MAKE IT OURS: ROBIN GIVHAN

ROBIN GIVHAN'S NEW BIOGRAPHY BREAKS DOWN THE WORLD THAT MADE VIRGIL ABLOH, AND THE WORLD VIRGIL ABLOH MADE.

By Morgan Becker

When Robin Givhan won the Pulitzer back in 2006, it was said that her essays turned fashion criticism into the cultural sort. The board referenced her critique of a dressed-down Dick Cheney on the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation (“the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower”). Also, a scene report on J.Lo’s Sweetface debut. (“A lesson on how to dress like Lopez on the cheap… Is that fashion?”) And an op-ed on tradition-shunning figures like Rick Owens, who “does not envision his clothes on fast-moving city dwellers but rather on those well-to-do rebels who slouch through life fueled by organic produce, yoga and cigarettes… seeking a connection to something they perceive as less processed, less commercialized and somehow more real.”

Whether she’s taking on the industry type, the celebrity, or the politician, Robin is sure to apprehend some wittily illustrated bigger picture, getting even the layperson to see why clothes are something worth really caring about. The editor and writer and Detroit native—who’s worked mostly for the Post but also Vogue, the San Francisco Chronicle, and as an independent author—has again done just that with Make It Ours, a biography of the late great Virgil Abloh.

Make It Ours is the story of Virgil’s professional life. More than that, though, it’s everything that made his career so powerful—and, in the first place, possible—referencing stuff as disparate as the architecture of Rem Koolhaas, to ’90s rappers’ embrace of Ralph Lauren, to the blogosphere. More than the clothes Virgil produced at Off-White and at Louis Vuitton, Robin was compelled by the personal, socio-cultural, and financial forces that lined up so the designer could change the face of fashion in a remarkably short span of time.

Robin is known for bluntness and for an incisive, connective mind. That style is well-suited to Virgil as a subject, as he’s a complicated figure: highly personable but highly private, attracted to the esoteric as well as youth and pop culture, African-American and the child of Ghanaian immigrants, prolific yet never a perfectionist. More than by coveted interviews with the designer’s inner circle, she shapes Virgil through everything around him, representing the icon by way of negative space.

In the lead-up to the launch of Make It Ours, Robin sat down with Beyond Noise, speaking to the process and the intention behind her own telling of the world Virgil Abloh built.

MORGAN BECKER: Where’d the initial drive to write about Virgil come from?

ROBIN GIVHAN: There was obviously a lot of surprise, attention, and sadness when Virgil passed away. That was striking to me because his career had been brief in the scheme of things. I realized there was this interesting tension between what I had written and thought about his work as a critic, and the way this community of people responded to how the work made them feel. It seemed like those things were in conversation with each other. I wanted to explore that middle ground.

MB: You really took your time setting up what made Virgil’s ascension in the industry possible. You wrote that ‘history is composed of a series of vantage points.’ That belief or that method of storytelling seems central to the way you set the biography up.

I’m wondering how you decided what parts of Virgil’s life and interests to dig into. How difficult was it to parse so much material, and condense it down to something that rang true?

RG: I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional biography that begins with, you know, a warm fall day when he was born, and then moves forward. I was struck by the fact that he had this wall between his professional life and life at home. Some people didn’t even know that Virgil was married, that he had children, or how on earth he was doing all this when he had a life in Chicago.

There is space for someone to do an entire biography about Virgil and his fine arts projects, and Virgil and his DJing projects. I knew I wanted this to be specifically about fashion. For a lot of designers throughout history, you could point to a particular garment or collection that sealed their place in fashion history. Armani, you immediately think of that loose-fitting Italian tailoring. You can see Tom Ford and the blue velvet mod suit from the Gucci show. But with Virgil, there wasn’t a garment like that. There wasn’t a particular collection like that. It was about something that felt more emotional and intellectual. I decided I wanted a biography that moved chronologically, but with a chronology based on what was happening within the broader context of Virgil’s world. It was the time that he spent in Chicago, how that shaped him. The movement toward a community of other creative people, and how that was something rising up as a new way of thinking about fashion. The conversation about sneakers was another phase in Virgil’s career, but also a phase within the larger fashion universe. I wanted those things to run in tandem. I was so interested in how this very untraditional person was able to succeed. Timing is everything, and I wanted a biography that captured that.

