Fashioning
Change
British Vogue’s Edward Enninful shows
the power of inclusion
BY DIANA EVANS/LONDON
Profile
August 2020 sAw no socA floAts
sliding along West London’s Lad-
broke Grove. No pink feathered
wings or giant plumes of headwear.
The Notting Hill Carnival was can-
celed, like all mass gatherings in late
COVID lockdown, the streets still
spare, the air still choked with grief.
No curry goat or jerk pan smoke
rose up into the city trees. And the
music, the great churning music of
the Caribbean islands, of Black Brit-
ain, of Africa and the Americas, did
not thump to the foundations of the
neighborhood terraces, making them
tremble.
All of this would have been part
of a normal summer for Edward En-
ninful while growing up in the area in
the 1980s. His mother Grace might
look out of the window of her sewing
room in their house right on the Car-
nival route, and see some manifesta-
tion of Trinidad going by, or a reggae
crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures
of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward,
one of six siblings, would stay out lateand take it in, all that sound and spec-
tacle, which for decades has been the
triumphant annual pinnacle of Lon-
don’s cultural and racial multiplicity.
It was this world that nurtured
his creativity and helped shape the
vision he has brought to the pages of
British Vogue since being appointed
editor in chief in 2017. “I was always
othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic
walk through the streets of Ladbroke
Grove, a much gentrified, still bohe-
mian part of London, where he moved
with his family from Ghana at the age
of 13, “you know, gay, working-class,
Black. So for me it was very impor-
tant with Vogue to normalize the mar-
ginalized, because if you don’t see it,
you don’t think it’s normal.”
Today, Enninful is the most pow-
erful Black man in his industry, sit-
ting at the intersection of fashion and
media, two fields that are undergoing
long-overdue change and scrambling
to make up for years of negligence
and malpractice. Since becoming the
only Black editor in history to head