Anna Wintour, Samira Nasr, Lindsay Peoples, Erik Maza and Rachel Tashjian helped Robin Givhan celebrate the debut of her new book Wednesday night at Chez Nous.
Before catching sight of Givhan, The Washington Post’s senior critic at large, guests passed by a table stacked with copies of “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh.” Wearing a flowing floral halter dress, the author greeted a stream of well-wishers that also included Antoine Gregory, Nancy Chilton, Bridget Foley, Agnes Cammock and Constance R. White among others.
Givhan’s summer read contextualizes how the Chicago-born multidisciplinary talent became a cultural leader by heading menswear for Louis Vuitton. Taking on that job in 2018, Abloh upended the industry and became the first Black artistic director in the luxury house’s 164-year history. His death at the age of 41 in 2021 was a global news story that was fueled in part by the millions who mourned him.
Her agent David Kuhn described the Pulitzer Prize-winning Givhan in a way that some already knew from firsthand experience — “low maintenance, not visibly neurotic, and always a pleasure to deal with.”
With a stable of big-name authors as co-chief executive officer of Aevitas, Kuhn said he has learned over the years that a writer can have a successful career, if they possess one of three talents — “being an elegant prose stylist, a dogged reporter or an original thinker, who sees what we all see, but sees it differently and is able to help us see the world in a new way.”
Although Givhan had some mixed feelings about Abloh over the years, “that critical eye” made her all the more curious to understand how Abloh became what he did, and amassed so much cultural influence and ended up in the most coveted job in the fashion world,” Kuhn said.
Abloh’s story is also about “how the multibillion-dollar fashion industry has evolved over the years,” Kuhn said. “Givhan never just writes about fashion, but how it intersects with history, politics and society.”
Having already garnered coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Essence, Publishers Weekly and National Public Radio besides other outlets, Givhan is keen to learn what people who “really looked up to” Abloh will make of the book.
She said she is also interested in the views of “the people who had some disagreement with him during the Black Lives Matter protests. Maybe they felt that he was not as responsive to their points of view as they wanted him to be. They are the ones that I hope that the book really reaches. I hope that they read it. I hope that it’s fair, and that it also captures the things that they really loved about him and the things that they [thought] could be frustrating or confounding.”
Asked about the initial response to the book, Givhan said she was surprised by the interest among “so many people outside of the fashion sphere.” She added, “That shouldn’t surprise me because I’ve always talked about how fashion doesn’t happen in a bubble. Obviously, fashion is culture. But when you see that in real time, it can take you off-guard. But that’s in a good way.”
Closing his remarks at the low-key affair in the Marlton Hotel, Kuhn asked guests to buy a copy of the Crown-published book on their way out and to spread the word, if they were inclined to do so. And having opened Chez Nous with his partner Kevin Thompson three weeks ago, he encouraged them to return for a meal, or they could just ask a manager for a table Wednesday night, after the party.