Robin Givhan
Robin Givhan
Robin Givhanis the fashion editor for The Washington Post. She left The Washington Post in 2010 to become the fashion critic and fashion correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. She returned to the Post in 2014. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first such time for a fashion writer. The Pulitzer Committee explained its rationale by noting Givhan's "witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEditor
Date of Birth11 September 1964
CountryUnited States of America
In the '50s, women aspired to dress like their mothers - this polished, controlled, formal way of dressing. Then all of a sudden in the '60s, going into the '70s, they stopped dressing like their mothers.
Films go into vaults, art into museums, and music into halls of fame. Most fashion is worn for a few seasons and off-loaded into the recycling bin or, worse, some landfill.
Designer Marc Jacobs ended his sixteen-year tenure at Louis Vuitton with a spring 2014 collection that celebrated fashion in its purest and least complicated form - as majestic, superficial beauty.
It's a fine line between commenting on social events and exploiting them in a commercial endeavor. This is the tension with which the fashion industry struggles - unfairly.
Fashion designers only occasionally tread outside the realm of clothes as pure commodity. When they do, the results are often a muddled, self-conscious message.
I have a rule that I don't review shows from photographs or from video. I certainly might go back and look at photographs and look at video to remind myself of something or for personal information. But I never review from that.
I've always summed up my definition of fashion as the way that people present themselves on the public stage.
I am a thorn in the side of designers.
Avoiding the appearance of queenly behavior is politically wise. But it does American culture no favors if a first lady tries so hard to be average that she winds up looking common,
Clothes are incredibly symbolic.
I do think younger women have to figure out how to combine their own sense of style with what is appropriate and authoritative. Some young women think there's no reason why they can't wear flip flops in the office in the summer because their accomplishments should exempt them from a stodgy dress code.
Because what the fashion industry loves, it woos - then swallows whole.
Over the course of the years, I've learned [that] fashion is a fascinating business about selling magic. It is done on the backs of our optimism and our insecurity. It is as much psychology as commerce. But I've also learned that every day we make split second decisions about people based on their attire and those decisions can have powerful implications - see the story of Trayvon Martin and his hoodie. It's important for us to understand how fashion works and how we connect to it.