I spoke to Robin Givhan from my hotel room in Bangkok. She was in her hometown of Detroit, where she had just delivered a commencement address at her old high school. My Wi-Fi was unreliable. We turned our cameras off. It didn’t matter. From the moment she started speaking, her voice had that rare quality: warmth sharpened by clarity, intelligence wrapped in a sense of proportion. For decades, she’s used this voice to tell the truth about clothes, power, and the culture that creates them.
We were there to talk about her new book, Make It Ours, a biography of the late Virgil Abloh, the boundary-pushing designer who became the first Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton. He died in 2021 at age 41, after a private battle with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer. His death was a shock, not just because of how young he was, but because of how much he had already altered the landscape.
Before his historic LV appointment, Abloh had come up through the creative orbit of Kanye West (now known as Ye), working as his artistic director alongside a tight-knit group that included Matthew M. Williams, Jerry Lorenzo, and Heron Preston—figures who, like him, would go on to reshape menswear in their own image. That circle gave rise to collaborative projects like Been Trill, while he launched Pyrex Vision and later Off-White, the Milan-based label where he blurred the lines between streetwear, luxury, and conceptual art. His ability to translate cultural capital into institutional power—first through Ye’s reach, and later on his own—became a defining arc of his career.
Or maybe something more precise than that: a study in meaning-making, cultural inheritance, ambition, and the transformation of creative legitimacy. It’s not a puff piece or a hagiography. Givhan didn’t know Abloh personally. And she believes that was an asset. “People had such deep emotional connections to him,” she told me. “And I think having that professional distance gave me room to really consider the work.”
The result is a book that resists myth and embraces context. She’s not trying to explain Abloh’s every choice. She’s trying to map out what those choices meant. “There are books to be written about Abloh the man,” she said. “About his personal life, about his fine art practice. Mine was about the professional Abloh, the one whose work I critiqued, and whose rise reflected how the fashion industry itself was changing.”
Givhan had written about him before, sometimes critically. She didn’t always love the collections. She thought some were scattered, under-edited, occasionally underwhelming. But what fascinated her, and what comes through so clearly in the book, is the dissonance between what she expected from fashion, and what a younger audience found in Abloh’s work. That friction, between design as a discipline and design as a cultural signal, demanded a new vocabulary. “It didn’t change my idea of what made fashion great,” she said. “But it did change my idea of what made it matter.”
There’s a generosity in how she makes that distinction, and it’s mirrored in how she speaks about Abloh’s ability to speak to people who’d never felt fashion was for them. He made space. He created meaning. Even if, as she put it, “the garments didn’t always hold up.” Her honesty is never cruel. It’s calibrated. Precise. Thoughtful. She’s a critic who holds ideas to high standards, and people to humane ones.
Abloh’s power, as Givhan sees it, wasn’t aesthetic so much as strategic. He understood how to thrive in a system that was never designed for him. He wasn’t trained as a designer. He didn’t go to Central Saint Martins or spend years as an apprentice in Parisian ateliers—though he did have a stint at Fendi in Rome with Ye, an experience that served more as immersion than instruction. But he had two forms of power that are foundational in 21st-century fashion: proximity to celebrity, and fluency in social media. He had access, and an uncanny instinct for collaboration. “He attracted people,” Givhan said. “He wasn’t precious. He wasn’t closed off. He didn’t gatekeep the process. That made people want to root for him.”
That openness was real, but it wasn’t naïve. Givhan pointed out that while Abloh liked to talk about community and mentorship and sharing knowledge, he also trademarked the Off-White name, the red zip ties, even his signature use of quotation marks. He was open-source in method, not in ownership. “He wasn’t precious about the process,” she said. “But he protected the outcome.”
The conversation turned, inevitably, to Ye. One cannot tell Abloh’s story without him. “There’s no Abloh without Kanye,” Givhan said matter-of-factly. Not because Abloh lacked talent or vision, but because Ye built the initial orbit, both socially and creatively. “What surprised me was just how many people from that generation had worked with him. It was like every young designer in some corner had touched a Kanye project.” The ambition was contagious. And the conversations—about design, architecture, aesthetics—were rare, especially for Black men. “If you were a guy who wanted to talk about those things in depth, in a way that felt serious, that was hard to find,” she said. “But in that circle, you could.”
When Ye and Abloh embraced on the runway after Abloh’s Louis Vuitton debut, the hug became more seismic than the collection itself. For Givhan, it was a crystallizing moment. “It’s rare to see two Black men, in a space like that, showing that kind of emotion publicly,” she said. “We see it after sports wins. But not in fashion. Not in commerce. And certainly not on that kind of global stage.” That moment also underscored something deeper about how race, identity, and history shaped each of them differently.
Givhan noticed how often Abloh was described in the press as Ghanaian American—a child of immigrants—rather than simply African American. That label stuck with her. “Why do we keep insisting on that distinction?” she asked. “He was born in the U.S. But I think there’s something in how immigrant families arrive with a clearer sense of origin, of history, and that changes how you move through questions of race.” She contrasted it with West’s more aggressive, confrontational stance. “Abloh could deflect. West had to confront. And that comes from different lineages, different temperaments, different strategies.”
The discussion drifted to the infamous “3% rule”—Abloh’s theory that if you change an object just 3%, you’ve created something new. Was it clever? Evasive? Both? “It was a way to intellectualize what he was doing. And also a way to deflect criticism,” Givhan said. “But it doesn’t absolve you from creating something original. If you choose fashion as your medium, your job is to add to the vocabulary.” And yet, it worked. “So much of fashion isn’t about construction or innovation,” she said. “It’s about the meaning we attach to the garment. And Abloh understood how to make people feel seen. He understood how to connect.”
That, she argued, was his most powerful idea: that a brand could feel collectively owned. “He made people feel like his success was their success,” she said. “That’s rare. That’s revolutionary.” When asked about the work itself, the actual garments, Givhan didn’t hesitate. “I thought the womenswear was unsuccessful,” she said. “The menswear was stronger. But the collections weren’t why he mattered. What mattered was how he shifted the frame.”
She’s covered fashion long enough to know how unusual it is to matter that much without a single game-changing collection. “This wasn’t like Tom Ford’s Gucci era, where one show changed everything,” she said. “Abloh didn’t change the shape of the clothes. He changed who was allowed to make them. Who was allowed to matter.”
Givhan still wonders what might have come next. “If he’d had more time, would the design have caught up with the meaning?” she asked aloud. “Would he have found that collaborator who could take the ideas and translate them into garments that really held up?” Maybe. Maybe not. But the search—for collaborators, for ideas, for legitimacy—was part of his brilliance. “He was a connector,” she said. “He connected streetwear to luxury. He connected cultures. He connected audiences who had never seen themselves reflected in high fashion.”
At the end of our conversation, I asked what Abloh had taught her. She paused, thoughtful. “He added something to my list of what fashion can do,” she said. “That’s a good legacy.” And it is. Especially coming from someone like Givhan, who has made a career out of cutting through the noise. The fashion world has never been short on hype. What it needs, what Abloh made space for, and what Givhan continues to give, is meaning.
Robin Givhan is the author of “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh,” out now.