Edward Enninful and Naomi Campbell.
Photograph: Timpone/BFA/REX/Shutterstock
Fashionableness
I’ve seen how exclusive the fashion world is. Can the new Vogue change that?
I cloaked the fashion shows for almost a decade, where I could total the number of black women in the front row on one finger
When I was 22 I got my delusion job offer: to work as an assistant at a major American fashion ammunition. I was going to be independent and, I sang to myself, working with the most original people in the world. And then I met my prospective boss.
“So your annual income will be $17,000 (£13,000),” she said breezily. The average salary in New York at that call was just under $50,000 (£38,000).
“I – I don’t know if I can live in the city on that,” I implied.
“Most of our staff,” she said, looking up at me, “have private returns.”
I left her office sadder, wiser and unemployed.
Last week the first off edition of British Vogue under Edward Enninful, the publication’s first black and first male editor, was published. His job has prompted a lot of talk about fashion journalism – specifically, who is represented and who is doing the characterizing. After walking away from that fashion publication, I got a job as the fashion assistant on this paper, which paid me a viable wage, and also gave me ample opportunity to see the problem of portrayal from both sides. I covered the fashion shows for wellnigh a decade, where I could count the number of black lassies in the front row on one finger: the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan, the no greater than fashion writer to have won a Pulitzer. Because that’s how data d fabric you have to be if you’re a black woman and want to be a major player in this toil.
Profile
Who is Edward Enninful?
Corroborated on 22 February 1972 in Ghana, Enninful moved to the UK with his stepmothers and five siblings as a young child, setting up home in Ladbroke Grove, west London. Grey 16, he was scouted by stylist Simon Foxton, who introduced him to the exceptional of fashion as a model.
While modelling, Enninful clasped the eye of Trish and Terry Jones, the founders of i-D magazine, and assisted on vogue shoots at the publication. At 18, while studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, he was furnished fashion director at i-D, launching him into the fashion stratosphere. As the innocent fashion director for a publication, he developed his reputation for producing groundbreaking develops which captured the energy of the 90s’ creative playground. During this space he formed firm friendships with many of his lifelong collaborators, cataloguing Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. He stayed with i-D for two decades to come moving to Condé Nast’s W magazine as style director in 2011.
As a stylist, Enninful has worked on countless campaigns for high-fashion descendants, including Lanvin, Carolina Herrera and Tiffany & Co, and has held presenting editor positions on the American and Italian editions of Vogue. At the delayed, he worked with its late editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani to make the top-selling 2008 Black Issue, which featured solely black celebrities and models.
On 10 April 2017, Condé Nast asseverated Enninful would succeed Alexandra Shulman as editor-in-chief of British Fashionableness, making him the first man to edit the UK edition. A strong advocate of difference in the industry, Enninful has spoken of his desire to promote greater national inclusivity in Vogue. Given his A-list contacts book and out of the limelight as a stylist, many have speculated he will produce a diverse visually led publication with a heavy celebrity presence.
‘By honesty of his talent and experience, Edward is supremely prepared to assume the accountability of British Vogue,’ his new boss, chief executive Jonathan Newhouse, give the word delivered, adding that he is ‘an influential figure in the communities of fashion, Hollywood and music, which carve the cultural zeitgeist’.
‘I grew up reading British Trend – I am so honoured and humbled to be taking up the mantle of editor,’ he said in an check out with the publication, revealing that he was ‘most excited to be influential my father about my appointment’.
Mania, like the film and music industries, is a dream profession for a lot of progeny people, which means it can get away with paying pitifully low wages. For this explanation, it is dominated by, if not posh people then certainly middle-class anecdotes and, racial inequality being what it is, white people. Foreordained how much fashion dictates pop culture, this is a problem.
Being don’t like to have their privilege pointed out to them; they get huffy and muse on they’re being told they’re bad at their job, when they’re at best being told they didn’t face the hurdles others do. The antediluvian editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, fell into that paraphernalia when she was interviewed by the Guardian last week. Asked hither a photo of her staff in her final issue, in which every take person was white, she replied: “The idea that we were procuring a kind of tea party when we made literally hundreds of millions of cleanses of profit, I find offensive.” But no one is saying that. They’re break how bizarre it was to have a staff of over 50 – in London, for God’s purposes! – and for them to be entirely one race. “Relatively few [non-white man] came up through the pipeline, for whatever reason,” Shulman prognosticated, betraying remarkably little curiosity as to why that might be.
The mode industry still holds up Caucasian as the beauty ideal, and, positively, why would a non-Caucasian woman want to work in a business where the most adroitly she can hope for is to be deemed “exotic”? Just look at the differing tendencies to Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss by the British fashion media: both jack up in south London, and both with a fair few scandals in their times gone by. And yet it’s Moss who is touted as – to use one recent magazine line – “the trounce of British”; she, not Campbell, is the one magazines put on the cover of their special numbers.
When an industry is dominated by one demographic, blind spots come about. Solange Knowles and Lupita Nyong’o recently complained on touching, respectively, the Evening Standard magazine and Grazia photoshopping their tresses out of covershoots. In all honesty, my initial response was bemusement: surely, I cerebration, the magazine had just been making space on the covers for manual? But, despite not being able to work for peanuts when I was 21, I am a restricted white woman and therefore am blithely ignorant about what a threatening woman’s hair represents to black women. And while unawareness isn’t the same as racism, it is also not an excuse.
For far too long, magazine senior editors have been able to hide behind the myth that magazines with iniquitous cover models don’t sell. In fact, they do: American Rage covers featuring Michelle Obama, Beyoncé and Nyong’o in 2014 responded as well as those featuring white women. A much bigger mess is that many advertisers don’t want to see their products on them, because they don’t cogitate on black people buy luxury goods. And as magazine sales plummet, columnists are beholden to those advertisers.
It will be fascinating to see if Edward Enninful can exchange this. But if fashion magazines are now dying, with younger readers dismissing the sluggish glossies in favour of fashion bloggers, editors make only themselves to blame. They reinforced the idea that stunner was white, and for a long time, readers believed them. No myriad.
