Latest news with #RobinGivhan
Washington Post
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Fashion icon Virgil Abloh gets the bio he deserves in ‘Make It Ours'
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 fashion house would have 'ample security when he debuts his first collection in Paris in June,' since his 'legion' of 'hyper-energized, emotive' fans would vie to get close to him.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Q&A: Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan chronicles Virgil Abloh's rise to fashion fame
NEW YORK — With his calm and cool demeanor, fashion disruptor and multi-hyphenate Virgil Abloh artfully challenged the fashion industry's traditions to leave his mark as a Black creative, despite his short-lived career. In the years since his 2021 death at just 41, his vision and image still linger. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robin Givhan sheds new light on how Abloh ascended the ranks of one of the top luxury fashion houses and captivated the masses with her latest book, 'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh.'
Forbes
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Veteran Fashion Journalist Robin Givhan's New Book Examines How Designer Virgil Abloh ‘Crafted A Career For The Ages'
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.
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
First, Virgil Abloh changed Nike. Then he came for luxury fashion.
Adapted from 'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh,' ©2025 by Robin Givhan. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. As a teenager in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh saved his pennies and bought his first pair of Nike Air Jordans from a Marshalls discount department store.
Washington Post
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Reader critiques: The Post is doing Trump's work for him
Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers' grievances — pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week's Free for All letters. On March 26, Robin Givhan's writing shone brighter than President Donald Trump's tacky ormolu in her The Critique column, 'The swift and petulant gilding of Trump's Oval Office.' From the overly shiny coffee table (in which Trump can see his 'beautiful' image) to the atrociously vulgar ormolu smacked onto the marble fireplace, to the gilded side tables and stacked, gilt-framed portraits (hung in a way reminiscent of the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, as was de rigueur in the fin-de-siècle era, when robber barons ruled), to his mug shot hung with pride in the hall adjoining the Oval Office, and the glitzy trophies and memorabilia strewn about, it is as if some cheap, gilt-spewing ogre vomited all over the Oval Office. Givhan has given us a keen analysis of this cultural upchuck, which reflects not just poor taste but the wholesale destruction of honored American traditions. One look at how the would-be king has marked his territory in his throne room/man cave tells us we are in deep trouble. Claire Tieder, Charlottesville I am disappointed that The Post and Robin Givhan (whose writing I admire even when I do not agree with her positions) dedicated so much ink and space to matters as trivial as the ornaments on the mantel of the Oval Office and the president's preferred font. When I look at the photos accompanying Givhan's column, my eyes are drawn to the paintings of former presidents, not the knickknacks that nobody visiting the Oval Office is liable to notice, much less linger over. Declaring war on knickknacks will not be a winning strategy for those who would like to see a different occupant of the White House. Malcolm O'Hagan, Chevy Chase The Oval Office now looks like a madam's waiting room. President Donald Trump obviously agrees with Oscar Wilde: 'Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.' Lesley Donovan, Long Beach, California A common error people make when writing or speaking about Muppet performers is saying they are 'the voice' of a puppet. The March 27 Metro article 'Terrapins secure amphibian for speech' said Kermit the Frog has been 'voiced' by Jim Henson and Matt Vogel. But puppeteers do much more than just the voice. They move the arms, legs and head of the puppet to emote all kinds of expressions. Puppeteers make foam and fabric come alive. The Muppets aren't cartoon characters that require just a voice. Please give Muppet performers the respect they're due in future articles. Katy McCracken, Herndon Sally Jenkins's great March 21 Sports column, 'For a young Navratilova, Voice of America a beacon,' about Martina Navratilova and her family stealthily listening to Voice of America when she was very young, took me back to my first year working for VOA. As a new member of the sports department, I was assigned to interview and write about a Czech defector trying out for the 1984 U.S. Olympic rowing and canoeing team. The trials for the Los Angeles Games were held on the Potomac River. I can't recall his name, but I'll never forget when he told me how he, his family and other families huddled around a shortwave radio in a secure basement to listen illegally to VOA broadcasts to get the truth of what was going on in and outside their country. He called VOA their 'lifeline' — the same word Jenkins said Navratilova used. It deeply saddens me to think how, because of the recent shuttering of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, people around the world who relied on VOA are now confronted with dead air. Parke Brewer, Silver Spring The writer is a former sports editor for Voice of America. There is an incredible amount of fear in the nation and around the world as a result of the Trump administration's unprecedented attempts to subvert the Constitution