The Life of Groundbreaking Designer Virgil Abloh

Summary

All Of It Podcast Summary: The Life of Groundbreaking Designer Virgil Abloh

Hosted by Alison Stewart on WNYC’s "All Of It," this episode delves into the life and legacy of Virgil Abloh, the influential artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear, through the lens of Robin Givhan’s biography, Make It: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and senior critic at The Washington Post, provides an in-depth exploration of Abloh’s journey, his creative philosophy, and his impact on fashion and culture.

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Introduction to the Episode and Guest

The episode opens with Alison Stewart introducing the topic—Virgil Abloh's remarkable rise in the fashion world and his untimely passing in 2021. Stewart introduces Robin Givhan, the book's author, setting the stage for a comprehensive discussion on Abloh’s life and contributions.

[00:07] Alison Stewart: "In 2021, the fashion world mourned Louis Vuitton's menswear artistic director Virgil Abloh after he died of a rare form of cancer at just 41 years old."

Virgil Abloh: Creative vs. Designer

Givhan elucidates Abloh's self-identification as a "creative" rather than solely a "designer," highlighting the breadth of his ambitions and his multifaceted approach to art and fashion.

[02:04] Robin Givhan: "For Virgil, sort of being a creative meant that you had a wide range of sort of vocabularies available to you. And he used fine arts and he used furniture making and he used DJing. All of that was part of the way that he communicated."

This perspective underscores Abloh’s versatility and his ability to integrate various forms of expression into his work, making fashion just one facet of his broader creative endeavors.

Early Awareness and Involvement with Virgil

Givhan recounts her initial encounters with Abloh, primarily through his collaboration with Kanye West and his early ventures in menswear. His participation as an assistant and colleague to West positioned him as a significant yet enigmatic figure in the fashion industry.

[03:25] Robin Givhan: "My first encounter with Virgil was as this guy, you know, sitting in on a fashion show, just kind of taking it all in."

Virgil's Upbringing and Rockford, Illinois

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on Abloh’s upbringing in Rockford, Illinois. Givhan emphasizes how his midwestern, industrial-city background and experiences with segregation played a crucial role in shaping his identity and outlook.

[06:07] Robin Givhan: "Rockford was interesting to me because... Rockford was segregated, that it struggled with segregation in its school system even in the 1990s."

Understanding his roots in a segregated environment helps contextualize Abloh’s later efforts to bridge cultural and social divides through his work in fashion.

Education and Philosophy Shaped by Catholic School

Abloh’s education at a Catholic high school is highlighted as a formative experience that honed his social skills and emotional intelligence—traits that later became instrumental in his ability to navigate and influence the fashion industry.

[09:24] Robin Givhan: "They wanted their students to have the soft skills of life... a lot of people talked about Virgil's incredible emotional IQ and his ability to engage with people."

These skills not only made him likable but also fostered collaborative environments wherever he worked, a key aspect of his success.

Virgil's Diverse Background: Sports and Collaboration

Givhan touches upon Abloh’s involvement in soccer, illustrating his understanding of teamwork and collaboration—principles that translated seamlessly into his professional life.

[13:24] Robin Givhan: "It underscored that he understood the importance of collaboration, that being a part of the team was in some ways as satisfying, if not more satisfying than being necessarily the star."

Abloh's ability to build and lead creative communities is attributed to these early experiences in team sports.

Entry into Fashion: Pyrex Vision and Early Ventures

Abloh’s foray into fashion began with experimental projects like Pyrex Vision, where he ingeniously repurposed Ralph Lauren shirts by adding his own twist, thereby demonstrating his knack for merging high fashion with streetwear.

[16:38] Alison Stewart: "Virgil Abloh had an interesting thing he called the 3% rule. Would you explain that to us?"

[16:54] Robin Givhan: "Virgil would often say that if you changed a pre-existing object by 3%, you had in fact created something new."

This philosophy not only fueled his creative process but also positioned him as a pioneer in the evolving landscape of contemporary fashion.

