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Home > Sangre Celestial > Fashion critic Robin Givhan’s lesson is simple: Show up
Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

Fashion critic Robin Givhan’s lesson is simple: Show up
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-09-13 16:00:00
Description: Fashion critic and writer Robin Givhan has built a career across major publications including the Detroit Free Press, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast. In 1995, she joined The Washington Post in 1995 where her position as fashion critic eventually evolved for her to write about everything from politics, to race, to art… And the deeper meanings behind personal style. In 2006, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first time that award was given to a fashion writer. In her latest book, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh, Givhan explores the legacy of the late fashion designer. More: Fashion writer Robin Givhan discusses her new book on the designer Virgil Abloh (The Treatment, 2025) For her Treat, Givhan looks back on her early days in journalism and the lesson that stuck with her: Sometimes, you just have to show up. She recounts an experience from her first internship, when she needed to track down a yearbook photo of someone who had passed away. Instead of getting tangled in red tape, she went straight to the school and got what she needed. Years later, she applied that same lesson while working on her book about Abloh. For Givhan, it’s proof that showing up gets you so much farther than a phone call or text. This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity. I think back to when I was a very young journalist, and it was, I think, probably my first internship. I was dispatched to go and get a picture of someone who had recently passed away. I had to go to the person's school and I got a copy of their yearbook, which had a picture of them, and I brought it back to the office. The editor had said to me, you just have to go and get it. Don't call anyone, because it's just going to be a lot of red tape, and it's going to take forever. We need it right away. And the lesson was really just that sometimes you just have to show up. Showing up gets you so much farther than being really formal, and hesitant, and going through all the red tape. And in reporting this book, I wanted to speak to Virgil Abloh’s parents. I had left a message, and I thought they're never going to get this message. I'm sure they're probably getting many, many messages. So I went to their home with a copy of an earlier book I had written, and I'd written a letter to them, and I slipped it into the book. My plan was to leave it in their mailbox. I rang their doorbell and I was going to put the book into the mailbox. When they came to the door, I introduced myself and we chatted a bit. And in the end, they ended up speaking to me about their wonderful son. I don't think that would have happened just from reading a message on their voicemail, so sometimes you just have to show up.
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