Journalist Robin Givhan will tell the life story of the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh in a new biography, People magazine reports.
Crown will publish Givhan’s Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh in the summer. It describes the book as “a groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry embodied the cultural sea change transforming our ideas about the relationship between who we are and what we wear.”
Abloh was educated as an architect before he met the rapper Ye, then known as Kanye West, in 2009 while they were interns at the luxury fashion house Fendi. Abloh worked at Ye’s creative agency, Donda and in 2013 launched his own fashion brand, Off-White.
In 2018, Abloh was hired as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear line. Abloh died in 2021 at the age of 41 of a rare form of cancer; the following year, One World announced it planned to publish a posthumous book by the designer.
Givhan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2006, is the author of a previous book, The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled Into the Spotlight and Made History. In her new book, Crown says, she “weaves a spellbinding tale of a young man’s rise amid a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste.”
“Ultimately, I wanted to explore how [Abloh’s] success changed the fashion industry, while looking at the ways in which the industry itself transformed so that Virgil's story could even be possible,” Givhan told People.
Make It Ours is scheduled for publication on June 24.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
