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Make It Ours

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan comes a groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry transformed our ideas about the connection between who we are and what we wear

In 2018, shockwaves were sent around the fashion industry when Virgil Abloh was appointed the head of menswear for Louis Vuitton. Despite no formal training in pattern-making or tailoring, Abloh had become the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s 164-year history.

Make It Ours tells the story of how that moment came to be and how Abloh came to symbolise and embody the industry’s way forward. 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 gate, and how a simple t-shirt came to hold as much cultural power as a haute couture gown.

With unparalleled access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking 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 amidst a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste. This 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.

'A captivating and beautifully written biography of the talented Virgil Abloh . . . Thought provoking, emotional and illuminating this book is a definite must read!' Tom Ford

'Robin’s posthumous look into the life and work of the late, great, Virgil Abloh is thoughtful, intelligent, honest and masterfully crafted. . . She brilliantly captures Virgil’s fearless march forward through his insatiable curiosity, kindness, humility, generosity and relentless work ethic.' Marc Jacobs

© Robin Givhan 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Make It Ours is the best book on the luxury business since Teri Agins' Hijacking the Runway.
Financial Times
A remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race.
Rolling Stone
Toggling between biography and cultural history, Givhan . . . offers an illuminating analysis of [Virgil] Abloh’s middle-class, first-generation American upbringing, one that suggests his quiet confidence and seeming unflappability were deliberately cultivated.
New York Times
Robin’s look into the life and work of the late, great, Virgil Abloh is 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 Jacobs
Virgil was a rule breaker who always had his finger on the pulse, and Robin Givhan’s unique perspective and meticulous research expertly chronicles his unconventional path and meteoric rise in fashion. Thought-provoking, emotional, and illuminating, this book is a definite must-read!
Tom Ford
Virgil’s journey from humble beginnings to the top of the fashion industry is one that needs to be studied. Make It Ours is a thrilling journey into the mind of a genius.
Edward Enninful, former editor in chief of British Vogue
Virgil Abloh . . . changed the way upper echelons of the [fashion] industry engage with younger generations and even social media. In Make It Ours, [Robin Givhan] captures that shift with the kind of clarity and nuance that honors the late designer’s many layers.
Essence
Legendary . . . incisive and unflinching . . . One of [Givhan’s] gifts is the acute power of observation.
SSENSE Magazine
Robin Givhan’s powerful new book explores a fashion legacy — and a life — that stretched far beyond labels. . . The book is less a biography than it is a study of success in fashion and culture: the parameters around it, the roadblocks toward it, the precedents others have set for it.
Harper's Bazaar
What makes Givhan’s book so compelling is not only her analysis of the designer’s creativity and ambition, but the historical context she builds around it — a reminder why she is an American icon in her own right.
Interview
Author Robin Givhan
Narrator Robin Givhan
Duration 11 hours and 28 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781804958414
Format Audiobook
Publisher Cornerstone
Genre Biography: arts and entertainment, Biography: business and industry, Fashion and textile design, Individual designers or design groups
Availability AU, GB, IE

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