Robin Givhan on ‘Crashing the Gates of Culture’

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0:31It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at kcrw.com slash the treatment. Well, what can you say about the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer? I think there is being a cultural critic, Robin Gavon. I think what's great about her work is it contains the excitement of ideas, and she's stimulated by what she writes about in the same way that her participants seem to be stimulated by the worlds in which they live. So I couldn't think of anybody to be the very person to write the book, Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. The book is Make It Ours.

1:03It's done in the font. If you recognize Virgil's work and his font. First of all, Robin, thank you so much for doing this. And I do think there's excitement in the prose. And I can't think of anybody who connect, you know, small fashion bags and Peter Saville and Edward Buchanan, but make them all about what I think the book is about, which is about basically the fact that a person of color can have a multitude of interests and find a way to succeed with all those interests. First of all, thank you for having me. And I would say that one of the fascinating things about Virgil is that he was someone who would talk about not wanting to be boxed in.

1:47and he would talk about being comfortable living in the in-between spaces, in the off-white spaces. But he didn't just talk about it. I mean, he really actually did it and invited other people to be comfortable doing the same thing. And I think that's one of the reasons why so many people connected with him because there are a lot of people out there, you know, Black creatives in particular, who have these really wide-ranging interests and often feel like they are being boxed in and forced to be one particular thing in order to succeed in any kind of sort of cultural endeavor. I think there's so much interesting about it.

2:37For one thing, I mean, there's kind of this through line that you have that connects several people like him. Edward Ennful and Oswald Boateng, who are all second generation African immigrants who brought a certain kind of ethos to their new places. And in fact, they all have really kind of formal first names that sort of engender aspiration from their parents. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that took me by surprise when I was reporting the book was, I think, the importance of Virgil's sort of second generation, or I guess its first generation American identity. because when I went back and, you know, as they say in journalism, you know, read the clips, he was always referred to as the son of Ghanaian immigrants.

3:24He was never referred to simply as African-American, which would have been correct. You know, he was a kid who grew up in Rockford, Illinois. And the more I talked to other people who had a similar background, the more it seemed to me that that identity was really important in the way that he moved through the world in his you know professional guise and it was important I think in the way that the professional world perceived him particularly the fashion industry he was not burdened by the same kind of history that Black Americans are burdened by. Well, I think it's interesting, too, because like you were saying, Oswald Boateng, Edwin Edinfeld, who was the first personal color to be an editor of Vogue, British Vogue, had similar backgrounds.

4:26And there's this thing that you pointed at the book, too, that actually brought to mind to me the old and living color sketch about the Jamaican family who all had 10 different jobs. There's a kind of an ethos of not giving up, not ever having a free moment that he actually sort of had till the end of his life. I honestly do not know how he accomplished it all. I mean, there's often this sense of hindsight when someone, you know, dies particularly young and Virgil was only 41 when he passed away in 2021. There's this question of, you know, they somehow innately know that their time was going to be limited.

5:05And so they sort of rushed to do everything that they possibly could. And, you know, Virgil certainly took on that kind of ethos. I mean, this was a guy who had basically a career as a DJ. He was also doing an incredible number of collaborations with all sorts of companies. He started his own brand, Off-White. He was working at Riton, but he was also, you know, doing things related to fine art. And he was, you know, contributing, you know, to other people's projects. He worked on gallery exhibitions. So, I mean, I don't know if it was sort of like the immigrant thing that pushed him to do all those kinds of projects.

5:59But it was certainly this desire to be in every possible space that he could. And it seemed like he especially wanted to be in those places where his presence would be seen as something of a surprise. I never met him, but I know a couple of people who knew him a little bit. And the thing you get at this in the book, that everybody says about him and who spent time with us that he would make time if he just met some new person. Next thing you know, he's talking to you for 15 minutes. You're wondering, don't you have someplace else to be? Yeah. I mean, he would do that. He would respond to people who DM'd him over social media.

