MAKE IT OURS: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh, by Robin Givhan
When Virgil Abloh became the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear division in 2018, it marked the pinnacle of an anomalous fashion industry ascent.
Prodigious, polymathic and perpetually online, Abloh was an unlikely candidate for the job, at least on paper. At the time of his appointment — Abloh was the first Black creative to assume the role at Louis Vuitton, and one of a short list to reach such industry heights — his only formal fashion training consisted of a single internship at Fendi. But he’d founded a popular clothing brand, earned the adoration of millions and managed to become a finalist for the LVMH Prize for young designers — all while eschewing the title of “designer” in lieu of the more catholic “maker.”
In “Make It Ours,” The Washington Post’s senior critic at large Robin Givhan examines the “colliding circumstances” that propelled Abloh to fame before his death from a rare cancer at the age of 41. Toggling between biography and cultural history, Givhan posits that Abloh’s success was at once a feat he was uniquely poised to achieve and indicative of the winds of change already sweeping through a high-end fashion industry seeking to appeal to a younger, more diverse consumer base.
Born in 1980 to Ghanaian immigrants in Rockford, Ill., Abloh studied civil engineering before moving to Chicago to obtain a master’s degree in architecture. He divided his time between studying, skateboarding, D.J.-ing, blogging and screen-printing T-shirts, all the while linking and building with other self-taught creatives. Much is made throughout the book of this cohort’s computer literacy and social-media savvy, a recurring detail that may feel revelatory to readers of a certain age but less resonant for digital natives for whom copious screen time has merely been a fact of life for the last two decades.
Abloh’s omnipresence within Chicago’s creative community led to a meeting, then collaboration, with the local celebrity Kanye West, who’d recently released two acclaimed albums and was just beginning to cement his reputation as an unrepentant firebrand. Givhan deftly traces the way the two men’s paths converged and split over the course of their lengthy collaborative relationship.
At first glance, their divergent experiences navigating the fashion industry appear to result from a stark difference in temperament: Abloh was soft-spoken, curious, relentlessly optimistic and congenial, a contrast to West — raw, tempestuous and increasingly megalomaniacal. But Givhan offers an illuminating analysis of Abloh’s middle-class, first-generation American upbringing, one that suggests his quiet confidence and seeming unflappability were deliberately cultivated. Though it was West who initially carried Abloh along on his quest to create a name in the fashion world, Abloh’s solo efforts would eventually eclipse those of his onetime employer.
While West, notoriously, maintained an openly contentious relationship with the fashion press, the personable Abloh also routinely garnered harsh reception of his work from critics — Givhan among them. Here, she admits upfront that his “design output, though prolific, was uneven,” but largely refrains from the more biting appraisals that she often deployed in the wake of his runway presentations.
In framing the industry’s skepticism toward Abloh’s philosophy — essentially, that innovation could be achieved by altering just 3 percent of an existing design — Givhan instead references “critics” or quotes industry heavyweights like Raf Simons. Still, when she points out that “generic T-shirts emblazoned with” Abloh’s company name “had more legal protection in the United States than Diane von Furstenberg’s famous wrap dress, which landed her on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1976” — before abruptly shifting to a discussion of what constitutes a luxury good — the reader feels she might have more to say.
It’s possible that, had Abloh’s career not been cut short, his time in fashion might have been but one glittering chapter in a longer story. He was, seemingly, perpetually at work on collaborations — with Mercedes, IKEA, Evian — and also dabbled in film, music and art. These endeavors, as well as the life he shared with his wife and two children, are mentioned in passing, a means of reiterating just how peripatetically packed was the young mogul’s career.
Abloh’s rise in an industry known for its hostility to outsiders is undeniably notable. Less than five years after his death, it’s much more difficult to know whether his legacy will beget lasting change or be diminished by the swing of fashion’s pendulum. The projects he launched during his lifetime — from an eponymous scholarship fund for Black creatives to his fashion label, Off-White — are still reshaping themselves in his absence. But as the dust continues to settle, Givhan implies that Abloh’s greatest contribution was, fittingly, a feat of branding.
“He made a lot of folks feel like they were inside fashion’s hallowed walls standing alongside him,” she writes, whether they actually were or not. “Abloh made people feel like they belonged, no matter how unlikely their success might have seemed to themselves or anyone else.”
MAKE IT OURS: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh | By Robin Givhan | Crown | 326 pp. | $35
The post A High-Fashion Phoenix, Virgil Abloh Changed an Industry appeared first on New York Times.
