Time September 21/September 28, 2020any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential
publications in the multibillion-dollar global fash-
ion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to
Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue
and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately
held company is navigating, on top of an advertising
market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public
controversies around representation both in its of-
fices and on its pages.
Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a
critical moment for the international publisher. “I
wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to
show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place.
I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves
in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa
Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When oth-
ers took steps, Edward took massive strides, show-
ing the importance of our visibil-
ity and stories,” she says. Covers
since have featured the likes of
Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi
Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s old-
est cover star), Madonna and soc-
cer player Marcus Rashford, photo-
graphed for this year’s September
issue by Misan Harriman, the first
Black male photographer to shoot
a British Vogue cover in its 104-year
history. While other publications,
including American Vogue, have re-
duced frequency during the pan-
demic, British Vogue has remained
financially stable and is still pro-
ducing 12 thick issues in 2020.
Under Enninful, British Vogue
has morphed from a white-run
glossy of the bourgeois oblivious
into a diverse and inclusive on-
point fashion platform, shaking
up the imagery, tracking the con-
temporary pain. Its shelf presence
is different—more substance, more political—and
perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole
looks different. No more do Black women search
mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of them-
selves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in
my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it
took was to give a Black man some power, to give
someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the mar-
gin a seat at the table.
“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to
me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the pass-
ing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in
mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London
headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security
guard who told him to enter via the loading bay in-
stead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are
returning to normal, we cannot let the world returnto how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in
the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests
sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are see-
ing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutiniz-
ing who is doing what and who is not doing enough
to bring about real change in equality and represen-
tation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-
signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listen-
ing now, and we need to take advantage of that. This
is not the time for tiptoeing.”We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-
summer noon. When anticipating an interview
with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible,
it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your
Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest
unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassum-
ing, arriving in a loose navy suit,
pale blue shirt and shades, the only
giveaway to his sartorial imperium
the no socks with his brogues. He
is warm and relaxed, bearing the
close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong
hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most
days to meditate before work.
These days he resides toward
Lancaster Gate, on the posher
side of Ladbroke Grove, with his
long-term partner the filmmaker
Alec Maxwell and their Boston
terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his
own Insta gram account and whose
daily walking was a saving grace
during lockdown. But the London
Underground is where Enninful’s
journey into fashion began, one
day on the train in a pair of ripped
blue jeans, when he was spotted by
stylist Simon Foxton as a potential
model for i-D, the avant-garde Brit-
ish fashion magazine. Being only
16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian
army barracks and who was less than four years in
the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a
clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and
regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of
Porto bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary
of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity
of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into
its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew
I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something
special was going to come out of it.”
He never had the knack for modeling, he says
with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I
hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved
the process and the craft of creating an image.” He
soon moved to the other side of the lens, assist-
ing on shoots and assembling image concepts and‘I was always
othered—you
know, gay,
working-class,
Black. So for me
it was very
important with
Vogue to
normalize the
marginalized,
because if you
don’t see it, you
don’t think it’s
normal.’Profile