6:40He hired people who DM'd him over social media. He was definitely a sort of people person and spent a lot of time speaking in the first person plural about the brand that he founded. You know, and some of that you sort of, you know, you're a bit, at least I was a bit skeptical and just thought, okay, you know, is some of this just like good marketing? but you know I had the chance to listen to an interview that he had done all the way back in 2008 and even then when he had very little experience sort of in out in the business world and certainly within the fashion world he was talking about wanting to mentor people so that did seem to be something that was embedded in him, but I think was also sort of good business sense, right?

7:38Like you never know where a great idea is going to come from. And he was someone who really relied on youth culture as font of inspiration. And that was also his sort of customer base. So it definitely made sense that he should be as open as possible to getting information and ideas and feedback from young people who would sort of come over the transom. The one thing I thought about, and that there's this sort of constancy in him that connects him to Kanye, to a group of people who basically grew up with hip hop. In this respect, the kind of third generation of hip hop people, they understand the ruthness of Black culture.

8:23If you're not constantly keeping an ear out, then you're going to be left behind. And that to me seems subtext in a lot of the stuff that you say about him. He talked a lot about wanting to do things that would impress his 17-year-old self. And wanting to speak to and respect the 17-year-old consumer. And what is really hard about that is, you know, that is a consumer base that is constantly churning through information and changing and getting on to the next thing, you know, at the speed of light. So it is a very challenging point of view to have. So he really needed to be in a constant state of change.

9:10He really needed to be sort of constantly with his ear to the ground, trying to figure out like what the next thing was going to be. And yeah, his relationship with Kanye was beneficial, difficult, influential, all the things. More of my conversation to come with Pulitzer Prize winning fashion critic Robin Gavon, whose new book is Make It Ours, Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Amblo. After this break, it's The Treatment. It's The Treatment. We're talking to the author of the book, Make It Ours, Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Amblo, Pulitzer Prize winner by Robin Gavon. You also have a show at kcow.com slash the treatment.

9:52But I was just so taken, there's a section of the book, I'm not going to ask you to read it since I have the book here in front of me. no established school of fashion. His work couldn't be characterized as avant-garde, minimalist, or deconstructed. That's true, it couldn't be, but yet there's a part of Black culture that demands that if you're aware of art, that your work has to encompass all of those things. And it did, didn't it? I mean, I haven't had all the shoes, the 10, and stacked in front of me. I'm sitting here in my garage by myself, and I can't look at this and not think about Andy Warhol and what Robert Hughes says about Warhol and celebrity and commodification.

10:30Just that need to sort of constantly assess who you are, assess what's going on around you. And in effect, if you're a Black person who's creative, you're kind of like the T-1000. That cursor is always like detecting what's happening around you. And he was kind of that person who did deconstruct and was a minimalist and avant-garde all at the same time, wasn't he? I would say that he was someone who, yes, absorbed the culture around him, you know, constantly and was willing to look high and low and to celebrate both things. I mean, that was, I think, part of the impact that he really had on the idea of luxury.

11:10I'm not going to say he saw through the sort of smoke and mirrors, but he certainly recognized that sort of the Eurocentric way of describing luxury was really becoming obsolete. and that the things that people valued, those 17-year-olds that he was thinking about, you know, had nothing to do with the beloved DNA that French luxury brands love to talk about. And what got them excited were, you know, things like sneakers or, you know, a T-shirt that connected them to a particular community and showed how plugged in they were to a particular vibe. And, you know, he recognized that those were luxury items just as much as, you know, a bespoke suit was a luxury item because those things were deeply valued.

12:13Those things could be incredibly elusive and hard to come by. Those things required a certain amount of insider knowledge in order to find, in order to appreciate. And depending on what the sneakers you happen to be talking about, they could also appreciate and value significantly. So, yeah, I mean, he was in that kind of Warholian way looking at sort of things that might have at one point be considered just sort of banal commercial products. and recognizing that if you put them into a different context and allowed them to be viewed through a different lens, you could see the value in them. You could increase the value of it.

