Pulitzer Prize–winning fashion critic Robin Givhan joins Sam Sanders to talk style, luxury, and legacy. Sam also asks the eternal question: which jeans should he wear — skinny, baggy, barrel, or wide leg? Robin offers sharp fashion advice and dives into her new book, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. They unpack the rebellious influence of Virgil Abloh — the late visionary behind Off-White and the first Black designer to lead Louis Vuitton—and how he blurred the line between streetwear and high fashion. She also breaks down the biggest challenges in fashion today, from TikTok microtrends to whether “high fashion” still matters.

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Have you heard of the “three percent rule”? It’s a design principle most recently attributed to Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton’s first Black creative head. The rule is simple, and quite controversial: if you make small, incremental changes to an existing product — even just a three percent change — then you’ve actually made something new. 

Abloh exploited this principle to the extreme. He’d patent a red zip tie on a shoe that someone else designed. He’d add the words “T-shirt” to a white tee and claim it was original and new. He’d put the words “Little Black Dress” on a little black dress, and well… you get the point. 

This week, I talked to Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion journalist Robin Givhan about Abloh’s legacy. She published a biography of the designer earlier this year. When I asked Givhan if she herself believed in the three percent rule, she laughed. “No, I don’t… And it got him [Abloh] into trouble, because he was the recipient of plenty of cease and desist orders.” 

Givhan paints a complicated picture of Abloh in her biography of him, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. On the one hand, he helped democratize the elite and insular world of high fashion, making it Blacker, younger, and more accepting of streetwear. But Abloh also couldn’t really sew, and his work could be sloppy. Even Givhan herself gave some of his runway shows negative reviews. 

“Virgil checked so many boxes,” Givhan told me. “Except he didn't really check any of the traditional boxes that high-end luxury designers typically do… he was this kid from the Midwest who loved hip hop and Michael Jordan. He also loved Nirvana and techno and Euro pop. He studied engineering and architecture. He was a DJ. He was as much a DJ as he was a designer, and he had this really sort of foundational relationship with the artist formerly known as Kanye West.”

Abloh died in 2021 from a rare cancer at the age of 41. Critiques of his legacy may be mixed, but Givhan has no doubts about the bigness of his impact. “Look what can happen when you widen your aperture,” she told me. “And look what can happen when instead of presuming that the qualifications that you've always valued are the only qualifications — instead, say these other qualifications, while different, could be just as valuable… I think the message that he sent to them [outsiders] was pretty simple but really profound: yeah, you can do this… There's no great mystery or magic to any of this. A lot of what happens in fashion is a bunch of smoke and mirrors and bull. Your ability to sell yourself and your ability to tell stories, and your ability to market and brand is just as valuable and powerful and can be defined as luxurious in the same way as these other folks who've been doing it all along.”

Check out the rest of our chat for not just more on Abloh and all he represented, but for Givhan’s report on the state of the fashion industry right now. And, as an added treat, Robin answers a question I can never seem to answer for myself: As a middle-aged man, what kind of jeans should I wear? Skinny, wide legged, something in between??!! I just don’t know. If you’re in the same boat as me, let Robin give you some guidance in this ep. 

Alright, with that, lemme know your thoughts on the three percent rule, or how you decide what kind of jeans to wear. Very curious to hear your takes! And come back next week for a lovely chat with one of my favorite podcast hosts of all time: Anna Sale, of Death, Sex and Money. We go big on those three themes, and then some. 

Have a *fashionable* weekend!

— Sam

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