: ‘This Is Not the Time for Tiptoeing.’ How British Vogue‘s Edward Enninful Is Shaking Up the Fashion World #WorldNEWS August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke

‘This Is Not the Time for Tiptoeing.’ How British Vogue‘s Edward Enninful Is Shaking Up the Fashion World #WorldNEWS
August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, 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 Britain, 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 Enninful 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 Carnival route, and see some manifestation 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 late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’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 bohemian 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 important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal. ”
Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting 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 any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion 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 offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.
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.