13:08Well, as you know in the book, it doesn't hurt to sort of bring Marcel Duchamp into all this, so it doesn't seem like you're just talking about mixing things up. But I think as a fellow editor... Can I just say about Duchamp? Virgil loved talking about Duchamp and God bless because, you know, I think two things about Duchamp. One, I think that, and I agree with Blake Gopnik, the art critic that I interviewed, in that fashion does not need to rely on the verbiage of fine art in order to prove that it has important cultural value. So that's sort of one of the things that kind of bothered me a little bit about the Duchamp quote.

13:57But it was also a bit, a lot of a cop-out. I mean, he would say after he sort of copied something or just sort of took something whole hog and declared it his own that Duchamp was his lawyer. Virgil walked a very fine line when it came to issues of copyright and trademark. And sometimes he did not walk it well. I have to say, in reading the book, it was for me kind of like a murder mystery. I was waiting for April Walker's name to come up, and you wait till the very, very end of the book. She is. Yeah, she is. And you had to plan that because that couldn't just be fortuitous. Why don't you explain exactly what we're talking about here with April Walker?

14:49First, I like to refer to something he called his 3 % philosophy. and it was this idea that if you took something, you took a ready-made, you know, to use an art term, and you changed it by 3%, you had essentially created something new. You know, in a favorable light, it was his way of saying to people, to do-it-yourselfers, that you could take, you know, a Nike shoe and you could ride on it or you could take it apart And you can really make it into something that was uniquely yours. But the problem with that is, you know, there's no 3 % rule in copyright law. Virgil was the regular recipient of cease and desist orders.

15:39And, you know, he was sued because he was taking things that belong to other people. And he was reusing it. And it didn't matter if he changed it by 2 % or 10%. If it was someone else's copyright, you know, it was still someone else's copyright. And finally, he was sued by April Walker, who had created one of the early sort of hip-hop brands, Walkerware, and, you know, had a copyright. He took the sort of WW insignia in her font and he used it. And, you know, she was really taken aback. And, you know, it was pointed out to her by people who saw the garments online and thought that she had collaborated with Virgil.

16:30and she felt like, you know, fine, if you want to do an homage, then give me credit, but this isn't an homage. And I think she was also hurt, I think, because she was a woman who had succeeded in an overwhelmingly masculine world. And when Virgil kind of sort of took her trademark, she didn't get a lot of support from the consumer base that she had been working with and developing over the years. So that was a lot of hurt that went beyond just a copyright infringement case. And this was settled, you know, after he had passed away. But for Virgil, So the idea of the 3 % philosophy was both a way for him to get away with a lot of things.

17:32It was a way to, I think, wrap his creativity in a certain amount of intellectualism. And it was also a way of, you know, leaning into another philosophy of his, which was, you know, giving people the cheat codes to success. It's the truth. My guest is reminding us that irony is not a legal defense, as Robin Givon. Her book is Make It Ours, Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abla. You can also show KCRW.com slash the treatment. As much as anything, his life is about the prominence of the sneaker in Black culture. And it's something that certainly preceded him. And it's about juxtaposition.

18:17It's about that thing, you know, we know kids growing in Detroit, you see somebody, this one that was completely sort of counterintuitive to wear a pair of Converse All-Stars with a suit. and the way that that, I think, is its own sort of cultural earmark, something that specifically belongs to Black culture. And I think that culture that Virgil was a part of was like the next sort of step of blending all those things together. But that was a huge thing. As a kid, you see someone wearing a pinstripe suit and a pair of sneakers. I was just talking to somebody about this a few months ago. even in jamaica i mean in cultures around the world what sneakers meant you'd see um all the reggae artists wearing adidas and at his wedding in 1972 mick jagger is wearing a a tan suit and a pair of adidas and he clearly lived a bit from from black culture and i feel like virgil was kind of like the exemplar of that in so many ways about bringing these things that seem kind of discord it together.

19:19And a lot of that is about sifting and sampling. And I'm not going to go do champ on this here, but keeping an eye on the things that marked Black culture that were sort of dying to be brought into the mainstream. Researching this, it was so interesting to kind of go back and connect some of the dots about things that you just sort of never know when something, an event happens, like how it's going to sort of spiral a decade later. I mean, just the impact that Black men have had on fashion writ large is extraordinary. And so much of it goes back to sneakers and sports, athletes, the NBA dress code, you know, and that happened and there was such pushback.

