How Edward Enninful’s Vogue changed British culture
Edward Enninful’s Vogue has changed what Britain looks like in a way that goes beyond clothes. The version of British Vogue that Enninful has helmed for the past six years has defined itself as a portrait of aspirational Britain that is never, to put it bluntly, all-white. Black models are a consistent, high-profile presence rather than an afterthought. The April 2023 magazine, with the coverline The New Supers, starred three models – all non-white, all non-sample size, all photographed full-length rather than in the zoomed-in closeup that fashion traditionally chooses for non-skinny models. People of all genders and all skin colours, disabled bodies, bigger bodies, octogenarians alongside teens, are included in the aspirational vision of the country’s premier glossy magazine.
Why does this matter? Because Vogue is the paper of record for the beautiful people. Vogue has always been not just about fashion, but about status and visibility. Vogue is the top table of what glamour looks like. Diversity has become a non-negotiable aspect of that guest list – and this has a knock-on effect on worlds adjacent to fashion. Say, for example, that you are the person in charge of throwing a high-profile party to celebrate the opening of a venue that is angling to become the latest place to be, or putting together a lineup of influencer-ambassadors to represent your new beauty or wellness brand. The trickledown effect from Vogue is that the optics will look way off – hopelessly unfashionable, embarrassingly out of touch – if the lineup of faces fails to embrace diversity. Tokenism is no longer enough.
Related: British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful says March issue will be his last
If, however, you have got the impression that Enninful has made Vogue a utopian, egalitarian world that reflects the real lives of ordinary people, think again. To flick through Vogue, you would think the cost of living crisis had never happened. The first five dresses shown in the editorial pages of the July edition of the magazine – by Valentino, Dior, Tom Ford and Rick Owens – had an average price of £4,771. Vogue has become more narrowly luxury-oriented under Enninful’s watch. It has always showcased eye-wateringly expensive clothes, but previous iterations of the magazine tempered this with a judicious sprinkling of affordable buys. Fashion editors would come back from the Paris haute couture shows with a list of fabulous ballgowns that simply must be featured this season, but they would also return from a lunch break having spotted a great pair of sandals in Marks & Spencer, and those would also make their way into the pages of the magazine. Now, not so much. During the pandemic, the July 2020 edition of Vogue celebrated three keyworkers as joint cover stars, but there is very little in the magazine that a midwife, train driver or supermarket assistant could ever hope to wear.
The narrowing of economic accessibility is an interesting counterpoint to the ways in which Vogue has become more diverse, because it has challenged lazy prejudice around fashion and race. For many years, black faces in fashion were siloed into streetwear. There was an unspoken assumption that the role of black voices in the industry was to talk about what people wore on the street, or to play sport – in other words, that they would represent areas of culture in which blackness was already visible. Black models tended to be booked to wear stretchy minidresses to wear on the dancefloor, not trousersuits to wear in a boardroom. This correlation no longer holds. Vogue has become less white, but remained as grand and elitist in its aesthetic vision as it ever was.
This can make Vogue in its current form a frustrating read. As a student in the days before the internet, when fashion content was much less widely available, I knew the publication dates by heart and would be waiting outside my local branch of WH Smith when it opened on “Vogue day” each month. I would read every word of the small print, memorising names of photographers and designers and stylists, but also on the lookout for clothes my budget could stretch to. It is a little exasperating to find that as a 50-year-old woman I am now less likely to be able to afford anything in Vogue than I was as an impoverished student.
There is some justification for this. Sustainability has rightly refocused the narrative of fashion around the principle of investment dressing for pieces you will treasure for ever, rather than grazing on fast fashion items once or twice a month. Vogue, however, takes this to extremes. A shoot in the current issue features the same Saint Laurent chocolate leather jacket in all six shots, instead of using different clothes on each page as is traditional. Anok Yai, an American model of Sudanese heritage – who in 2018 was the first black model to open a Prada show since Naomi Campbell 11 years previously – wears the jacket over a lemon Givenchy evening dress outside the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. In another, she wears it over Miu Miu cashmere leggings, striding a pavement with her sister, Alim, a financial consultant. In a third, her toddler nephew, Zane, is wrapped in the jacket. “The jacket becomes a modern heirloom,” the blurb notes. At a price of about £5,000, one would frankly very much hope so. Vogue is still very much a rarefied world for a clique of the beautiful people. But those beautiful people look different now.