Fashion Industry Dynamics and Virgil's Influence

Givhan explores the intersection of sports, hip-hop, and fashion, illustrating how figures like Abloh capitalized on these cultural overlaps to redefine menswear. The collaboration between athletes and fashion brands opened new avenues for cultural expression and diversity in fashion.

[16:54] Robin Givhan: "You have all of a sudden these mostly black players who become these fashion icons... and you have a black man stand at the top of, you know, the fashion world and sort of dictate trends."

Abloh’s role in this dynamic showcases his ability to harness cultural shifts and integrate them into mainstream fashion narratives.

Virgil's 3% Rule and Creativity

The 3% rule, as described by Abloh, emphasizes minimal yet impactful modifications to existing designs, fostering an environment of creativity that encourages reimagining established norms.

[19:21] Robin Givhan: "Virgil would often say that if you changed a pre-existing object by 3%, you had in fact created something new."

This rule became a cornerstone of his approach, allowing him to innovate while respecting the foundations of established brands and designs.

Appointment at Louis Vuitton: Cultural Strategy

Abloh’s appointment as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear is analyzed as a strategic move by the brand to align itself with contemporary culture and a younger, more diverse audience. His successful collaborations, particularly with Nike, demonstrated his ability to elevate brand presence through cultural resonance.

[21:34] Robin Givhan: "Louis Vuitton... wanted to get the attention of a growing, increasingly diverse customer base, a younger customer base. It looked to culture, people who were exciting the culture for its next designer."

His leadership at Louis Vuitton symbolizes the integration of high fashion with streetwear and popular culture, reinforcing his status as a cultural influencer.

Conclusion: Virgil Abloh's Legacy

The episode concludes by reflecting on Abloh’s enduring impact on fashion and culture. Through Givhan's biography, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of how Abloh's innovative spirit, cultural insight, and collaborative ethos transformed the fashion industry.

[23:08] Robert Givhan: "The book is really fascinating. It's called Make It: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh."

Robin Givhan's work serves as a testament to Abloh’s legacy, encapsulating his contributions and the cultural shifts he inspired.

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Final Thoughts

This episode of "All Of It" offers a thorough and engaging exploration of Virgil Abloh's life, motivations, and the cultural currents he navigated and influenced. Through insightful discussions and notable quotes from Robin Givhan, listeners gain a deeper appreciation of Abloh's role in shaping modern fashion and his broader cultural significance.

Transcript

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show tomorrow, we're going to preview HBO's new two part documentary about Billy Joel. NPR calls it revelatory. Co director Susan Lacey joins us to discuss. And on Friday's show, we'll talk about the new post apocalyptic film 40 Acres. It stars Danielle Deadweiler and she'll join us along with director Eric R.T. thorne. That's in the future. Let's get this hour started. In 2021, the fashion world mourned Louis Vuitton's Menwear artistic director Virgil Abloh after he died of a rare form of cancer at just 41 years old. A new biography and cultural history revisits his remarkable rise to fame. It's titled Make It Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. Born to Ghanaian parents, it traces his upbringing in Rockford, Illinois, to studying architecture to the founding of his brand Off White. The book reflects on the characteristics which allowed Abloh to make it in high fashion. First, he had talent, but he could also communicate well and he had a penchant for social media marketing and a unique theory on what made something fashionable. A Rolling Stone review states Make It Ours is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creat force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury. Make It Ours is on shelves now. Joining me now is the book's author. Robert Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize winning critic and the current senior critic at large at the Washington Post. It is really nice to speak with you.

[Robert Givhan]

Hi.

[Robin Givhan]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Alison Stewart]

In the book, you said Virgil saw himself more as a creative than a designer. In your mind, what's the difference between a creative and a designer?

