Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh
Biography, Customs and cultures, Lifestyle
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
How Virgil Abloh&’s iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry embodied a groundbreaking transformation of the relationship between who we are and what we wear.&“Thoughtful, intelligent, honest, and masterfully crafted . . . Virgil&’s freethinking and influence on… the possibilities of what creativity can be was a tour de force.&”—Marc JacobsVirgil Abloh&’s appointment as head of menswear for Louis Vuitton in 2018 shocked the fashion industry, as he became the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand&’s 164-year history. But as Pulitzer Prize–winning culture critic Robin Givhan reveals, Abloh&’s story encompasses so much more than his own journey.Using Abloh&’s surprising path to the top of the luxury establishment, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the cloistered, exclusive fashion world faced a revolution from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gates—how their notions of what was luxury simultaneously anticipated and upended consumer preferences, and how a simple T-shirt held as much cultural power as a haute couture gown. As Givhan relays, Abloh rose during a time of existential angst for a fashion industry trying to make sense of its responsibilities to a diverse audience and the challenges of selling status to a generation of consumers who fetishized sneakers and prioritized comfort. The story of how that moment came to be, and how someone like Abloh—who had no formal training in pattern-making or tailoring—could come to symbolize and embody the industry&’s way forward, is the story at the heart of this book.Make It Ours is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury. With access to Abloh&’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from visionary Black designers like Ozwald Boateng to Abloh&’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan 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.