


If any modern fashion designer warrants an obsessive biography, it’s Virgil Abloh. Through the 2010s, he made some of the most iconic Nike sneakers, founded one of the most important new fashion brands, Off-White, and gave men’s luxury a whole new look as creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton despite having no formal fashion training. His creative openness — giving talks on YouTube and filling Tumblr and Instagram with pictures of works in progress — inspired a whole generation of fashion-obsessed young men who followed everything he did. And it was contrasted with a notable silence about his broader personal views and his private life, including his cancer diagnosis. He was just 41 years old when he died in November 2021.
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I had thus hoped for a definitive biography of Abloh, but Robin Givhan’s Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh is not that book. Where a great biography brings you behind the curtain, Make It Ours was written firmly from the outside. In lieu of much original reporting on her subject, Givhan pads her book out with tangents and fluff, flattening him under the dull lens of modern race politics.
She brushes past his Louis Vuitton Air Force 1 collaboration, an authentic release of a fake Canal Street product that represented the ultimate triumph of his vision of high and low-brows coming together. But she has a full paragraph about George Floyd’s death and multiple arguments against colorblindness. Some of Abhloh’s most famous items, such as the tape belt, are never mentioned, but there are sentences detailing the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor. She writes, “Abloh kept things; he kept unrealized ideas, doodles, hard drives, architectural models. They weren’t organized; but they were there.” But she doesn’t mention his huge archives, kept in storage units around the world, full of things he bought and made — let alone bring the reader inside them.

The chapter about his childhood says little new about it, but has extensive paragraphs on the demographic information and racial history of his hometown of Rockford, Illinois. Because Abloh said everything he did was “for the 17-year-old version of myself,” Givhan then goes through 1997’s cultural goings-on, even when obviously irrelevant. Most grievously: “It’s hard to imagine seventeen-year-old Abloh—soccer player, engineering student, skateboarder—as someone interested in British fairy tales and princesses, but Diana’s death was a cultural moment.” That preamble should have been a sign to delete the multiple paragraphs on Diana that follow.
Further, there are far too many embarrassing lines that should never have made it past an editor. Case in point: “He had a degree in architecture that allowed him to see his ideas in three dimensions.” Or “They weren’t trespassing. They were blazing a new trail.” Perhaps worst are her various sequences of following “he” sentences: “He was thoughtful; he approached problems and possibilities in a considered manner. He was watchful and dutiful.” It’s all of a style that characterizes, rather than describes and explains. To wit: “He was an introvert, which is not to say that he was shy, because he was a talker.”
The book has high points, such as her dive into Abloh’s architectural influences, but even the interesting asides feel like a waste of time. A section on the restrictions on National Basketball Association fashion would be welcomed in a 1000 plus page biography, but here feels like padding, as the 336 pages of Make It Ours leave so many basic biographical questions unanswered. What were his religious views? What was his general political framework? What was his home life like? Givhan writes incessantly about how Abloh’s friendly, nonconfrontational manner was a calibrated tool for navigating predominantly white spaces as a black man and something emergent from his middle-class, African-immigrant-parent background, but she never provides any answers about what he actually thought.
Givhan tries to write from a neutral gods-eye view, but you can often tell which few people she spoke with, and the many she didn’t, so passages often feel thin. She interviewed his parents, Nee and Eunice Abloh, but there are no original quotes from his widow, Shannon Abloh, who isn’t mentioned in the acknowledgements. The Arnault family is not quoted or thanked either.
The biggest gap is Kanye West. Abloh and Kanye were the closest creative collaborators, and you can’t understand Abloh’s story without talking at length about their brotherly, competitive relationship. Givhan doesn’t give this nearly enough attention or detail. She only mentions West’s self-appointed “Louis Vuitton Don” title as he hands that label to Abloh, and never mentions that West’s dream job was Louis Vuitton’s creative director, nor whether there were discussions about him taking that role. She never considers what Abloh contributed during West’s more controversial periods, such as releasing Confederate Flag merchandise during the Yeezus tour, nor does she provide any insight into how their relationship frayed over time with envy and competition. She clearly didn’t speak with West, which is understandable, but she never mentions why one wouldn’t. Sean “Diddy” Combs is also mentioned throughout, and similarly, she never brings up what he’s now most associated with.
In the most galling omission, their mutual associate, Tremaine Emory, said that West wasn’t invited to Abloh’s private funeral, and then was barred from speaking at the public memorial. There is no mention of this in Make It Ours.
With these huge gaps and minimal original reporting on Abloh, it’s hard to understand why Make It Ours exists. If you want to appreciate his work, buy coffee table books such as Louis Vuitton: Virgil Abloh or Virgil Abloh. Nike. ICONS. And if you’re curious about the philosophy behind his work, just listen to Abhloh’s lectures, where he explains himself more clearly, succinctly, and interestingly than Givhan does. She occasionally provides a critical take on his approach, notably contrasting how he riffed on the works of others while also aggressively copyrighting his own signatures. But she pulls her punches even here. In 2021, the New York Times wrote an interactive feature on his trademark operation, called The Off-White Papers. Givhan moves on from this after a paragraph.
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Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that you get the strong suspicion that Givhan doesn’t really like or truly understand Abloh’s work and only values him as an agent of change. A racial lens simply doesn’t work very well for Virgil Abloh. He was black, yes, but he was a cultural magpie, loving mediums born of cross-cultural collaboration, be that “street wear,” hip-hop, DJing, Tumblr, or sneakers. Black Americans have heavily contributed to those, but equally so have the Japanese, French luxury houses, and big American corporations. And, most of Abloh’s fans were young white guys.
Through the internet and our shared love of Abloh’s work, I’ve met some collectors of his, who’ve each spent close to six figures buying his most important work — be they Abloh’s Nike shoes, Louis jackets, or IKEA rugs. I asked these diehard collectors if they knew about this book, and they didn’t. They asked if I would recommend it. I didn’t.
Ross Anderson is the life editor at The Spectator World and a tech and culture contributor for the New York Sun.