[Robin Givhan]

Well, I think the biggest difference is in many ways sort of the breadth of ambition. You know, I think for the traditional classic designer, the focus is on the clothing and it's about being able to use clothing as your form of communication. Like that's your vocabulary. And so there is a tendency want to be as eloquent and articulate as possible as you communicate with that fashion vocabulary. For Virgil, sort of being a creative meant that you had a wide range of sort of vocabularies available to you. And he used fine arts and he used furniture making and he used DJing. All of that was part of the way that he communicated. As a result, I don't think that fashion was necessarily the sort of the strongest element in his repertoire, but it was the one that I think was the loudest.

[Alison Stewart]

You said that at first, Virgil Abloh.

[Robert Givhan]

Was a bit of a riddle to you. When did you first become aware of him?

[Robin Givhan]

You know, I really focused my coverage on women's wear, even though I sort of started off in covering the industry on the men's side. So his work was always kind of in my peripheral vision because he really started in menswear. And before that, he started as an assistant and then a colleague of the artist formerly known as Kanye West. And so Kanye's ambitions in fashion were quite well known, and Virgil was usually with him. And so in many ways, my first encounter with Virgil was as this guy, you know, sitting in on a fashion show, just kind of taking it all in. Then when he launched his brand, he was a semifinalist in a big fashion competition, the LVMH prize. And that's when I really had a chance to meet him and to talk to him about his work. But he was always kind of a presence because he was so interested in fashion. He was a fan even when he was very much sort of outside the center ring. And he was in particular a fan of Louis Vuitton.

[Robert Givhan]

When you first spoke to him, I think it was on Zoom. What. What did you talk about?

[Robin Givhan]

I had a chance to moderate a conversation and interview him in front of group of students who were all part of a scholarship fund that he had created. And it was, I think, in many ways, sort of the essence of Virgil. Right. You know, beforehand, one on one, he was the same as he was in front of students. And he would say to them, you know, as. As the time kind of moved on in the conversation, oh, I have all. I have plenty of time. Keep the questions coming. Keep the questions coming. He was very much. Someone wanted to break down the barriers. He wanted to be transparent about the way the industry worked. And he wanted them to understand that just because you don't have the qualifications that have been deemed important in order to reach particular goal, it doesn't necessarily mean that those are the only qualifications. And the ones that you might have can be different, but that doesn't mean they're any less valuable.

[Robert Givhan]

That's good advice for anybody right now, right?

[Robin Givhan]

Yeah, I think it is bad advice.

[Robert Givhan]

Washington Post senior critic at large Robin Givhan. Her new book is a biography and a cultural history of Virgil Abloh's rise. It's titled Make It Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. You spent a lot of time in your book discussing Rockford, Illinois, which is where he grew up. First of all, why did you Want to spend so much time describing Rockford, Illinois?

[Robin Givhan]

Well, you know, Virgil talked a lot about doing things to impress the 17 year old version of himself. He spent a lot of time celebrating 17 year olds, teenagers, young people, and really expressing how he valued their point of view. He valued what they thought was important, he valued their sense of style. And so I knew that any biography that tried to explore his sort of fashion origins really needed to kind of start with the 17 year old Virgil. And when he was 17 year old, 17 years old, he was living in Rockford, Illinois and he was going to Catholic high school. Rockford was interesting to me because often Virgil would be described as having sort of grown up in a suburb of Chicago. And Rockford is 90 miles outside of Chicago. I mean, it is equidistant between Chicago and the Iowa border and it's very close to Wisconsin. So it is very midwestern. It's an industrial city, it is small. It. You can very quickly go from, you know, modest, sort of rust belt era downtown to cornfields. And I think it was important that people understood that this was someone who came to fashion from a real dreamer's perspective, not someone who had kind of firsthand, you know, being able to like, see, see all the big designers, like right there, like just down the street. And I think it was important also to understand that in many ways Rockford was segregated, that it struggled with segregation in its school system even in the 1990s. And that in his decision, in his desire to go to this Catholic high school, which he had asked his parents if he could attend, that he was very much a minority within a minority there. And I think all of those things were really important in sort of shaping the way that he saw himself in relationship to the fashion industry and the way that he saw himself as someone who spent a lot of time living sort of in the, in between spaces and that you could flourish in those spaces.

