Yes he’s a star. But does he know what women want?
...a very personal view from Femail’s Fashion Editor HOW ironic that in a world which is embracing a new wave of feminism, Condé Nast has turned the clock back to the days when men were deemed the only worthy guardians of female fashion.
Just look at the roll call of top designers who are men, from Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, to Dolce & Gabbana, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs.
These are the men who are responsible for deciding what women should be wearing — and, more alarmingly, what shape they should be. It was Lagerfeld who famously said: ‘No one wants to see curvy women on the runway.’
Yet in the largely maledominated fashion world, magazines were a rare female enclave, led and staffed by superbly stylish women who cherrypicked the looks they believed women would love to wear. Women — and this is important — just like them.
For fashion is as much about emotion as it is about what’s ‘hot’. How a long, swishy skirt makes us feel as it brushes against our legs. Or how an exquisitely tailored jacket can transform a soft waistline into a sharp silhouette.
These are things that women instinctively know.
And while Vogue is only ever going to be a magazine for the most keenly fashion conscious, what it considers fashionable
trickles down to the rest of us. For the past 25 years, those decisions have been made by Alexandra Shulman and her utterly stylish fashion team.
At every catwalk show, teams from other magazines would always cast sneaky glances at what the Vogue girls were wearing, because you could be sure we’d all be wearing them three days later. Three months after that, there’d be versions of their looks in the High Street shops.
There has been much back-
slapping from Condé Nast about Enninful’s PC credentials (he was awarded an OBE for his work in fashion diversity, last year).
But isn’t there something fundamentally un-PC about the appointment of a man to a job which is all about the tastes and empowerment of women?
Shulman created a quietly tasteful magazine which cultivated terribly English, upper-crust bohemian fashion. Enninful is an altogether more controversial figure.
On W magazine, he was responsible for naked photographs of his friend Kate Moss. Last year, he assembled 81 fashion designers, celebrities and models to create a video called I Am An Immigrant as a protest against President Trump’s refugee ban.
All well and good, but what about the role of a fashion magazine to showcase the shoes, handbags and dresses which will make us swoon? Or is that just too laughably old-fashioned?
Yes, Enninful is hugely respected in the industry — but you do wonder how his Vogue will relate to British women and our rather individual sense of style.