cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare type of cancer he'd been diagnosed with two years prior in 2019. Abloh opted to largely keep his diagnosis private, which led to the extra shock of his passing amongst the industry and culture at large.
The cover of Givhan's 'Make It Ours,' which comes out June 24.
The sheer interest in his career and how it came to be led Givhan to write the book. 'And that was so evident with his passing,' she says. 'I mean, he was so young.' Givhan wanted to dig into what Abloh had that others didn't. 'And the other reason is, honestly—because I think whenever, for me, whenever you are going to be essentially living with a subject for a long period of time, you want that person to be interesting,' she tells me. 'You want that person to make you curious.' Abloh fit that bill.
Givhan and Abloh's paths had crossed; kind is a word often used to describe Abloh, and Givhan calls a meeting of theirs, appropriately, 'one of the nicest encounters.' He was doing a virtual conversation with a group of scholars from the Fashion Scholarship Fund during the pandemic, and before the Zoom started and was opened up to all of the students, they had a moment together.
'And it was an interesting moment to have a conversation with him like that, in part because the industry was really struggling to kind of figure its way through COVID, and it was also interesting because he had just created this scholarship for students—and it was, unbeknownst to me, really something that was so, so much a part of what he had always wanted to do,' Givhan says. 'I was so surprised to see that, even as early as 2008, he was talking about wanting to mentor, which is really, to me, quite surprising. And definitely his optimism came through—the grace and diplomacy with which he's dealt with issues related to racial equity and inequity.'
Givhan won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2006—the first time the award was given to a fashion writer. True to her reputation as a, if not the, forefront fashion critic, Givhan wasn't always a fan of Abloh's work during his career. 'I was not a huge fan of his women's collection [at Off-White],' she tells me. I often was extremely critical of it. And at the same time, I recognized the esteem with which so many people held him. So I was interested in exploring that tension.' (Later in the conversation, when I ask her about a wobble in his career, she explains, 'I think he was at his best when he was creating clothes for men. I think he was the most creative when he was doing that.')
Virgil Abloh attends "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & the Catholic Imagination," the 2018 Costume ... More Institute Benefit at Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 7, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by)
Abloh stepped forward as a ringleader, 'but that singular voice is really created by a lot of other voices,' Givhan says. 'And I think Virgil was really into this idea that he was speaking for a group—that he wasn't just speaking for himself. And I think that also was really kind of smart marketing, to a great degree, because what that meant was he had the ability to say that 'This isn't me talking—this is the whole generation. This is a group of people. I'm just the messenger.'' So, yes, Abloh is dissected in her new book, out June 24—but so is the bigger picture.
'He also had this real understanding that not only do people want to see themselves and their point of view reflected in fashion—particularly in the world of aspirational fashion—but they want that point of view to be deemed important,' Givhan says. 'They want it to feel substantial and weighty and not just like people are giving lip service to the point of view, but that they're deeply considering it.'
Givhan calls Abloh a 'designer as DJ'—'someone who was sampling and remixing, but wasn't actually writing music,' she says. Timing worked in his favor; he stepped into the spotlight, she says, when questions about diversity, race and equity were at the forefront of people's minds. 'He had a temperament that was particularly suited during a period that was particularly fraught,' Givhan explains. 'That temperament was tested when people started protesting and marching in the streets and lost patience for people who were calling for restraint. But I still think about how so many people would say as their first description of Virgil just how nice he was, how genius he was. I've heard that over and over and over again—how easy he was to talk to. And some of that was personality, some of that was environment, and some of that was also really just savvy interpersonal skills.'
Virgil Abloh after the Undercover show during Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2017/2018, ... More on March 3, 2017 in Paris, France. (Photo by)
Juxtaposed with Abloh's close friend Kanye West—someone who, while 'supremely talented,' Givhan says, was also someone who would 'go into these spaces and be angry and hold a grudge. And that is not to say that sometimes that anger wasn't righteous, and sometimes those grudges weren't deserved. But I think Virgil understood that there were some things that were not worth his energy, and that expending energy on the thing over there was going to prevent him from being able to get ahead and do the thing over there on the other side that he really wanted to do. And that's a particular temperament—the ability to be restrained, but also the confidence to know that your restraint is in no way giving in.'
Abloh and West were, in Givhan's words, 'young-ish' when they started their journey in Chicago, Abloh into fashion, West into music (and, later, fashion). 'Kanye was the one who had the greater success, the name recognition,' Givhan says. 'And I really marveled at Kanye's breathtaking ambition and the degree to which that energized the people around him. And that to me is—that's quite a gift I think, to be around someone who not only is just sort of wildly ambitious, but ambitious and in a sort of breathless scope of things kind of vision. And that was, in many ways, contagious.'
Their friendship opened doors for Abloh, Givhan says: 'Even if they were sitting on the floor in the back of a [fashion] show, they were in the room,' she says. 'A lot of people can't even get in the room.'
Kanye West and Virgil Abloh after the Louis Vuitton Menswear Spring/Summer 2019 show as part of ... More Paris Fashion Week on June 21, 2018 in Paris, France. (Photo by Bertrand)
Though West may have opened doors, it was Abloh—and his talent—that walked through them. He had a point of view, and, in Givhan's words from the book, 'crafted a career for the ages' and 'broke into the popular consciousness in a way that other Black designers before him did not.' He was 'the right man for the times,' she added. In Abloh's own words, 'Life is so short that you can't waste even a day subscribing to what someone thinks you can do, versus knowing what you can do.'
'I often feel like when people do die at a particularly young age, in hindsight, it does feel like they were living with an urgency—as if they knew that they had to cram in as much as possible,' Givhan says. 'And so I don't know if there is this kind of thing that's deep in your DNA that dictates how quickly you feel you need to move through life, but I will say that one of the things that allowed him to move that quickly and to do so much was his feeling that everything didn't have to be perfect. I mean, he was the exact opposite of a perfectionist. It wasn't that he was doing things willy-nilly or half-assing it, but he felt like everything was a process that was getting him close to some end, but that he was really focused.'
Abloh used social media 'in a very intimate way'—so much so that the masses felt like they knew him. 'I don't want to give the impression that I think Virgil was like this fashion God or anything, but I will say that one of the things that he did that is really different from most other designers was the degree to which he allowed himself to remain accessible through social media,' Givhan says. But he decided to keep his illness private, and his death felt deeply sudden. 'People were shocked, and obviously there was a lot of sadness,' Givhan says of his death. 'And what I really remember is the way that the broader culture responded, because I was honestly surprised by the number of people who knew his name and knew that he designed for Vuitton.' The world knows the name of longstanding houses like Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Dior. But, be it because of his social media presence, talent, groundbreaking firsts or a combination thereof, the world knew Virgil Abloh, too. And it mourned him.
Abloh, always more interested in the journey than the destination, carved his own path. He didn't do it the traditional, accepted way. He did it his way.
Virgil Abloh attends Belvedere Vodka party at Capitol Cinema on May 10, 2018 in Madrid, Spain. ... More (Photo by Juan)
'I think and I hope that we'll continue to see it with rising generations of designers who feel like there's a pathway for them to get into the fashion industry now that Virgil has shown that you don't have to have checked all of these particular boxes about 'the right design school' or 'the right apprenticeship'—that there are other ways into the industry,' Givhan says.
Though the fashion industry and the world at large lost Abloh far too soon, that, among many other touchpoints—the courage and confidence to do it one's own way, and not take the prescribed path—will keep Abloh alive, his legacy still felt in fashion, his fingerprints still evident, long after his passing. Over three years on, Abloh's presence still reverberates—with no end in sight.