MB: There were a few things you really drilled in as Virgil’s talents: graphic design and branding, an understanding of youth culture, his ability to communicate with all sorts of people. That was all balanced out by your identification of the societal and personal factors that let him navigate up and through the world of fashion, including some rather complicated ones, like his early self-exemption from conversations about race in the industry.

RG: Early on, there were stories that described him as the first Black designer at a French luxury house. I was like, Wow, they completely forgot about Ozwald [Boateng]! When I started looking at Ozwald’s story again, the context of the moment in which he rose to acclaim was interesting. Because he and Virgil have much superficially in common, but because of the timing, their successes were received in very different ways.

MB: Materially, would you say the bulk of your research was conducted through interviews?

RG: Yeah, the bulk of it. I had a chance to talk to Virgil. But obviously, sadly, I can’t go, Oh, in hindsight, what do you think about this? I was able to listen to some audio of an interview he did in 2008. It was so, so early in his career, before he had done anything related to fashion. I was struck by how he talked about wanting to be a mentor. He was so young. He hadn’t actually accomplished that much.

There was a helpful transcript of a conversation Michael Rock had with Virgil that he very graciously let me read. In that conversation, he talked quite a bit about his relationship with Kanye and about the way that he was starting to think about his own work. This was before he had launched Off-White.

MB: What was that first interview focused on?

RG: The guy who did it was interested in the people behind the scenes of different musicians. He was in Chicago, and he had heard of the people working with Kanye. The curious thing about it is—while it was meant to be a conversation about creativity—they had both grown up with parents who had immigrated from Ghana, [and so] they talked a lot about what that was like and the similarities in their upbringings. It took a more personal turn as opposed to being just about the work.

MB: The mentorship thing makes me think about how much self-documentation Kanye was doing early career. You spent some time separating his and Virgil’s approaches and personalities, but that sureness that they were going to be someone was maybe part of their kinship?

RG: One of the things I walked away from the research with was this new appreciation for the degree and expansiveness of Kanye’s ambition, confidence, belief in his own creativity, and the way that he scooped up so many people in that cloud of enthusiasm. At one point, I was like, Is there any designer from this generation who, at some point, did not work with or for Kanye? He was constantly doing collaborations. He would look around for anybody he thought could be of service, and would glob on to them and bring them into that circle. While there were certainly things that were negative, even then—when Kanye was still Kanye and not Ye—there was this storm of creativity. These guys had thoughtful conversations about art, aesthetics, design, and luxury with a group of people who could keep up. In talking to some of them, it was unusual that they could find a cohort that had those kinds of interests; they wanted to talk about sometimes esoteric things.

MB: Were there any particular conversations where it felt like you were cracking who Virgil was as a person?

RG: Matthew Williams raised this whole idea that, for Virgil, everything was a prototype. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but he had that point of view that everything was a work in progress. He wasn’t super precious. For some people, that was frustrating, right? He was constantly churning out things, and some of those things weren’t that great, but working that way seemed to give him a kind of freedom from being constrained by the criticism.

If anything got criticized, by the time it did, it was as if he was onto the next. I thought that was telling about the way he dealt with people who didn’t think that he belonged in a certain place. I was also struck by the way he dealt with microaggressions, macroaggressions, and anything that was related to race. He didn’t let them get in the way. One of the interesting quotes from him was when he juxtaposed himself with Kanye—he said that if Kanye goes into a room and sees a microaggression, he has to call it out because that’s who he is. Virgil can go into the same space, deal with the same thing, and just shrug it off as completely unimportant and irrelevant to his ultimate goal.

MB: It was clear by the end that he has real superfans and real critics as well. Are you anticipating a lot of feedback?

RG: [Laughs] I know that there are a lot of people who are Virgil superfans. But I also know that there were a lot of people who certainly had issues with him, were frustrated by him, and were a bit disillusioned by him as things moved on. I wish that we were able to see how he would have evolved at a moment like this. Even in the aftermath of George Floyd, he was wrestling publicly with a lot of blowback in the way that he dealt with race, in the aftermath of how he represented himself as a Black man within the fashion sphere. It was clearly changing his public relationship with race, and I would have loved to see how he’d be responding now.

MB: I loved that line about Virgil calling Duchamp his lawyer. He was appropriating—from ravers, pro athletes, hip-hop, American suburbia—concurrently with a huge cultural conversation around appropriation, artistic, racial, and otherwise. Were you thinking about those references, about Virgil’s sense of irony, during his career? Or is it something you put together in hindsight?

