#Ghanaian gay photographer

[torrid-wind]

Eric Gyamfi reflects on his activism, photography, and telling the stories of West Africa’s queer communities.

Several months before I wrote about Gyamfi for “Platform Africa,” the summer issue of Aperture, I was introduced to his work at the LagosPhoto Festival. Despite the bustle of the location—a large, busy hotel in the city’s Echo Atlantic development—and despite being placed in a nook among many other works, his work stood out. And just in case I didn’t notice them, the celebrated veteran photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi made sure I would. “Watch this guy!” he said, jabbing his finger at the photographs.

My first conversation with Gyamfi took place on March 6, 2017, the day marking the sixtieth anniversary of Ghana’s independence from Britain. When he answered my message on Skype, I’d just been listening to Gyamfi’s video introduction to See You See Me (2016–17), an exhibition project at the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, which was supported by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund. I thought, then, that I could possibly frame my Aperture essay within the context of Ghana’s Independence Day and the poetic longings for creating and being “home.” Our conversation ended at 2:59 a.m. Accra time. It was the beginning of a dialogue that helped me understand how to best introduce readers to his body of work.

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Visit Eric Gyamfi's blog (https://gyamfieric.tumblr.com/archive)

[hotghnews]

Another Ghanaian Gay Marries His White Partner In A Local Wedding Style, Dubbed "Trumutrumu" - Watch

Another Ghanaian Gay Marries His White Partner In A Local Wedding Style, Dubbed “Trumutrumu” – Watch

A Ghanaian gay in the United States of America has married his gay lover in traditional wedding images that have gone viral. A Ghanaian gay in the United States of America has married his gay lover in traditional wedding images that have gone viral. In their wedding photos, the two appeared to be in love and were photographed kissing. The Ghanaian man is dressed as a man, while the white woman…

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry

[lesagreen]

#Black-magic man. The mover and shaker stepping in to a woman’s shoes to weave diversity through British Vogue... 

Vogue archives confirm the first issue of Vogue magazine was published on 17 December 1892, priced 10 cents. It began as small, weekly society magazine and released its first issue, in the words of it’s founding publisher Arthur Baldwin Turnure ‘with the aim of attracting the sage as well as the debutante, men of affairs as well as the belle’

Sage is an interesting word, it refers to a profoundly wise person; a person famed for wisdom, judgment, and experience.

According to the tweets, the whoops of delight in the press, fashionistas and creative world at large yesterday, it is no surprise  Vogue has upped their game and made a forward thinking decision and sage choice in selecting  Edward Enninful as Editor in Chief, to  take over as successor to Aexandra Shulman after 25 years, becoming the new ‘darling’ of British Vogue.  

Refreshingly, he’s the first male editor in the 125 year history, stepping into a woman’s shoes. He happens to be Ghanaian and openly gay but it is his fine credentials, reputation and understanding of the fashion world, that sets him apart from the crowd. Undoubtedly these qualities will enable him to take the creative direction forward to the next glamorous level, weaving some #black-magic through its glossy pages, globally. Actually this is the second Male Editor appointment Conde Nast has made in three months, following the lead of Italian Vogue in January.

With an illustrious background Enninful comes across as a thoroughly likeable, savvy and able, hardworking man with a fabulous eye, a sound voice, unafraid to speak up on serious issues in an industry that is predominantly white.  And that is a breath of fresh air.

Vogues first black AfroAmerican cover model Beverly Johnson was featured in 1974 and since then although progressively more black women have graced the pages, there’s an obvious imbalance and issues of racism to address in the industry. London girl Naomi Cambell appeared as covergirl in August 2002 but  it was not until twelve consecutive years later that a single black model appeared solo, in her own right. 

In February 2015, Jourdan Dunn was invited to appear under ‘Global Girl’ strap line. Clearly, one swallow doesn't  make an British summer and no black models featured on any page of British Vogue during Winter 2016 which leans more to inequality, rather than an oversight. Where were  they? All booked up or relaxing themselves in the Caribbean, after copious workloads. Really?!