[Alison Stewart]

It was sort of interesting how Catholic school helped shape, I don't know, philosophy is the right word or his aesthetic in a way.

[Robin Givhan]

Yeah, I mean, he didn't have to wear a uniform, but, you know, they still had to come to class, you know, shirt and tie. And I was struck by the way the president of the school sort of describes some of the sort of fundamentals that they taught there far, you know, outside of the, you know, the basic subjects. She said that they, they wanted their students to have the soft skills of life. And by that she meant the ability to walk into a room with adults and, you know, equip themselves well, to know how to engage people, to, you know, come in with the firm handshake and to send the follow up and note and to, you know, send flowers if necessary, to just sort of be sort of to be charming, for lack of a better word. And down the line, a lot of people talked about Virgil's incredible emotional IQ and his ability to engage with people, to be so likable in an industry where that can sometimes be challenging, and to just be able to be the person that people wanted to work with.

[Robert Givhan]

Did his parents, did they believe in.

[Alison Stewart]

That version of education or were they.

[Robert Givhan]

About the capital E education as immigrants?

[Robin Givhan]

They were very much about the capital either education. I mean, that is one of the reasons why Virgil studied engineering in college. You know, he said, my parents gave up a lot. They came to this country, they wanted an engineer for a son. The least I could do was give them an engineer.

[Robert Givhan]

In studying architecture, did it seem that his mind was on designing not just buildings, but something else?

[Robin Givhan]

I think he described the decision to study architecture as it was kind of the bridge between something that felt very analytical, the engineering and his desire and his interests in things that were creative. You know, even during college and high school, he was a dj. He took an art history class towards the very end of his college career on the Renaissance period and was just really engaged and just lured in by this idea that art could change a culture, that it could have that big of an impact on a society. And when he started at the Illinois Institute of Technology for architecture, you know, he didn't want to be an architect man, and something that he did not tell his parents that, but he was really interested in the sort of the thought process of architects and what it meant to be able to explore the idea that design could impact economics, it could impact civil civic life, it could impact the aesthetics of an entire community.

[Robert Givhan]

And before we leave, young Virgil Abloh, I have to ask about his career. He was a soccer player. He wasn't necessarily the best soccer player, but his coach said he was part of the whole process. He wouldn't expect anything. What did that mean to you?

[Robin Givhan]

Me, it underscored that he understood the importance of collaboration, that being a part of the team was in some ways as satisfying, if not more satisfying than being necessarily the star or being. Or going it alone. I mean, I think that was something that stayed with him and it was instructive in the way that he built a community of artistic people around him. And it was also, I think, in some ways a kind of bridge building activity because it Was, you know, a soccer team. You know, soccer is certainly popular here, but it's very much an international sport. And I think that to some degree also appealed to. To him.

[Robert Givhan]

My guest is Washington Post senior critic at large Robin Givhan. Her new book is Make It Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. When does fashion enter the picture? For Virgil Abloh.

[Robin Givhan]

It was always kind of bubbling underneath the surface, right? I mean, when he was a teenager, he was into, you know, sort of the skatewear brands, fascinated by the big designer brands, particularly Vuitton. Early on, he talks about saving up his pennies and buying, you know, this little sort of key chain pouch from Vuitton. The cheapest thing. Well, I shouldn't say cheap. The least expensive thing that the brand sold that he could afford. But it really kind of enters the picture when he is in architecture school and he starts silk screening T shirts. And the fascination grows through his relationship with Kanye west, who was desperate to start his own fashion line. And at a certain point, Virgil, who's working with him and becomes sort of his creative director as traveling 300 days a year and says to himself, you know, what am I building for me? And he begins by creating this art project, he called it, that was called Pyrex Vision. And he essentially bought dead stock Ralph Lauren rugby shirts and silk screened them with the words Pyrex 23. And he bought these shirts for about 30, $40 a piece. He sold them for well over $500, and they sold out. And I think that tells you a lot about the fashion industry. And it was also just the audacity of Virgil believing that by adding his personal mark to these Ralph Lauren shirts that he increased their value, that the sum of these two things was far more valuable than one of them alone.