20:07And yet that really opened the floodgates for athletes, particularly basketball players to become these fashion icons who, you know, began being featured on the covers of fashion magazines and sitting front row in fashion shows. And those guys, those athletes became the fashion icons that people looked up to, that they looked to for cues about what was cool and what wasn't. And not just, you know, Black kids, but kids in general. And that is because, you know, those basketball players were predominantly Black men. Men's were recognized that and embraced them, wanted to dress them. Basketball players, the athletes themselves recognized that and realized that it could be a tool for creating an identity far outside of the world of sports.

21:08And menswear then became this incredibly impactful part of the industry that has given us athleisure and sneaker culture and, you know, blurring of gender when it comes to fashion. so you know black men are like you know the the fashion movers and shakers in a way that you know black women are not even close to being and that was really important and helpful for Virgil certainly and I don't think he would have gotten the job at Vuitton had he not done the collaboration with Nike on the 10. I mean, that was an extraordinarily important inflection point in his career. As I think about all the stuff you've done, especially in this book about chronicling the movement of Black manhood over the past three or four decades, I can't help but bring up your beautiful piece, your remembrance of Malcolm Jamal Warner in the post.

22:17Thank you. That was such a heartbreaking, such heartbreaking news. For me, it connected, too, with the story of Virgil, just because of these young, these Black men who still had promise, who still had careers ahead of them, who people still thought about with enormous affection. It's funny because that piece you wrote about Malcolm Jamal Warner could have been a section of the book. You're charting the growth. You're about how young Black men can use fashion as a way of trying to identify themselves, about how they relate to family, about how we relate to seeing a family. that were exemplars of Black excellence, but also of excellence.

22:57And also just about how there can be a certain amount of taint around all these things. But, you know, how positivity and the right impact can keep those memories alive for us. And it's a very complicated thing, the Cosby Show. Again, that piece that you wrote touched on so many things you get at the book, including watching a Black man mature. I had a conversation, you know, with one of the editors here ahead of writing the piece about Malcolm Jamal Warner. And of course, we talked about the impact that, you know, Bill Cosby's legacy has had on the show's legacy. and you know I said to her you know while all of that is true and even though it was in fact called the Cosby show the show was as much about the children as it was about the parents and what I really and I think a lot of people loved about the character that Warner played Theo was that Theo was, he was in the middle.

24:04He played such a normal kid. Like he wasn't this pinup band boy, cute person. And he wasn't playing this excessively geeky Urkel figure either. He was just normal. And he got to be vulnerable and he got to make mistakes. And you never had this sense of like nail-biting worry that oh my goodness like is this mistake gonna like turn out badly for him and Virgil in some ways was kind of a similar guy there were things that were very relatable and normal about him and the degree to which people talked about how accessible he was and how he was just, how he was a nice guy. And that seems like such a small thing, but he was also a really optimistic person.

25:06You know, he once said that like, I choose optimism, particularly now, you know, and the book Landing Now. I think that is a really powerful statement because he wasn't naive and he didn't have blinders on, but he chose to allow himself to be optimistic and it's something of a privilege to be able to be optimistic to really sort of live in optimism and he allowed himself that privilege well gosh i think that's kind of a hallmark of your work too because so much of what you write about is about you find a way to bring social justice and injustice into it and perception versus reality and how perception often doesn't slow to people who are real pioneers well well thank you the perception that people often have of how others are thinking about them can sometimes leave them paralyzed and i think virgil was a really good lesson in not letting that happen.

26:16I mean, another thing that he would, or another way that he had about him was not being a perfectionist. And, you know, that isn't to say that he was sort of shoddy about things, but sure, you know, his output was uneven. Some of it was good. Some of it was great. Some of it was not great at all, but he kept putting stuff out. And a lot of people don't even put out mediocre stuff. Like they don't even get that far because they're so worried about how it's going to be received. And Virgil liked to use the word practice and liked to talk about prototypes. and some of that was very protective because if you consider everything that you're doing to be a prototype and someone then criticizes it, you can sort of shrug it off and say, oh yeah, well, you know, that was just practice.

