How Virgil Abloh Pried Open the Gates of Luxury Fashion

Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.

When Robin Givhan set out to write “Make It Ours”: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh, her new book on the late designer, she didn’t want to take the traditional biographical route of, as she describes it, “He was born on a cool fall day.” Instead, The Washington Post senior critic-at-large and Pulitzer Prize winner was intent on chronicling 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.

When Abloh died in 2021 at only 41, he left a complicated legacy. His career in fashion lasted less than a decade, but he packed infinite activity into that time. Givhan bookends Abloh’s story with that of other Black designers—Edward Buchanan and Ozwald Boateng, who preceded him in the industry, and Pharrell Williams, who succeeded him at Louis Vuitton menswear—to situate Abloh in the place and time that he arrived in fashion. “I knew that when [Louis Vuitton] announced Pharrell as the next designer, that was going to be the coda,” she says. “So, in a weird way, I already knew what the coda was before I even started.”

“Make It Ours” by Robin Givhan

Before Abloh entered the scene, the highly gatekept world of luxury had started to nudge open its doors a bit in the interest of attracting a younger and more diverse customer base. Abloh, she says, “benefited from the fact that fashion had become so much more online, not just with streaming shows, but because [being] online allowed for designers, if they chose, to be able to connect directly with their customers. Virgil took that to the next level, not just putting things out there for customers to see or doing videos to talk directly at customers, but really engaging with them—in some cases hiring them. He also benefited from the fact that consumers had a way to talk back to the industry really loudly and in unison.”

Another factor was what she calls “the changing culture around menswear…I don’t think that if [Abloh] had been designing women’s clothing first and foremost, he would’ve been invited to take the helm of women’s Dior, but menswear was a very different vehicle.” The culture of sneakers, which was and is still heavily driven by male collectors, allowed Abloh to ascend to superstar status despite not checking the boxes of, say, attending fashion school or having the initial backing of a major brand. One of the most illuminating passages in Givhan’s book looks at the way we still dismiss women’s interest in fashion, while valorizing men’s interest in it. “You know how sometimes you’re writing, and you shock yourself once you realize that the words that have always been associated with a particular topic, how charged they are? And how they allow people a kind of dignity and power that other words don’t?” Givhan says. “I was thinking about the conversations that men were engaging with when it came to sneakers specifically, and how they’re referred to as hypebeasts. They’re on the prowl. They’re on the attack, and they’re not called fashion victims.”

Abloh with A$AP Rocky at his spring 2019 Louis Vuitton menswear show.

It almost goes without saying that Abloh also benefited from the turbocharged celebrity culture of 2010s fashion. As a close collaborator of Kanye West and the creative director of his agency Donda, Abloh became a celebrity in his own right, leveraging his famous friends to bring attention to his projects and presaging the rise of celebrities like Pharrell taking the helm at luxury brands.

Kaia Gerber backstage with Abloh at the fall 2019 Off-White show.

While he became the ultimate insider, Abloh retained the trappings of an outsider in multiple ways: he was a Black man in a predominantly white industry, a Midwesterner in the fashion capitals of Paris and New York, and a self-taught designer who applied the same sampling he did as a DJ to his fashion creations. He also saw himself as a disruptor, looking to figures like Steve Jobs just as much as he did fashion designers. While fashion has long thrived on exclusion, Abloh wanted to bring more people into the fold, and not necessarily just his customers. When he unveiled his debut collection for Louis Vuitton menswear in Paris, he invited 3,000 fashion students to sit in the audience. “He was someone who lifted the veil of secrecy, so to speak. He was willing to share prototypes of sneakers during a speech. He would toss the sneaker into the audience so people could actually look at it. He would post the backstory and the design process on his Instagram. Fashion can be so opaque that just to shine a little bit of light and demystify it is incredibly helpful,” Givhan says. Of course, his democratization of fashion wasn’t total: He positioned Off-White as a luxury brand, with the prices to match. But even though his pieces weren’t in reach for all, “I would argue that Virgil made [fashion] more accessible because he recognized the vastness of the dream and said, ‘Your dream is valid. Come on in.’”

Abloh with Naomi Campbell at his Princess Diana-inspired spring 2018 show for Off-White.

Givhan also looks at the way Abloh’s experience as the child of Ghanian immigrants to the U.S. shaped his approach to his career. His parents prioritized what she calls the “protective layers” of education that they felt guaranteed a future in their new home country, and Abloh earned a B.S. in civil engineering and a master’s degree in architecture well before his name was ever bandied about in fashion circles. “If you just look at it in outline, it makes it seem like he went from 0 to 100 practically overnight, and his trajectory was extremely fast,” Givhan notes, “but there were many, many incremental steps along the way.”

His second-generation identity was “key to understanding more about his temperament, his ambition, the dutifulness that he would express in his choice of studying engineering, and the sense of urgency that he seemed to have about succeeding,” she says. It also meant that Abloh, despite being a member of the sellout-averse Generation X, had a more deferential disposition than many of his peers. His love of disruption has its limits: “He did not want to turn over tables inside the boardroom. He wanted to be able to sit at the head of the table.”

A guest wearing one of Abloh’s Wizard of Oz-inspired designs during men’s fashion week in Paris.

The same openness that Abloh cultivated with his fans and followers became a liability during the racial reckoning of 2020. “You started to see some tension between that attitude and many of his fans in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder,” as he was criticized for a perceived failure to meet the moment. “His centrist demeanor had been taken to task, and he was having to wrestle with that in real time,” she says.

Even now, Abloh’s legacy is still unfolding, which made writing about him both fascinating and challenging. “I really wonder, where would he be in a moment like this? Would he still say, ‘I’m not a rebel. I’m not a flamethrower?’ And if he did, how would that sit with the people who were fans of his? That’s, to me, the sad thing, that you don’t get to see that evolution,” Givhan says. “With a lot of people who cast a big shadow and died quite young, there is, I think, a kind of magnifying effect that happens. You see their accomplishments magnified because you are comparing it to all the things that could have been.”