and many of our democratic norms. The Post should not be feeding this fear unnecessarily by running such uncritical headlines as 'Trump signs executive order requiring proof of citizenship in federal elections,' from March 25. This executive order mandating that people provide documents proving they are citizens when they register to vote is illegal, as the article acknowledged. So why wasn't that caveat in the headline? Please use your platform responsibly by raising alarm where it's warranted, and keep fear to a minimum by calling this administration's countless bluffs. Charles Lusher, Los Angeles The Post should stop using the term 'mass deportation' to describe the Trump administration's actions regarding immigrants being removed from our country, as it did in the March 23 front-page article 'IRS on verge of migrant data deal.' The term is a political talking point used to falsely suggest that the administration's actions are effective, aggressive and novel. However, credible independent sources have reported that deportations have actually decreased since President Donald Trump took office. By repeatedly using 'mass deportation,' The Post is falsely suggesting that Trump is fulfilling one of his most well-known campaign promises, when his actions, which demonstrate incompetence and legal heedlessness, do not match the description. Trump would like people to think mass deportations are happening. The Post should not do his bidding. Peter Dorfman, Belmont, Massachusetts Regarding the March 23 obituary 'Reagan speechwriter coined notable lines like 'evil empire'' and the news article 'Putin commissioned a 'beautiful portrait' of Trump, U.S. envoy says': By a happy coincidence, the obituary for Reagan speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan appeared on the same day as an article about a portrait Vladimir Putin commissioned for Donald Trump. Dolan crafted some of Ronald Reagan's most famous words, including 'evil empire' to describe the Soviet Union. Those words spoke truth to power, made Reagan a hero to people in the captive Soviet republics and became an enduring part of the president's legacy. With his forthright truth-telling, Dolan etched his own name in the history books. By contrast, consider the words of Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff, who has engaged Putin about his war against Ukraine. Witkoff recently lauded Putin for gifting Trump a 'beautiful portrait' of the American president and praying for 'his friend' when Trump was shot. Witkoff stated, 'I don't regard Putin as a bad guy.' Apparently, Putin is unaware of Russian troops' rape and murder of Ukrainian civilians, bombing of hospitals and executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war. If only the pious autocrat weren't in the dark, he surely would put an immediate halt to these atrocities. The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against the 'not a bad guy' for kidnapping Ukrainian children is all a big misunderstanding. Diplomats, as the saying goes, are paid to lie for their country. But fibbing is not the same as uttering an odious lie. In practicing the latter, Witkoff debases himself and precludes any positive mention of his own name in the history books. Meanwhile, Putin and his associates must be snickering about Witkoff's praise and congratulating themselves for how easy it has been to manipulate the Trump administration with nonsense about prayers and friendship. We can only hope that Trump recognizes sooner than later that he is being played, and thereby humiliated. Victor Nakas, Towson On March 22, for the first time since I started reading Marc A. Thiessen's commentaries in The Post, my reaction was 'What a great column!' 'My half-million miles as a hockey dad' was warm, loving and full of human interest, proving that Thiessen is a mensch after all. His previous contributions to The Post demonstrated that he was a MAGA man, which meant that nothing he said resonated with me and I wondered why The Post continued subjecting me to him. This column almost made up for all of that. Bravo (for once), Mr. Thiessen! Harris Factor, Columbia The March 22 front-page article 'Brazil's nationalist flight of fancy?' reported that American schoolchildren are taught that the Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903 but 'Brazilians hear a different story: that the true inventor of the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont.' Is 'true inventor' an accurate or important way to identify either the Wright brothers or Santos Dumont? I had never heard of Santos Dumont, but I now see that he was an outstanding aviation engineer and he certainly got his machine to fly. Also, I don't see any evidence that his success was related to or dependent upon the Wright brothers' feat. So, I am reminded of a question a high school student once asked me: 'Who invented shoes?' We had been discussing 19th-century American inventions, and that question made us all, teacher and students, realize that many 'inventions' have many inventors. What's the point of worrying about 'first' or 'true' inventors? What's all the fuss concerning aviation? It appears the airplane was independently invented at least twice. Lynn Kearney, Arlington The question should not be who invented the airplane. That was clearly the Wright brothers. The question should be who was first to achieve sustained, powered, navigable flight. That, just as clearly, was Alberto Santos Dumont in his No. 6 dirigible. As mentioned, the Wright brothers' first successful flights took place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903. However, their best flight that day lasted less than a minute, reached a meager altitude of 10 feet, could fly only in a straight line while covering just 852 feet, and ended in a crash. This is not a good example