Inside a fashionista fallout
As Vogue House was thrown into turmoil this week, Mick Brown reports on the big fashion fallout
When Edward Enninful was appointed as the new editor-inchief of British Vogue last April, one of his first tasks was to contact the magazine’s fashion director Lucinda Chambers.
Chambers, who is 57, had been at Vogue for 36 years – the last 25 of them as fashion director under the outgoing editor Alexandra Shulman. She is one of the grandes dames of the British fashion scene, a crucial part of establishing the look and tenor of Vogue. Nonetheless, the appointment of a new editor charged with revamping the magazine would have caused some consternation. So when Enninful told Chambers how much he admired her and her work, it was, as one Vogue insider puts it, “an elegant and classy thing to do. To reassure the one person you knew would be the most wobbly about the whole thing.”
A few weeks later Enninful – who takes up his new role in August – summoned Chambers for their first meeting, in a side-office at Vogue House. A big, bearish man known for his effusively jovial manner, Enninful is said to have spent the first couple of minutes lamenting the trouble he was having with his back, before telling Chambers “I think you’re fabulous, you are British Vogue, but I’m going to have to let you go.”
Chambers departed quietly and amid the customary effusions about her talent and contribution to the magazine.
“It is impossible to overstate her vision, commitment, imagination and her ability,” Alexandra Shulman said.
Chambers herself said: “I adore British Vogue and am so very proud to have been a part of it for so long.”
And there it might have rested until this week, when an extraordinarily candid interview with Chambers appeared on fashion site Vestoj. In this she revealed the sudden circumstances of her dismissal
– “I didn’t leave. I was fired”, she said, while claiming that no-one in Vogue’s management had any foreknowledge of her dismissal “except the man who did it”, and then proceeded to launch a rueful attack on the fashion industry and the magazine where she has worked for pretty much all her professional life.
Most fashion magazines, she said, leave you “totally anxiety-ridden”.
“Truth be told,” she added “I haven’t read Vogue in years.” The clothes featured in the magazine are “ridiculously expensive”. A recent cover shoot Chambers had done with Alexa Chung in a “stupid” Michael Kors T-shirt was “crap”. But Kors is a big advertiser, “so I knew why I had to do it”.
This, it must be said, is hardly news. Everybody knows that magazines curry favour with advertisers in their cover shoots. Everybody knows the clothes are ridiculously expensive. But it is not the kind of heresy you expect to hear from the magazine’s departing fashion director.
This week in Paris, at the couture shows where Chambers would have been occupying her normal seat in the front row, the talk was of little else. Friends and fashionistas have rallied to her support, applauding her for her candour and sympathising over her dismissal. Nobody – least of all Chambers herself, perhaps – is surprised that she was let go. Of course Enninful wants his own team. But did it have to be done in the way that Chambers alleged? “Condé Nast like to think of themselves of a company with class,” says one prominent fashion commentator. “This lacks class.” Chambers herself is said to be mortified by the controversy her comments have caused. According to friends, she gave the interview on the understanding that it was for a book, and was shocked to see it appear online. In an email, the editor of Vestoj, Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, affirmed that she had originally asked to interview Chambers in connection with a book she was working on, but claims Chambers subsequently agreed to it being published online, and was sent a copy of the interview before publication.
So, a storm in a bone-china teacup then, but a rather significant one in the world of glossy magazines catering to an industry worth £26 billion to the UK economy. The world of fashion may be many things, but trivial it most certainly is not. Reputations matter.
The day after Chambers’s interview appeared, Vogue issued a statement saying her original claim that the management were unaware of Enninful’s decision to dismiss her was “categorically incorrect. It’s usual for an incoming editor to make some changes to the team. Any changes made are done with the full knowledge of senior management.” At the same time, the interview was removed from Vestoj’s website, although it was subsequently reinstated in cannibalised form with the allegation about the management not being forewarned of Chambers’ dismissal removed and an editor’s note from Cronberg: “Following the original publication of this article, we’ve been contacted by lawyers on behalf of Condé Nast Limited and Edward Enninful OBE and have been requested to amend the interview. This request has now been granted.”
“This is a David and Goliath fight I don’t have the financial means to enter into,” Cronberg told me in an email.
Enninful, who is 45, was born in Ghana but grew up in the Ladbroke Grove area of west London. As a young boy he had a passion for clothes and after being spotted in the street he began modelling and then styling for i-d magazine. At the age of 18, he became the magazine’s fashion director – the youngest ever of a major fashion publication. He went on to work for both Italian and American Vogue, before becoming style and fashion director of the American magazine WWD in 2011. Along the way, he caught the eye of Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman and chief executive of Condé Nast International, who appointed Enninful to the Vogue job. Enninful is said to be particularly close to Newhouse and his wife, whom he jokingly calls “mum and dad”. “I think dad has told him, it’s your playground,” says one insider. “You can do what you like with the toys.”
Shulman attempted to strike a balance between the grand tradition of Vogue and an aspiration towards posh west London bohemian chic, with a smattering of grown-up celebrity. She put the Duchess of Cambridge on the cover – a shoot that was styled by Lucinda Chambers.
