Vogue editor’s def iant farewell
40 icons on final cover that blows a raspberry at boss Anna Wintour
‘Budget for this won’t be pretty’
THE outgoing editor of British Vogue Edward Enninful has unveiled the final cover of his reign, and it’s a show-stopper.
Here are 40 of the world’s most famous women photographed together in a veritable wedding cake of celebrity.
Models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss; actresses Jane Fonda and Anya Taylor-Joy; pop stars Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa and there, slap bang in the middle of them all, Oprah Winfrey herself.
The star power is dazzling. The assumption is that they were all shot separately, then Photoshopped together. But, watch the accompanying video and you realise with shock – and applause – that he did manage to get all 40 divas in the room together. ‘From London, New York, Paris, Milan and Los Angeles, they materialised as if from a dream,’ British Vogue announced. Quite.
As a former magazine editor myself, I know how much wrangling of diaries, sweet-talking of PAs, and flattering of egos such a photoshoot must have taken. Imagine the discussions over where each star would be placed on the cover? Surely it shows incredible good grace on the part of Victoria Beckham, who is literally falling off the right edge. And where, dare I ask, is Meghan Markle, who guest-edited the September issue of Vogue, early on in Edward’s six-year tenure?
It is a bold move, especially for a departing editor who, it is rumoured, has not parted on the best of terms with parent firm Condé Nast.
Indeed, it is hard to resist the notion that Enninful is sending a message stateside with this cover. Bluntly, it says: Look how much these famous women love me. No one else could pull this off. Follow this!
Not even his boss, Vogue’s global editorial director Anna Wintour, with her 100th anniversary cover featuring ten supermodels for the April 1992 US Vogue issue, comes close. In fact, and perhaps this is the point, no editor is going to follow this.
In September last year, Condé Nast made the shock announcement that Enninful would be replaced not with another editor-in-chief, but by a ‘head of editorial content’, an amorphous title that means very little other than they will probably be paid a lot less than Enninful. If you listen to the whispers, it is part of Condé Nast’s wider cost cutting plan, which included the shuttering of Vogue House in London’s Hanover Square just last week.
This cover then, with its ambition, glamour and downright audacity (because let’s be honest, the budget for something like this won’t have been pretty for the finance department) is a marketing masterstroke – for Enninful rather than Vogue. It can be viewed as perhaps the chicest of farewell air kisses for British Vogue itself, relegated from here on in to a world of cost-slashing ‘content creation’.
Legendary! Is the single cover line on Enninful’s final cover. Perhaps he wants us to feel that’s as much a statement about the man himself as it is the world he used to belong to.