On NPR's Wildcard podcast, Michelle Obama says she's reinventing herself.

I don't know if my ambition has ever fully been able to actualize itself.

I think I'm now at a stage in my life where all my choices are mine.

I'm Rachel Martin. Listen to Wildcard for a conversation about balancing family and personal

growth with Michelle Obama. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today is Pulitzer Prize winning

senior critic at large for the Washington Post, Robin Gavon. Her voice is among the most

distinctive and influential in the world of American criticism.

She writes about fashion, not a surface-level aesthetics,

but a lens through which to examine politics, power, and how we see ourselves and each other.

Over the decades, Gavon has written essays that decoded First Lady Michelle Obama's 2009 decision to wear sleeveless dresses during formal and public appearances, a choice that became both a fashion statement and a

political one, to the unspoken codes behind Supreme Court Justice's robes and the symbolism embedded

in the Vatican's ornate vestments. She has also explored the spectacle of fashion weeks

and the powerful symbolism of the hoodie in the wake of Trayvon Martin's killing. Her latest book,

Make It Ours, crashing the gates of culture with Virgil Ablo, is both a vivid portrait of the late

designer and an examination of the world that shaped him.

Ablo, who died in 2021 at the age of 41,

following a private battle with a rare and aggressive form of heart cancer,

was best known as the first Black American

to serve as artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear.

He came of age in the 90s in 2000s, a time when

culture was shifting, remixing and challenging tradition. Givan explores how his vision and his

instincts as a digital native, deeply immersed in the disruptive ethos of hip-hop, cracked open elite

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