The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Make It Ours

Make It Ours

Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

Select a format:

Pre-order:

Summary

In 2018, the fashion world was shocked when Virgil Abloh was appointed as head of menswear for Louis Vuitton. In the brand’s 164 year history, he would be the first black designer to serve as Artistic Director. In this brilliant, landmark book about Virgil Abloh, Make It Ours, Robin Givhan charts his surprising path to the top of the fashion world – a story that encompasses so much more than his own journey. This is at once a remarkable biography of the singular, creative force of an icon and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury.

With access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, contemporaries, and many of the key figures of fashion’s present and recent past, 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. Featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from early groundbreaking Black designers like Oswald Boateng to Abloh’s mercurial but critical collaborator and mentor, Kanye West, Make It Ours moves seamlessly between high fashion and pop culture in telling the story of how the collision of these worlds irrevocably transformed our desires and beliefs about the essential connections between who we are and what we wear.

About the author

Robin Givhan

Robin Givhan is Washington Post's senior critic-at-large, writing about politics, race, and the arts. Previously, she covered the fashion industry as a business, as a cultural institution, and as pure pleasure. She is the Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism and author of The Battle of Versailles. In addition to the Post, Givhan has worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue, and the Detroit Free Press. During her most recent tenure at The Post, in addition to fashion, Givhan covered Michelle Obama during the first year of the administration.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more