Pulitzer winner Robin Givhan tracks Virgil Abloh’s rise from Midwestern teen to Louis Vuitton disruptor in Make It Ours, publishing June 24, 2025.
Virgil Abloh rewrote the playbook long before he slipped on a Louis Vuitton ID badge. In Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh, Robin Givhan pieces together how that happened, following the late polymath from suburban Illinois to a front-row seat at luxury’s top table.
Givhan opens in 2018, the year Abloh accepted men’s artistic direction at Vuitton and cracked a 164-year-old ceiling as the house’s first Black designer. She argues that his appointment was less a surprise promotion than the culmination of a decade spent remixing streetwear codes with couture budgets.
Rather than a cradle-to-grave bio, Givhan zeroes in on the years Abloh called “for my seventeen-year-old self,” treating his Rockford high-school period as the incubator for an optimistic creative ethos that prized possibility over pedigree.
Architecture studies in Chicago taught him structure; DJ booths from Miami to Milan taught him flow. Off-White, Nike collabs, an Ikea flat-pack, even a Been Trill GIF, each became a case study in collapsing high and low without apology.
Givhan finds the real story not in varsity jackets or Princess Diana references, but in how Abloh treated fashion as a town square. He tossed a Nike prototype into a lecture hall crowd, then asked for edits on the spot, proof that authorship could be porous if the idea was big enough.
The book positions Abloh as proof that talent can arrive from unexpected lanes when the culture, social media, and a newly diverse customer base open the door. Givhan hopes gatekeepers notice the returns on that openness, and that outsiders see a path inside.