It’s no laughing matter, the fashion world needs to wake up and work much harder on inclusivity, eliminating prejudice, embracing diversity and accepting the inner and outer beauty of people coexisting within our multicultural society. It is far behind the music industry for sure, but Vogue has woken up and if anyones going to readdress the glaring imbalance, create change and mix it up, Edward Enninful is the man for the job. He will be taking the magazine through it’s digital media transition and reaching out to younger audiences while at it. 

The former creative director of W magazine brings with him more than diversity and a touch of the avant-garde, he has an enviable #lbb of connections and talented photographers to collaborate with including  Stephen Meisel more than able to raise an eyebrow and test visual boundaries to realise #multicultural #multicolour creative vision. 

We needed some positive industry news after #Brexit and with all eyes on the UK stage, this is one aspect to be thankful about. If we are going to billions of pounds down, resizing Brussel sprouts and changing EU laws, at least lets be rich in style with a diverse #British fashion industry that brings with it a strong message of hope and embraces women as a whole, in sizes, race, belief and skin tone.

I look forward to the Alexander McQueen  #styleaddict working his #black magic through the glossy pages and in the media, across a global platform. Lets face it anyone who can create a nun out of Kate Moss is a genius and has my vote!  Frankly, it will be a worthy £20 spent for a Vogue subscription of 12 issues of the magazine for the inspiration and colour alone.

[holleygrigsby01-blog]

Childhood

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Chris Wiensczyk has actually helped supply pupils in Halton and also Harrison Community College for 14 years. For example, a lot of the Ghanaian chroniclers and also thinkers of the Overdue as well as 18th 19th centuries including Amo, Capitein, Protten, Casely Hayford, Reindorf, Aggrey, and Danquah were actually mental contemporaries of Wundt, Titchener, Spearman, and also Ebbinghaus dued to the fact that they were actually enlightened at about the exact same time and all contributed to planet literature on humanity (though the formers' payments were unfamiliar at the moment to the world). Has created and also led courses for numerous international organizations featuring: American Express, ASK, Banking company from Montreal, Bank Zachodni WBK, Cadbury-Wedel, Centra-Exide, Coca Soda, Commercial Union, Dialog, Period, Esso, Eurobank, Finning, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Hochtief, Hongkong Financial institution, Impel, Kompania Piwowarska, Leroy Merlin, McCain, Polkomtel, PwC, Rothmans, Royal Bank, Sanofi-Bicom, Layer, Siemens, Sunshine, Toyota, Viessmann, Volvo, Xerox. This piece hyperlinks directly with one thing that I have actually been actually a firm believer in because I began my Educational institution occupation (getting a degree along with a Masters in Civil Engineering in the summer), which is that there is also huge a gap in between what is being actually instructed in Learning as well as what is being practiced in the actual. I compete that I am me, as well as nobody else will ever before understand just how I feel- and with that said contention happens the realisation that the challenges from psychological health are solitary unmentioned fights in between myself and my heart, along with self-indulgent success as well as invisible cuts, which- then- develop my best weak spots and a lot of profound strengths.