[Alison Stewart]

And sort of happening tangentially to this is the fashion industry turning their attention to Gen X, to hip hop and the NBA, which was fascinating. Would you explain that a little bit?

[Robin Givhan]

Yeah, I mean, it was so much fun for me to go back and realize how all of these sort of dots, these discrete dots were connected. The NBA had sort of an image problem, it felt, and a lot of its young players were entranced by early hip hop culture and in particular, sort of the gangster look. And they'd also been plagued by, you know, some violent incidents, particularly one that happened at the palace in Auburn Hills, in Detroit, or outside of Detroit. And so they instituted this dress code that banned all of the sort of markings of hip hop from their wardrobe when they were on team business. But not on the court. And initially they really balked at these rules. But what happened is the entryways to these stadiums became these runways for athletes, and they leaned into fashion in a huge way. They realized they could use fashion, or at least their advisors and publicists realized that they could use fashion to build an image off the court separate from basketball. They realized it could be a launching pad for their own brands. And so you have all of a sudden these mostly black players who become these fashion icons who are appearing on the covers of magazines, who are sitting in the front rows of fashion shows, and it, you know, enhance everything gets more enhanced because menswear itself starts to have this huge impact on fashion with athleisure wear and with the blurring of gender. And then you have this massive impact on fashion, and you have black men who are, in fact, leading the charge. And I think that really opened up a world that was ready to have a black man stand at the top of, you know, the fashion world and sort of dictate trends.

[Alison Stewart]

Virgil Abloh had an interesting thing he called the 3% rule. Would you explain that to us?

[Robin Givhan]

Yes. Virgil would often say that if you changed a pre existing object by 3%, you had in fact created something new. And he loved tinkering with pre existing objects ideas. He loved collaborating with companies and riffing on product. Now, I think any copyright lawyer listening would argue that that is really not an actual principle. And Virgil was sued and he received plenty of cease and desist orders. And he was also very diligent, diligent about copywriting his own work. But he would say that as a way of kind of introducing this idea of do it yourself creativity that, you know, you didn't have to think about creativity as something that was really distant and formalized and required permission structure in order to engage with that you could change things and make them your own, and that you should then, you know, take that seriously and take your creativity seriously. So I think it was both something that he used proactively, but it was also a bit of a defensive mechanism too, because, you know, he didn't have formal fashion design training. He didn't have formal training in pattern making. And so being able to kind of say that he was a creative person who was playing with these pre existing ideas also kind of took the pressure off of people looking at his work and saying, oh, well, that looks a little derivative, or that's not, you know, like I've seen that before. I mean, I think he was able to kind of have it both ways.

[Robert Givhan]

If you had to think of one reason. There are many reasons why he was appointed artistic director at Louis Vuitton.

[Robin Givhan]

Yeah.

[Robert Givhan]

What do you think the main reason was?

[Robin Givhan]

I think it was Vuitton understood that it was a brand that really stood on culture, on popular culture. It was not a brand that was deeply rooted in sort of ready to wear. Even though it had a history of ready to wear, it was a recent history. But there's no garment that is in the Vuitton vocabulary that people immediately think of when they think of Vuitton. You think of a bag, you think of the logo. And so I think it in moving forward and in wanting to get the attention of growingly increasingly diverse customer base, a younger customer base, it looked to culture, people who were exciting the culture for its next designer. And I think that was one of one of the big reasons why it looked at Virgil and the light was really shining on Virgil because he had just done an incredibly successful and influential collaboration with Nike. And when a product at Nike excites people, it excites them in a very loud way and people notice.

[Robert Givhan]

The book is really fascinating. It's called Make It Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. It is by Robin Givhan. Thank you for taking time to share your reporting and share your story with us.

[Robin Givhan]

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

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