Perhaps no fashion designer understood better than Virgil Abloh (1980–2021) the thousand forces that turn a bag, shoe, or dress into “fashion.” The scare quotes are intentional. Abloh often used them himself, making, for example, a little black dress with “little black dress” written on the side. On October 14, to mark FIT’s Civility Week, the Pulitzer Prize–winning fashion journalist Robin Givhan discussed Abloh’s visionary career with the writer Emil Wilbekin, assistant professor of Marketing Communications.
In 2018, when Abloh was appointed the artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, he became the first Black designer to head up a French luxury fashion house. Trained as an architect, but fascinated with skateboarding, DJing, and social media, Abloh was known for creating bridges between couture and marginalized subcultures. Givhan’s 2025 book “Make It Ours”: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh takes stock of the young mogul’s ambition and achievements. (It was also FIT’s Common Read for 2026–27.) She explained the book’s title to Wilbekin: “Virgil was a business person, but he liked to talk about fashion as something that was inclusive of a much wider range of people than the luxury world typically represented. So that was the idea of the ‘ours’ part of it. But it was also that the definition of luxury was changing, and Virgil had a hand in helping it change. When people raised an eyebrow at the prices of his clothes, he would say, ‘Well, then you should make something of your own.’”
Abloh, Givhan said, used social media creatively, disruptively. He hired people he met in his DMs and once invited all his followers to one of his couture shows, creating “a bit of a security issue,” she said. The Paris fashion establishment didn’t like that.
A student asked what Givhan had learned from writing about Abloh. She recalled something the designer said when he first heard he’d gotten the LVMH job. At the time, he was considered a long shot, in part because he had little formal fashion design training. “He said something along the lines of, ‘I’ve been running a fashion business. I’ve been creating clothes. I have been working really hard to become better. So I’m not sure why people are so surprised. Why not me?’”
Hosted by FIT’s Diversity Collective, the event was introduced by Deliwe Kekana, FIT’s chief diversity officer. The FIT Common Read Program is designed to foster a sense of community by encouraging a shared intellectual experience across the college.