27:18But it also kept him from stalling and a lot of people just sort of live in a state of constantly being stalled. Well, I'm glad you're not one of those people. My guest is Washington Post writer and little surprise winner, Robin Givon. Her book is Make It Ours, Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. It's a really valuable piece of literature. And I think it's a book that, as I was saying before we got started, is buoyant and full of ideas and a ton of fun to read. And about the history of Black style and Black achievement of the last 50 years. Robin, I can't thank you enough for doing this.

27:58Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

28:04The thoughts of Robin Givon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning style critic for The Washington Post, on the cultural phenomenon known as Virgil Abloh. He's the central figure of her book, Make It Ours, Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. Find it where books are sold. Watch Breaking of Boundaries at the archive, kcrw.com slash the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. There's more to come.

28:47KCRW sponsors include FX's The Bear, starring Emmy-winning stars Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Adebri, and Eben Moss-Bachrak. The critically acclaimed Season 4 finds the team determined to survive and take the bear to the next level. Rolling Stone declares Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Debrey keep finding new levels of rawness and vulnerability. For your Emmy consideration, an outstanding comedy series. The Bear is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. It was natural that the romantic entanglement comedy Splitsville would have its debut at the Cannes Film Festival. You'll find out why in this conversation from Khan about Splitsville with its co-stars and co-writers, Michelangelo Covino and Kyle Marvin.

29:31Covino also directed the film. What's so great about the way you guys work is that you make movies about guys who are presumably adults, who have all the accoutrements being adults except for maturity. Presumably is the key word. And also I love the bookending of the film with those 80s songs about sex. Sex. And I was telling you, it reminded me of the French films and comedies of the 70s. It also reminds me, there's a Paul Mazursky movie called Bloom in Love. So funny you say that. Because Kyle watched that, he just calls me, he goes, you gotta watch this movie right now. Right before we went in prep.

30:06There's a line in Bloom in Love where George Segal says, if I lose my wife, I will die. I do not want to die. Therefore, I must get her back. One thousand percent. And I thought about that, especially with your character. Of course, of course. Yeah, you know, we talk about he's not necessarily a hopeless romantic, but he's a hopeless optimist, I think. Which is also what those two songs are about, too. Right. He wants things to go the right way. And I think sometimes when you want things to go the right way and it's falling apart around you, you just try and hold on as much as you can. And that's a great character to put through hell.

30:37And I think that's sort of what we wanted to do, is like, great, take someone with that mentality and then just put him through all of the worst things you could imagine. But Mike, your character, when we meet him, he seems like the most grown-up of anybody. You know, he's got this very European relationship with his wife. He's got this beautiful architectural digest house. He's got this kid who sees this sort of behavior when he steals, he's not stealing boats from him. I love the pivot, the immediate pivot to infantile behavior. Yeah, I mean, that was very much, I think, part of the impetus for why we even wanted to make this movie was like, we are these people and we know these people who everything's together on the surface you look at the house you look at the way they present themselves but you're like under the surface there's something else going on and we just loved exploring like the children in us who would throw temper tantrums and get upset and and hit people and because they didn't get what they wanted it's still like there it's just buried under this facade of sophistication and and you know grown-up-ness nobody is what they seem you guys are really like fighting those kinds of characters don't you where you get this immediate sort of vivid first impression, really vivid impressions of characters who 10 minutes into the film, I don't know these people anymore.

31:51I want you to talk about writing characters like that. Yeah, I think we love that the most because it happens with everyone. Everyone says something and means the absolute opposite. So part of the fun of us, of what we do in our writing process, is we go to those moments of explosion, those moments that we really find compelling, and then we go back and say how can we justify getting there so it so you just there's no way a character can't make this reprehensible decision or this insane choice in this moment it's the only thing available to them and so we sort of walk our process that way and it's really fun to sort of map how far we can push the audience and have them still stay on yeah it's like emotional subterfuge you're going okay we know this is going to happen we know that this is under the surface so what can we do to because because that's the beauty of people we're walking we're all walking sort of contradictions in a way.