VOLUME II / ISSUE XII / DECEMBER 2018
Enninful says. A woman who had been photographed thousands of times was revealed anew. By fall, it seemed that Enninful had created a ripple effect. Traditionally the most advertisement-packed issue of the year, the September fashion magazines have long been stubbornly homogenous. But this year, major magazines featured women of color on the cover. But Enninful led the way with Rihanna wearing a dramatic floral headdress, with the hand-drawn eyebrows of a silent movie siren and lips glimmering like lacquered blackberries. It marked the first time a black woman had ever appeared on a British Vogue September issue. “He has a vision and a talent for telling a story,” Newhouse says of Enninful, whom he has known for 20 years. “Vogue is kind of a magic act. How do you describe the difference between a beautiful image and an ordinary image? It’s hard to put in words; you can’t put it in a business plan. But success depends on that.” Enninful, whom colleagues call genial, even-tempered and just plain nice, has the sort of British accent that sounds, to American ears, unfailingly polite, yet delightfully conspiratorial. He describes himself as European, African and British — in that order. “If I wasn’t all those things I don’t think I’d be able to do what I do or see the world the way I do,” Enninful says. “I see it from the perspective of ‘the other.’ Maybe that’s the strength of my work.” His mother was a seamstress, and his father was in the Ghanaian army and worked with the United Nations. “There was a lot of us. Six of us. And we were like a tribe and kind of didn’t need anybody else,” he recalls. “At home, I lived in Africa: the food, the clothes, the people who came to visit my parents. And then I’d go to school. I’d be in England. So there was always that diversity, [but] I didn’t even know what it was called. It’s always been part of me and my family page 78
and my upbringing.” His family wanted him to become a lawyer; they expected something intellectual from him. But Enninful loved art and design. He and his mother would “sketch clothes together. Design things,” he says. “She had a lot of African wives [as clients], so every day the women would come into the house in their heads carves and all these colors. She’d have me zip them into these peplum dresses. I remember that so well, and then later she’d tell me how to make clothes.” Enninful was a tallish, lanky 16-yearold when he was discovered on the Underground on his way to school by Simon Foxton, a stylist who told him that he had a particular, distinguishing model’s “it,” which in this case was full lips, hooded eyes, flawless ebony skin and a bone structure of angles and planes that catch the light just so. His parents grudgingly let him model while he was in school. “I decided that my destiny really was to work in magazines and just to say something, not in the traditional way of, you know, being a lawyer or doctor, but just to say something through art and beauty,” he says. “I was very young. But I knew I had a voice.” Enninful works from a modest office on the fifth floor of Vogue House, a 1958 dun-colored brick and stone building whose exterior is neither as elegant nor as stylish as its name would imply. There are some 40 people on his team. He’s hired stylist Julia Sarr-Jamois as a fashion editor at large, Alice CaselyHayford as digital editor and Donna Wallace as fashion and accessories editor. They are all women of color. There are some dozen other editors, interns and assistants whose ethnicities read like roll call at the United Nations. And beginning this year, the magazine also has a new publisher after 26 years: Vanessa Kingori, who is of AfroCaribbean descent.
Enninful delights in how his team is also diversifying the front row of fashion shows. The mythical front row. In the alchemy of fashion show seating charts, it’s a designation reserved for those who are gatekeepers, decision-makers, news-makers. It is not a diverse place. In 2013, Enninful remarked on this fact in especially blunt terms. As the fashion director of W magazine, he was in Paris for haute couture shows, a civilized realm of one-of-a-kind gowns and made-to-order daywear presented to admiring clients and industry professionals. Enninful arrived at one of the day’s shows to find his counterparts at other magazines all seated in the front row. Enninful had been seated in the second. He was not pleased. And he did not take his designated seat. This wasn’t a matter of wanting an unobstructed sight line to the runway. It was not ego. And while it may have been a minor detail, it was not a petty one. So he tweeted: “If all my (white) counterparts are seated in the front row, why should I be expected to take 2nd row? Racism? xoxo.” It was the sort of remark that might have bubbled up privately over dinner but had never been stated publicly by someone of Enninful’s stature, in part because so few editors of his stature are black. “At that moment, I thought, ‘I’ve been here working all these years, for 20 years. Same as this editor and same as that editor.’ And there’s just a level of respect, really,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind every fashion director in second row. But if you’re putting me behind my contemporaries, then that means that is a problem that we need to address. My parents [said] when these things happen, stand up. So I stood up ... for myself — and for the future, really.” The matter was resolved privately to Enninful’s satisfaction. “I’d do it again,” he says. “I was taught certain things that were right and wrong. It’s that simple. And you know, at the time, I had to right a wrong.”