of sustained, powered, navigable flight. On the other hand, Brazil's 'le petit Santos,' as the French called him, flew a seven-mile round trip from the Parc de Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back at an altitude of roughly 1,300 feet in his No. 6 dirigible in slightly under 30 minutes. Now that is an excellent example of sustained, powered, navigable flight, which Santos Dumont achieved on Oct. 19, 1901. His flight was also witnessed by accredited aviation officials. The same cannot be said for the famously secretive Wright brothers. Brazilians still have every reason to be proud of their native son. John J. Geoghegan, Novato, California In Lewis Carroll's poem 'The Hunting of the Snark,' what the Bellman says three times must be true. Journalism should aspire to a higher standard. Articles in The Post repeatedly assert that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty requires the United States to defend any NATO member from attack. The March 23 front-page article 'As tensions rise on a melting map, Greenland's world stature grows' was illustrative: 'Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty ... which holds that an attack on one is an attack on all, the U.S. is bound to protect Greenland.' Don't overlook that Article 11 declares that signatory nations shall respond according to their constitutional processes. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, relying on the testimony of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, made clear in a report before the Senate ratified the treaty that it left to Congress the decision of whether the United States should resort to war to defend a NATO member: The 'question was repeatedly asked' whether the United States was 'obligated to react to an attack on Paris or Copenhagen in the same way it would react to an attack on New York City? In such an event does the treaty give the President the power to take any action, without specific congressional authorization, which he could not take in the absence of the treaty? The answer to both these questions is 'No.'' War is too important for journalistic oversimplification. Bruce Fein, Washington The writer was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. I have abandoned my shortsighted liberal-lefty knee-jerk mindset and am now wholeheartedly in favor of President Donald Trump's plan to acquire a lot of territory. This would include Canada, Greenland and Panama. But we should not stop there. We also must have Iceland, Bermuda and Cuba to protect our national security. Haiti we can skip for now. So, with Canada's 10 provinces, plus Panama, Greenland, Cuba, Iceland and Bermuda, we'll have 15 new states and 16 if Canada's three territories become one state. But like the other territories the United States has acquired (Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, New Mexico, etc.), these new ones must have full representation in Congress. That will mean 32 new senators and I can't count how many new members of the House of Representatives — but a lot. A final point: To be scrupulously fair, we should buy these territories (like we did Alaska) at fair market value. This would add to the national debt. But the new products we could export (such as Cuban cigars) would be well worth it. Christopher Harris, Gallatin Gateway, Montana I wish Drew Goins's March 26 op-ed, 'Team Trump's Greenland invasion group chat,' had come with a trigger warning. A part of me registered that it was intended to be humorous, yet the adolescent and careless dialogue could have been taken from actual events. For satire to work, you have to know which world you're in because the contrast is what makes it funny. The outlandishness of government behavior no longer cues which world I'm in. Reading the piece, I felt like a combat veteran who had been jump-scared by a playful friend: There was relief when the punchline came, but there was also irritation that I had been too bombarded with threat to enjoy the joke. Please, Mr. Goins, warn me in advance next time that it's safe to laugh. Lindsay C. Gibson, Virginia Beach Regarding the March 22 Free for All letter 'Casting aspersions on the grieving,' from a widowed mother offended by Rick Reilly's March 12 op-ed, 'Ash-scattering is out of hand. Please, cremain in place': All humor is based in tragedy, or at least discomfort. This ranges from something as simple as telling knock-knock jokes, where the humor is a result of the other person's momentary confusion and anticipation, all the way to (and likely beyond) my siblings and I making jokes about Alzheimer's, which we all took up as soon as my father did — right after he was diagnosed with it. Grief is awful. No two ways about it. But the world doesn't change to accommodate it, nor should it. The griever should learn to temper their grief over time, as we all do. Matt Weixel, Cleveland Well, Edith Pritchett has done it again. Her March 29 editorial cartoon, 'Your 23andMe results are here,' was mean-spirited and hurtful. We all know people who have faced some of the very situations she makes fun of, and I can imagine how they might feel if they saw this cartoon. Barbara Wilson, Bethesda In his March 15 Free for All letter, 'This understanding is understanding,' Tucker Eskew complained about an editor's note stating, 'A book ... is publishing on March 18.' At least the editor didn't write, 'A book ... will drop on March 18.' Everything that debuts nowadays — movies, TV shows, new donuts at Dunkin' — drops. All I can think of when I hear that word is an animal giving birth. Karen Albamonti, North Kingstown, Rhode Island Join us at 1 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, April 23, for a Free for All live chat! Have a question about The Post's journalism? A grammar pet peeve? Some fun wordplay? Submit questions at