Enninful made his name as a stylist with edgy ‘conversation’ pieces – freakish-looking photographs of Kate Moss in W as representations of good and evil; a cover for Italian Vogue showing a chic, expensively-clad woman bandaged after plastic surgery with the strapline, “Makeover madness” (an idea that, frankly, the Duchess of Cambridge might have passed on).
Shulman was first and foremost a journalist: while inhabiting the fashion world, she was never fully a part of it. She is down-to-earth, rarely engaged in gossip. She has a hinterland.
Enninful lives and breathes fashion, and he cherishes his association with celebrities. His Twitter feed portrait is a photograph of him standing next to Michelle Obama.
“Edward is a good noise to make,” says one observer. “He is very hip. He’s a very strong visual person, but he’s not a word person.” When Shulman announced her resignation, a slew of fashion journalists applied for the job. When Enninful was appointed, one remarked “We felt like we’d entered Crufts and the cat won.”
“Edward will bring a very different way of looking at things,” says Katie Grand, editor of Condé Nast’s stablemate Love magazine. “He’s not been a bystander. He’s from a fashion background and started in independent publishing; he’s worked within fashion companies and has a good relationship with designers, he
‘When Enninful was appointed, we felt like we had entered Crufts and the cat won’
knows how hard it is to put a collection together, and I think that experience can only be good. We’ve looked at the same front row [at fashion shows] for a long time, so to look at the British Vogue block with new faces will not be a bad thing.”
But this is a story not simply about frocks. It is also about race and class.
In April, when Enninful’s appointment was first announced, a peculiarly malicious blog appeared in, of all places, The Spectator, under the pseudonym of Pea Priestley (a play on Miranda Priestly, the thermonuclear editor in The Devil Wears Prada), describing Vogue as “complacent” and “borderline racist” and hailing Enninful’s appointment as “the closest the UK will get to its Obama moment”. The tone of hysteria was echoed by Naomi Campbell, a close friend of Enninful’s, who excitedly tweeted: “I never thought I would see this day! I’m truly happy for you, words cannot describe how I feel for you right now, for what you will do in bringing people together being at the helm of British Vogue. TODAY, HISTORY WAS MADE!”
Shortly after his appointment, Enninful, who last year was awarded an OBE for services to diversity in the fashion industry, is alleged to have told a friend that one of his first priorities was to “get rid of the posh girls” that supposedly inhabit the offices of Vogue.
In fact, the magazine’s reputation as a place for well-bred girls to pass the time between breakfast at the Wolseley and drinks at Kitty Fisher’s is somewhat exaggerated. Taking its beat from Shulman’s Stakhanovite work-ethic, Vogue was more often a hive of activity than the den of “Sloaney sloth”, as The Spectator blog had it. But the ripples of unease that the rumour of Enninful’s comment caused around the office, and the general air of uncertainty about his arrival, have led to an exodus of Vogue staff.
Emily Sheffield, the magazine’s deputy editor (and indubitably posh: she is Samantha Cameron’s sister) announced this week that she will be leaving after 10 years, along with the managing editor of 24 years, Frances Bentley, editor-at-large Fiona Golfar and several junior staff.
“The Vogue office has felt like the night of the long knives,” says one staff member. “It’s been terrifying.”
Chambers is to be replaced by Venetia Scott – described by one friend as “posh-ish” – who first worked on Vogue under Chambers’ predecessor, the legendary Grace Coddington, and who has since worked across the fashion industry as a stylist and photographer.
“If you’re given that job, the only way you can do it is by bringing in your own team that you believe in, regardless of how good or successful the previous people were,” Katie Grand says. “I don’t think it’s about class. It’s about your comfort zone and who you want to work with.”
This week Enninful also announced that Campbell, the film director Steve Mcqueen and Coddington will be joining Kate Moss as contributing editors.
In her 25 years as editor, Alexandra Shulman made a spectacular success of Vogue, increasing its circulation from 183,000 at the time of her arrival to a peak of 221,000 in 2008. But like all glossy magazines, in recent years Vogue has been on a gradual but inexorable decline; circulation now stands at around 195,000. Enninful’s task will be to capture a younger audience who read online, not on glossy china paper.
The controversy over Chambers’s departure may not have been the first edgy “conversation” piece that Jonathan Newhouse was expecting from his new editor. But as one commentator puts it, “the Newhouses have got to make this a success, and Edward will be given whatever he needs. The advertisers will like it in the beginning because they like something fresh and new, and want to be associated with something that’s perceived to be modern; the fashion industry is paranoid about not looking modern. But after the novelty wears off… it’s a very big challenge for him.”
As Lucinda Chambers put in her interview: “You’re not allowed to fail in fashion – especially in this age of social media, when everything is about leading a successful, amazing life. Nobody today is allowed to fail. Instead, the prospect causes anxiety and terror. But why can’t we celebrate failure? After all, it helps us to grow and develop.”
A wise sentiment, perhaps. But perhaps one best not expressed around Vogue House.
‘Edward is a good noise to make. He’s very hip. He’s a very strong, visual person’