RG: During his career, there were moments when I thought, Okay, that’s interesting. But I would say, ‘I don’t know that I would call that great fashion.’ I still tend to feel that part of what makes great fashion is adding to the vocabulary of style. To have a strong point of view, to demonstrate technique and understanding of production, construction, and all of that. But it’s also about showing something that wholly belongs to you. Obviously, no one’s going to reinvent the wheel all the time—and that’s why I would argue that there’s a lot of great clothing, but not necessarily great fashion.

I never felt Virgil was changing the nature of fashion in terms of the clothing. But he was changing the importance of certain kinds of fashion, elevating things in a way that made them more meaningful to his customer. He was helping us see that there’s this other category that fashion can fall into—something purely about emotion and belonging, different from just showing off your net worth. Some of it is great. Because, as Virgil would say, these t-shirts have incredible meaning because they identify you as part of a cohort. You know about the person who created it, you understand all the references. To say that has as much value and meaning as an Hermès Birkin, I think, is completely fair. But I do long for a continued respect for expertise.

MB: Our last issue was tied to luxury and society’s changing understanding of it—sort of how the luxury market is appealing to fewer customers, and how people are going after experiences, good service, smaller brands. You related it to cultural worth, or affiliation with a product that has cultural significance.

RG: Those things can be true at once. The customers who buy into that traditional, classic way of thinking about luxury still exist. But the numbers are getting smaller and smaller. That broader base of luxury is, to me, the one that Virgil spoke to. That’s the one assigning importance to things that are outside of the traditional luxury vocabulary. They’re valuing a scarcity that is different from the custom-made object. It’s limited-edition, it drops at whatever-o’-clock, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I think the smart money is always on the fashion pendulum swinging the other way. I also think about this moment, with the tariffs—people are thinking about where things are constructed. The question is whether location equals quality. I wonder if that will bring expertise back into the spotlight and make people more concerned or discerning. Going way back to those early hip-hop brands, the giant logos were everything—and then everything went very minimal. Thinking about what Pharrell has been doing at Louis Vuitton, [the difference] is pretty big.

MB: I imagine it was difficult to wrap up the book. It sort of feels ongoing, as Virgil’s legacy unfolds. Are there things you wish you could have added between the final draft and now? Or anything you threw in at the very last minute?

RG: There were definitely things that ended up in the footnotes, about the ongoing machinations with Sean Combs and Ye and these tertiary characters. The sale by Louis Vuitton of Off-White was certainly an interesting monkey wrench. I had wrapped up by the time it happened and decided that my endpoint was going to be that first Pharrell show. I didn’t want to go beyond that, because I felt that the book would be an ellipsis.

MB: Is there anyone you’ve got your eye on right now, who feels like they could have as much of an impact as Virgil did on fashion?

RG: It feels like this whole moment is an inflection point, because so many of these big legacy houses are at a point of change. I am curious to see what will happen with the designers of color who were celebrated in Superfine at the Met and on the red carpet. I’m thinking about someone like Sergio Hudson, who dressed over a dozen people in wonderful ways. I’m curious to see if any of them become the next big business. It’s been such a long time since an independent designer built the next big business. There’s always this forward momentum and then this backlash. We’re clearly in a moment of backlash, but I wonder if something will catapult forward out of that.

It always feels like the success isn’t allowed to happen organically. There are always these not-that-invisible hands, shaping it and making it happen, as opposed to customers speaking. In some ways, that was a little bit of the magic that people felt with Virgil, particularly when he launched Off-White. There weren’t these hands of the fashion gods propelling him forward, it was his community of consumers. When the door opened at Louis Vuitton, it felt like they opened that door by sheer desire, excitement, and enthusiasm. That is a rare thing. I mean, he had the LVMH Prize going for him and many forces pushing him along, but also this illusion that it was all happening organically.

At the end of the day, the criticisms that I levied in stories about the work were legit and I stand by them, but I was really moved by the optimism that Virgil had, and it was nice to be in the world of someone who wasn’t cynical. People always say, ‘If you’re going to do a book, you have to be prepared to want to live in that world for a long time.’ This was one where the main character really did seem to move through his professional life optimistic about what could happen. It was nice. It was a relief.