Everything you need to know about Virgil Abloh's first biography By Robin Givhan, “Make It Ours” retraces the story of the designer who changed fashion

All the greatest myths in history have a biography, whether written by someone else or the protagonist themselves. How was the pinnacle of success reached? How were the rules of the industry changed? These are the questions this type of book attempts to answer. In the case of Virgil Abloh, a revolutionary designer who forever changed contemporary fashion and ushered in a new era where luxury and street style finally enter into dialogue with each other, it must not have been easy to contain his story in a book. First of all, because Abloh always expressed his vision publicly, always made his thought process accessible; secondly, because his fans and anyone who has ever purchased OFF-WHITE™ feel like part of the movement started by the designer, not spectators. It is therefore complex to tell a project to someone who was an integral part of it: for this reason, the first official biography dedicated to the story of Virgil Abloh after his untimely passing in 2021 is authored by none other than Robin Givhan, one of the most influential fashion journalists in the world, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Titled Make It Ours, the book best expresses the collective spirit that has always characterized Abloh's work—from the people he had around him to his main goal: uniting cultures and generations far apart.

What particularly distinguishes Abloh’s biography written by Givhan is the way in which the designer’s story is explored. It doesn’t recount in detail everything he went through, from his birth in Rockford in 1980 to his degree in civil engineering, his master’s in architecture, and finally his role as creative director for Louis Vuitton Men in 2018, but instead examines the mindset and circumstances that brought the creative to the top of the fashion industry. By connecting various cultural, geographical, and historical cues, Givhan explains what influenced Abloh—even unintentionally—from the fact that he was a child of immigrants («His family didn’t carry the generational trauma of slavery or the Great Migration,» the journalist explained in an interview with The Face), to the perception that the luxury world initially had of him and the Black community even before he began his first fashion internship at Fendi in 2009.

By gathering data and speaking directly with people who worked with Abloh, Givhan celebrates the legacy left by the founder of OFF-WHITE™, showing that before him, there were many designers from the African-American community who were extremely influential in fashion (Edward Buchanan and Patrick Kelly, to name two), but he was the first to break the glass ceiling that made luxury an elitist world, marked by racism and exclusion, and to invite others previously marginalized to take part. As the author of Make It Ours told Dazed: «One of the things that was really surprising to me was the degree to which so many of the designers of his generation were connected in some way. All of them, at some point, had done some kind of collaboration or conversation with Kanye via Virgil, and I was fascinated by the sense of community.»