Robin Givhan on ‘Crashing the Gates of Culture’

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis speaks with Pulitzer Prize winning critic Robin Givhan about her book on the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. Then, Elvis speaks with Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino, the co-writers and co-stars of the new film Splitsville. And on The Treat, brothers and creative collaborators Chris and Paul Weitz talk about some thought-provoking inspirations.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com slash the treatment. Well, what can you say about the work of the
0:22.4	Pulitzer Park is a fashion writer? I think her as being a cultural critic, Robin Gavon. I think what's
0:28.6	great about her work is it contains the excitement of ideas and she's stimulated by what she writes
0:34.7	about in the same way that her participants seem to be
0:37.6	stimulated by the worlds in which they live. So I couldn't think of anybody to be the very
0:42.3	person to write the book crashing the gates of culture with Virgil Ablo. The book is to make it
0:47.0	ours. It's done in the font if you recognize Virgil's work in his font. First of all,
0:52.8	Robin, thank you so much for doing this. And I do think there's excitement in his font. First of all, Robin, thank you so much for doing this.
0:54.4	And I do think there's excitement in the prose.
0:57.8	And I can't think of anybody who connect, you know, small fashion bags and Peter Seville and Edward Buchanan,
1:07.3	but make them all about what I think the book is about, which is about basically the fact
1:12.1	that a person of color can have a multitude of interests and find a way to succeed with all those
1:17.1	interests. First of all, thank you for having me. And I would say that one of the fascinating
1:23.4	things about Virgil is that he was someone who would talk about not wanting to be
1:30.1	boxed in and he would talk about being comfortable living in the in-between spaces, in the
1:37.6	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.
1:49.3	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
2:05.5	like they are being boxed in and forced to be one particular thing in order to succeed in any kind of
2:17.1	sort of cultural endeavor.
2:19.3	I think there's so much interesting about it.
2:21.0	For one thing, I mean, there's kind of this through line that you have that connects
2:24.9	several people like him, Edward Ennful and Oswald Botan, who are all second generation
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