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CFDA: In an upcoming chronicle of the late Virgil Abloh’s impact, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan offers his biography “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh,” a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury.

Born to Ghanaian parents in Rockford, Illinois outside of Chicago, Mr. Abloh began his career working at Fendi under Silvia Venturini Fendi, and, in 2010, was named Creative Director for Kanye West before launching his Off-White label in 2013.

With Off-White, he firmly positioned himself at the intersection of fashion, art, and music. He elevated streetwear to luxury levels and reinvented the art of collaborations, his most iconic ones ranging from IKEA to Nike, Moncler, Jimmy Choo, Kith, a special London gallery installation with Takashi Murakami, and Jay-Z and Kanye West for their joint 2011 Album Watch the Throne.

In 2018, he became the first Black artistic director of Louis Vuitton, in a game-changing move for Paris fashion that influenced and inspired the global fashion landscape.

Using Abloh’s surprising path to the top of the fashion world, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the exclusive fashion world faced a transformation from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gates.

“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 fetishize sneakers and prioritize comfort,” reads the book’s synopsis on publisher Penguin Random House’s website. “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, is the story at the heart of this book.”

With 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 amid a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste.

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 Aldo Araujo