Edward Enninful’s take on contriving fashion moulds
Ararity in a business like fashion, where fairy-tale transports are most often town cars, the story of Edward Enninful, recently named the next editor of the British edition of Vogue, began on the London Tube.
Born in Ghana and raised in Ladbroke Grove, Enninful was discovered in 1989 on the Hammersmith and City Line by fashion stylist Simon Foxton. It was not necessarily a fashion sighting. Foxton recalled Enninful in those early days in an ever-present duffel coat and National Health-style glasses, the arms of which would occasionally be mended with tape. Still, Foxton said in a recent interview: “He must have had something about him. I don’t stop that many people.”
Enninful went home and asked his mother’s permission to model for Foxton. He had to. He was all of 16. Duly, if reluctantly, permitted, the teenager appeared in a shoot done by Foxton and photographer Nick Knight, for i-D magazine, the upstart London style bible. He was transfixed. He quickly went from Foxton’s model to his assistant. “I seem to remember he said he was wanting to go to college to do law,” Foxton said, “But once he saw the bright lights of fashion, he thought, ‘Oh, well, forget that’.”
So began a near threedecade career in fashion, which has taken Enninful, now 45, from the chaotic offices of i-D to fashion shows and photo shoots the world over to — as of this August, when he and his partner, filmmaker Alec Maxwell, will relocate to London — the tiny doorstep of Vogue House in Hanover Square. His appointment represents a timely rupture with tradition. He is a gay black man in a position that has been held for 100 years by white women, for the past 25 by the departing editor, Alexandra Shulman.
“It does show that there is a God,” said Knight, who continues to work with Enninful. “He’s broken that mould. I think that offers a lot of hope for people who see fashion as something they couldn’t ever get into, that they’d be shut out from.”
Enninful, who declined to be interviewed for this article, may have been little more than a lad from Ladbroke Grove at the outset, but he happened down one of London fashion’s most fertile and febrile rabbit holes. i-D had been founded a few years earlier by Terry Jones, a former British Vogue art director who struck out on his own to document a London that was truer to what he saw in the streets than in Vogue’s high-gloss pages. Its Covent Garden office was a magnet for ambitious young talent, which Jones assessed without overmuch regard for age, station or experience. Foxton compared it with a drop-in centre. Money was a secondary concern, and a spirit of can-do reigned. Enninful came with Foxton and, for some 20 years, stayed.
“He was basically soaking up what he needed to set himself up,” said Judy Blame, a stylist and jewellery designer who contributed to i-D. “I suppose we were his mad college.” Blame invited Enninful to move into his house, which belonged to singer Neneh Cherry; Enninful stayed a year.
Enninful distinguished himself early, and when i-D’s fashion editor left for anoth- er magazine not long after, Jones appointed him to succeed her — despite the fact that he was 18 years old. “It’s gut instinct,” Jones said of the choice. “The nature of i-D was to start people who didn’t already work with major magazines, usually at the beginning of their careers, and then just give them support. I always wanted that energy, that fresh beginning, when people have got their eyes open and are prepared to take risks.”
Suddenly Enninful was a person to be reckoned with. Blame took him to Paris to see the runway collections there for the first time. They cadged shelter from friends and slept on the hotel-room floors of better- budgeted editors. i-D was a favourite of the designers on the cutting edge. “All the designers that I knew gave us really good tickets,” Blame said. “It caused a bit of a stir: ‘Who is that boy with Judy?’ ‘Oh, he’s the new editor of i-D.’ There weren’t that many black faces in the front row.”
“He was a bit nervous, to tell you the truth,” Blame added. “I was glad to be there to hold his hand and say, ‘You’re the bloody editor of i-D! Jean Paul’s given us front row, come on. Helmut wants to see you afterward’.”
Enninful adapted quickly. Soon he and the magazine were attracting new attention. He met Naomi Campbell, who said he is like a brother to her, at a shoot for i-D in Paris in 1993. “I’d heard of him,” she said, and when she arrived on set, “I loved his style, I loved his personality, I just loved him. Any model will tell you, to this day,” she said. “Even when Edward was at i-D — they never had a big budget — but no matter what, if Edward called, the girls would jump on a plane and do it. We knew it was going to be a great story, creatively. We wanted to be part of it.”
He was promoted at i-D, and bigger commissions followed. Enninful began a long and fruitful collaboration with Steven Meisel at ItalianVogue, and Grace Coddington paved the way for a contributing position at the US edition. He styled major fashion shows and high-paying ad campaigns, including Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Dior.
It was not a transition without growing pains. Enninful’s appearance inThe September Issue, the 2009 documentary about the making of the year’s largest issue of Vogue, painted him as a journeyman stylist, whose work gets scrapped for not living up to Anna Wintour’s high standards. “Where’s the glamour?” she is seen demanding in one scene. “It’s Vogue, OK? Please, let’s lift it.” (Wintour called Enninful’s British Vogue appointment a “brilliant choice”.) THE INDEPENDENT
“I seem to remember he said he was wanting to go to college to do law,” Foxton said, “But once he saw the bright lights of fashion, he thought, ‘ Oh, well, forget that.”