Fashion Book Fridays: Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

September 25, 2026 | 12:13 pm

Fashion Book Friday is back—and what better way to return than with Virgil Abloh?

Some people design clothes; others change the conversation around fashion. Virgil Abloh was both—and, depending on whom you ask, perhaps something even more complicated. While I question whether Abloh was a great designer, he created an almost new category of all-round cultural visionary. He was a designer, architect, DJ, creative director, cultural connector, relentless collaborator and, ultimately, one of the most influential figures in 21st-century fashion.

Robin Givhan’s Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh is not simply a biography of Abloh. Thank goodness. I suspect Virgil would have found the idea of a conventional “born, educated, became famous” biography rather terribly boring. Instead, Givhan uses his extraordinary career as a lens through which to examine something much bigger: who gets invited into fashion’s inner sanctum—and what happens when they stop waiting for an invitation?

That's where this book becomes particularly fascinating.

Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion and culture critic, knows fashion's machinery intimately. She also knows fashion has historically been a rather exclusive club, with velvet ropes, secret handshakes, and an alarming number of people standing outside, wondering who decided they weren't dressed appropriately enough to come in.

And did Virgil Abloh simply walk through the door?

NO, actually, he did something more interesting.

He crashed the gates.

The man behind the myth

Abloh's story is remarkable precisely because it wasn't supposed to look like this.

Raised in Rockford, Illinois, by Ghanaian immigrant parents, Abloh studied civil engineering and architecture, not fashion design. He didn't emerge from the traditional European fashion system, spend years apprenticing in a Parisian atelier, or follow the prescribed route to becoming a luxury designer.

Instead, he came through culture.

Architecture. Hip-hop. Sneakers. Music. Art. Streetwear. Youth culture. The internet. Collaboration.

That mixture became his education.

Givhan is particularly good at placing Abloh within the cultural landscape that made his rise possible. His success wasn't created in isolation. It arrived at precisely the moment fashion was being transformed by social media, streetwear, celebrity culture and a new generation of consumers who didn't necessarily care whether their luxury came from a centuries-old couture house or a pair of sneakers.

Abloh understood something many traditional fashion institutions were slow to recognize:

Culture was no longer waiting for fashion to tell it what was cool.

Culture was telling fashion.

From Pyrex to Off-White to Louis Vuitton

The journey from Pyrex Vision to Off-White to Louis Vuitton reads almost like a fashion fairy tale—but with considerably more quotation marks.

Abloh's genius was often less about inventing something from nothing than about taking something familiar, shifting its context and asking us to see it differently. A Ralph Lauren flannel could become something else. A quotation mark could become a design language. A sneaker could become an object of desire, cultural currency and, eventually, something worthy of the world's most powerful luxury houses.

This is also where Givhan's critical eye is important.

She doesn't pretend Abloh's work was universally accepted as brilliant. She openly acknowledges that she herself had been critical of some of his Off-White designs. And I appreciate that honesty. Too many books about beloved cultural figures become memorials disguised as criticism.

Abloh's influence was enormous, but influence and traditional design mastery are not necessarily the same thing.

That distinction matters.

He wasn't necessarily interested in fashion's old definition of genius. He was interested in access—to ideas, to culture, to collaboration and ultimately to the people who wore the clothes.

“Make It Ours”

The book's title may be its most important idea.

Abloh's career was, in many ways, an argument for ownership—not simply ownership of clothing, but ownership of culture.

For generations, luxury fashion had largely decided who belonged. Abloh challenged that hierarchy by bringing street culture, Black culture, hip-hop, sneakers and youth culture into rooms where those influences had often been treated as inspiration rather than authorship.

His appointment as Louis Vuitton's men's artistic director in 2018 was therefore more than a prestigious job announcement.

It was a cultural earthquake.

Abloh became the first Black artistic director of Louis Vuitton in the house's then 164-year history.

But Givhan is careful not to suggest that he arrived alone.

One of the most valuable aspects of Make It Ours is its insistence on remembering the Black designers who came before him—figures such as Willi Smith, Patrick Kelly, Ozwald Boateng and Edward Buchanan. They had already pushed against fashion's barriers, creating the cracks through which others could eventually enter.

That is an important fashion-history lesson.

No one crashes a gate that hasn't already been weakened.

The power of community

What I found most compelling about Abloh's story was his extraordinary belief in collaboration.

He seemed to understand that creativity doesn't have to be a solitary pursuit conducted in a candlelit studio while everyone else waits outside. Musicians, artists, architects, designers, sneakerheads, students and fans populated his world.

He used social media not merely as a billboard but as a conversation.

That feels almost ordinary now.

It wasn't then.

Givhan shows how Abloh understood the emerging power of community before much of luxury fashion had figured out what Instagram was supposed to do beyond making handbags look seductive.

And this is where his legacy becomes bigger than the clothes.

What remains

Virgil Abloh died in 2021 at only 41, leaving behind a career that was astonishingly short and astonishingly dense.

Reading Make It Ours after his death inevitably adds another layer of poignancy. We know how the story ends. But Givhan isn't interested in turning Abloh into a saint. She wants to understand the moment that produced him—and the fashion industry he transformed.

For me, that is the real strength of this book.

Make It Ours asks us to reconsider what we mean when we call someone a fashion designer. Is it the ability to cut a perfect sleeve? To drape a gown? To construct an immaculate jacket?

Of course.

But perhaps it can also mean understanding people.

Being aware of and understanding culture.

Understanding desire.

Understanding that sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is look at the room, realize you weren't invited—and walk in anyway.

Virgil Abloh didn't simply enter fashion's house.

He changed the floor plan.

And Robin Givhan gives us a thoughtful, deeply researched account of how he did it.

For anyone interested in fashion history, Black creativity, streetwear, luxury, contemporary culture—or simply the delicious spectacle of watching fashion's old rules get turned upside down—Make It Ours belongs on the bookshelf.

And if you're anything like me, you'll finish it wanting to look at Virgil's work again.

This time, perhaps, with a slightly different eye.

Fashion Book Friday verdict: READ IT.

★★★★½
4.5 out of 5 fashion books

Robin Givhan: When Fashion Becomes Cultural Criticism

I have long admired Robin Givhan because she understands something that too much fashion writing forgets: clothes are never just clothes. Born and raised in Detroit, Givhan studied English at Princeton University, graduating in 1986, and earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Michigan in 1988. She began her newspaper career at the Detroit Free Press, initially as a general assignment reporter before moving into features and eventually fashion criticism. After a brief period at the San Francisco Chronicle, she joined The Washington Post in 1995 to cover fashion, later spending six months as an associate editor at Vogue before returning to the Post in 2000. In 2006, she became the first—and, to date, only—fashion critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, honoured for her “witty, closely observed essays” that transformed fashion criticism into cultural criticism. That distinction goes straight to the heart of why I find Givhan so insightful: she doesn't merely tell me what someone is wearing; she makes me consider what that clothing says about power, identity, politics, race, culture, and the society wearing it. Her criticism has the rare ability to be both deeply knowledgeable and culturally on point—and, at its best, reminds us that fashion isn't frivolous at all. It is one of the most revealing languages we have.

Tags: