BIOGRAPHY, JOURNALS & LETTERS

From Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Robin Givhan comes a groundbreaking chronicle of the legacy of Virgil Abloh, whose iconic rise to the top of the fashion industry transformed our ideas about the connection between who we are and what we wear

In 2018, shockwaves were sent around the fashion industry when Virgil Abloh was appointed the head of menswear for Louis Vuitton. Despite no formal training in pattern-making or tailoring, Abloh had become the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s 164-year history
Make It Ours tells the story of how that moment came to be and how Abloh came to symbolise and embody the industry’s way forward. Using Abloh’s surprising path to the top of the luxury establishment, Givhan unfolds the larger story of how the cloistered, exclusive fashion world faced a revolution from below in the form of streetwear and designers unafraid to storm the gate, and how a simple t-shirt came to hold as much cultural power as a haute couture gown.

With unparalleled access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan weaves a spellbinding tale of a young man’s rise amidst a cultural moment that would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste. This is at once a remarkable biography of a singular creative force and a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury.

Bill Gates is one of the most transformative figures of our age. In Source Code he takes us back to his beginnings.
We see Gates’s extraordinary mind developing, the restless teenager who discovered a love of coding and computing at the dawn of a new era and felt that ‘by applying my brain, I could solve even the world’s most complex mysteries’. We see the earliest signs of his phenomenal business acumen, which led him to drop out of Harvard at the age of 20 to devote all his energies to Microsoft, the company he started with his childhood friend Paul Allen. He writes about his first involvement with three Steves – Jobs, Wozniak and Ballmer – who would play a crucial role in so much that followed.

The book ends in the late 1970s when Microsoft, still with only a dozen employees, signed its first deal with Apple. The deals would go on and Microsoft would grow unimaginably. Yet Gates never forgot his mother’s reminder that he was merely a steward of any wealth that he gained. This warm and inspiring book, Bill Gates’ origin story, allows readers to understand his energy and ambition – and to see how he sets himself in the world.

With revealing, never-before-told stories, Fred C. Trump III, nephew of President Donald Trump, breaks his decades-long silence in this revealing memoir and sheds a whole new light on the family name.