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Make It Ours
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  • Published: 26 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529153439
  • Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $55.00
Categories:

Make It Ours

Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

Formats & editions
Paperback
27 Oct 2026
EBook
26 June 2025
Audiobook
26 June 2025
Hardback
26 July 2025
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From Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan and Washington Post journalist 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.
  • Published: 26 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529153439
  • Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $55.00
Categories:

About the author

Robin Givhan

Robin Givhan is Washington Post's senior critic-at-large, writing about politics, race, and the arts. Previously, she covered the fashion industry as a business, as a cultural institution, and as pure pleasure. She is the Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism and author of The Battle of Versailles. In addition to the Post, Givhan has worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue, and the Detroit Free Press. During her most recent tenure at The Post, in addition to fashion, Givhan covered Michelle Obama during the first year of the administration.
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Praise for Make It Ours

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

Make It Ours is more than a biography of Abloh’s rise and reign in the fashion world. Givhan deftly balances her intimate portrait of him with analysis of how the fashion industry has dealt with race and racism over the past century.

Washington Post

Make It Ours is informed by a deep curiosity. . . The book is filled with industry anecdotes that’ll thrill any fashion fan.

W Magazine

Make It Ours chronicles the intersection of a man and a moment, a time of disruptive change in the fashion industry, and a figure who was uniquely primed to seize that opportunity.

ELLE

Givhan’s sharp blend of biography, cultural history, and fashion criticism . . . reconsiders the meaning of luxury and who gets to decide.

Publishers Weekly

A brilliant, captivating book. Make It Ours makes the case for a true cultural giant.

Elaine Weltroth, bestselling author of More Than Enough

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

The 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

Make It Ours is the best book on the luxury business since Teri Agins’ Hijacking the Runway

Financial Times

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