But there is actually just no dispute between all at once contacting attacks xenophobic" and criminal", which is actually the incorrect selection that Mbeki and also lots of South African leaders continuously insist on. The constant gruesome strikes against gays as well as lesbians in South Africa - consisting of restorative statutory offense" and also homicides - are, after all, examples from both homophobia as well as criminality. Right here's things ... Kodak was the firm that devised digital photography ... Kodak was actually the largest laser printer from photographic photos on the planet ... they recognized technology was actually heading to inevitably construct a field for digital photography ... but they found photography as being about memories, and regarding developing albums of factors you would like to spare. The Center for Ray Bradbury Researches is actually combined right into the operations as well as control regimen from the IAT's Research Center, where pair of internationally-recognized Bradbury historians operate: Lecturer Jonathan R. Eller as well as Lecturer William F. Touponce, writers of Ray Bradbury: The Lifestyle of Myth as well as where a public library of 5,000 editions from Bradbury similar components are actually presently housed. Tory Burch Entrepreneurship is about realizing a space in the marketplace as well as having the capability to construct a service around this. I failed to recognize I was a business owner till I possessed the concept for our business and also started to create it, but in review I see that I was actually business in all I performed in my profession leading up to that aspect. Likewise details that one of those which examined abroad, simply Amo, Capitein, and also Protten had all their education in Europe as the remainder had their fundamental education and learning (at times at the university degree) in the Gold Coast prior to securing their innovative education and learning in other places. In the course of the 2017 High-Level Political Online forum, I had the option to deliver system help to Armenia's social effect assets event and also attend fascinating meetings on Innovation Labs.

[jewelgriver3-blog]

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Yet there is just no dispute in between concurrently getting in touch with assaults racist" and also criminal", which is actually the incorrect choice that Mbeki and also several South African leaders continue to emphasize. The constant gruesome assaults against gays and lesbians in South Africa - consisting of restorative rape" as well as massacres - are, nevertheless, instances from each homophobia as well as criminality. That is actually disclosed that the first undergraduate psychology degree was rewarded in 1967 as well as the first Master's level in 1975 whereas the Doctorate in 1982 (Eze, 1991 ). The first research laboratory of speculative psychological science in Sub-Saharan Africa was actually likewise set up in Zambia in 1965 (Nsamenang, 2007; Oppong Asante & Oppong, 2012 ). Contributing performers include modern dark bohemian jewellery performer Stevie-Leigh Smith as well as acclaimed metalsmith Luke Axworthy, in addition international comic musicians Martin Simmonds (Titan Comic books: Death Sentence), Ben Templesmith (IDW: Thirty Day from Evening), Caspar Wijngaard (Graphic Comic books: OUT THERE) as well as John Pearson (Creature Buck wagon). Tory Burch Entrepreneurship concerns acknowledging a gap out there as well as having the ability to construct a business around this. I really did not understand I was actually an entrepreneur till I possessed the idea for our provider and started to develop it, however in review I view that I was business in everything I carried out in my occupation leading up to that factor. Likewise keep in mind that amongst those that examined abroad, just Amo, Capitein, as well as Protten possessed all their learning in Europe as the rest had their fundamental education (often at the college amount) in the Gold Coast before securing their sophisticated learning elsewhere. In the course of the 2017 High-Level Political Forum, I possessed the possibility to deliver plan aid to Armenia's social influence expenditure celebration and also join amazing conferences on Development Labs.

[torrid-wind]

Desmond and Richie. Desmond studies communications and Richie is a nurse. They have been in a relationship for a year and live together. 2016 - photo © by Eric Gyamfi (https://gyamfieric.tumblr.com), from his "Just Like Us" series

“Just Like Us” is a series of photos that celebrates LGBTQ life in Ghana.

(***Click image or title link to view in higher resolution***)

[torrid-wind]

Friends get together from various parts of the country to celebrate the Aboakyer festival, an annual festival held in May. One feature of festivals in Ghana, is that those who have moved to other parts of the country due to work, school, or other reasons take advantage of these occasions to return home briefly to reunite with friends and family. 2016 - photo © by Eric Gyamfi (https://gyamfieric.tumblr.com), from his "Just Like Us" series

“Just Like Us” is a series of photos that celebrates LGBTQ life in Ghana.

(***Click image or title link to view in higher resolution***)

[torrid-wind]

Shana and Ama at lunch. They are a couple and both volunteer teaching at a program that helps children with various learning disabilities. 2016 - photo © by Eric Gyamfi (https://gyamfieric.tumblr.com), from his "Just Like Us" series

“Just Like Us” is a series of photos that celebrates LGBTQ life in Ghana.

(***Click image or title link to view in high resolution***)

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry