Join Professor Alison Trope’s COMM 396g class “Fashion, Media and Culture” to discuss the role that race plays in the fashion industry. Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large for the Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism for her fashion coverage.

Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large for the Washington Post. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Princeton University and a master’s of science in journalism from the University of Michigan. In 1995, she arrived at the Washington Post where she began covering the news, trends and business of the international fashion industry. She also wrote a weekly culture column. In 2009, she began covering Michelle Obama and the cultural and social shifts stirred by the first African American family in the White House. From 2010-2012, she was special correspondent for style and culture at Newsweek Daily Beast. She returned to the Post in 2014 as fashion critic. In 2020, she was appointed senior critic-at-large.

Givhan’s work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Vogue Italia, British Vogue, Essence, Elle UK, New York and the New Yorker. She has contributed to several books including Runway Madness, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers, and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. She is the author, along with the Washington Post photo staff, of Michelle: Her First Year as First Lady.

Her first solo book, The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into The Spotlight and Made History, was published in March 2015. It is a cultural history of the 1973 Franco-American runway extravaganza that altered the trajectory of the fashion industry.

In 2006, she won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism for her fashion coverage.

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