Edward Enninful, former editor of British Vogue: fashion has to be more inclusive

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1:55For this interview, I met Edward Enninful, former editor-in-chief of British Vogue in London. You're going to hear what it was like to emigrate from Ghana as a boy and about his rise to the top of British fashion, inspired by his seamstress mother and the bodacious African women she dressed in their home. After more than 20 years as fashion director at British magazine ID, a position he first held at the age of 18, Edward Enninful spent six years at the helm of Vogue, the first black person in the role. It was pretty lonely as one of the few people of colour in the industry, he says. So he set about changing that industry, tearing up the rulebook on which models sell magazines and what constitutes beauty.

2:36We have to represent the world we live in today, he tells me. He believes fashion is more democratic now than it has ever been, thanks to social media. And we also discuss fast fashion and its environmental impact. He's now launching a new fashion and media platform, EE72, named for the year he was born. And he's put a woman in her 50s on the cover of his first print edition, a celebration of ageless beauty, which he says goes unseen. It was very important to me that the first cover was a woman of a certain age. It's the age where women are seen as invisible when they hit their 50s or 60s. And I felt like talking of inclusivity, that is the kind of woman I wanted to target for the first issue.

3:20Sort of the invisible woman. There's such an emphasis on being young, especially now, you know, with all these beauty procedures, you know. I mean, I see these incredible women. I've always championed them. I think women get so beautiful the older they get. The wisdom they have, the way they navigate the world. I grew up with my mother watching my bodacious aunts. We were women of a certain age. So that's what I grew up with, these incredible women. I never placed beauty on youth necessarily. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Edward Enninful.

4:03I remember the aeroplane ride on the way to London. We were so excited. I remember being detained at Gatwick Airport. Detained? Detained. We were detained because we had to wait for my father. I think the papers were out of order or something, but in the end it was okay when he arrived. So I remember all of us, we were so happy and excited. Then I remember sort of arriving, walking out the next day and thinking, oh my God, there are white people everywhere. Because don't forget, I grew up in an all black country. The doctors were black, nurses were black, president was black. Everybody I saw was black.

4:41And then there I was, odd one out. And I mean, my brothers were all so shocked. Were you very conscious of being an outsider? Did you feel... The minute I arrived in England, I mean, with so much excitement, they were going to love my family and I, because don't forget in Ghana, we love people from England. So it was a bit of a shock to realise that it wasn't quite the case, you know, with the SUS laws and... That stop and search, which was a very big issue in 1980s London. And, you know, it was quite shocking for me to sort of arrive in a country which was great on one hand, but also quite hostile on another.

5:24It's just a couple of aspects of your childhood. One was the influence of your mother. Oh, she was amazing. Why? My mother was the seamstress. she really gave me this love of fashion and beauty and she was always making incredible clothes and I remember always having these incredible women around my mother would be sort of measuring them squeezing them into these African outfits and I'll be right there just mesmerized by the beauty of these full-bodied women and don't forget you know in Ghana being curvy was the norm. If you were skinny, everyone thought something's wrong with you. Like, doesn't she eat?

6:03Is she okay? So for me, I grew up with those bodacious, sort of big, wonderful, curvy, loud, strong women. Aunts, mother's friends. So yeah, that was my upbringing. And for you, the thing about your mum and being a seamstress was it was fashion as craft, wasn't it? It was fashion as skilled, practical work and practical manufacture. More than fashion as kind of, you know, know catwalk stuff or kind of no i didn't even know what the catwalk was exactly and so it's fashion and skills so your mom was a big influence on you and you're on the tube and a chap called simon foxton sees you goes on to be a big influence on you just tell us what happened when you met simon foxton you know i got on the train it was a guy sitting opposite and he kept staring at me you know i was a little scared i was a little nervous i was very innocent you know 16 years old he literally got up and gave me his card and i remember he said he was a stylist for I didn't know what a stylist was but he was a stylist for Arena I remember Arena and ID Magazine and you would go and a couple of years later you became fashion director of ID Magazine at the age of 18 an extraordinary achievement as a teenager but your parents had slightly different ideas I think it's fair to say I mean my mother I think secretly was quite happy because I was following in her footsteps my dad wasn't so happy sort of kind of kicked me out basically but you've now been reconciled with your dad you see you know what In his defence, it's what he knew.

7:28He wanted his children to succeed in a foreign country. He wanted us to do very well. I understand him now. And the idea of going into fashion or media at that time was so alien to him. Of course. That time, you mentioned, you sort of evoke an era where you grew up with extraordinarily famous and really iconic figures, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and so on. Heady days in fashion. magazines were very powerful very well funded glossy at that time did you always have a bubbling sense that there are issues within the magazine issues if you like that it wasn't representing everyone that it was kind of promoting maybe toxic behavior what did you have bubbling concerns about the fashion industry even as you were in it no i mean you know i started at id as an 18 year old fashion director but at the same time i was the only person of color you know if you're a person of colour and you get a position, you can either choose to just be there for yourself and achieve incredible things or think, hey, I need to bring people with me.

8:31So my thing was, how do I get more people of colour here with me in this lonely industry? But do you think that the, I mean, we're talking late 90s here. Britain has got a lot of black people in it. And we're talking, you know, half a century really after Windrush. Was that lack of representation active racism or was it unconscious bias? I think it was unconscious bias on one hand and active racism on the other hand. Because, you know, the people will say things like, oh, black models can't sell. Asian models, forget it. And I just was like, I don't care. And maybe it was naivety. Maybe it was the fact that I've always had to fight.

9:09But if you look at my work on ID Magazine from the early 90s, it was black models. indian models white models let's create inclusivity even before i knew what inclusivity was i knew something wasn't right you know it's very easy with hindsight it's a danger of all history that you look back and say oh he was a pioneer he was radical he was changing things and this went really well but at the time did you face opposition i remember there was three id issues i had a black model an east asian model and another black model on the covenant i was told you can't have three models of color back to back and I went can't I here we go number four so there was this naivety which was you know I was very headstrong so even if you told me not to do something I would I would want to do it more had it not worked I would have been having a different conversation with you today because people ask me then you face opposition didn't people try and stop you I'm like they didn't because financially it was so successful if If you're going to sort of talk about race, if you're going to talk about inclusivity, you still have to have your eye on how that's going to pan out commercially.

10:19Well, if you're making money, people leave you alone. Then people leave you alone. When you got approached about British Vogue or when there was a chance for you to become the editor, one of the most influential positions in global fashion, what was your winning pitch? first of all when I looked around in the world I lived in I didn't see the the women I knew in the magazine I didn't see women from different backgrounds socioeconomic backgrounds religious backgrounds um a you know different age I didn't see any of that so to me that was you know apart from okay let's make it more inclusive it was just bad business because the whole selection of you know of the population was being ignored that wasn't really the pitch like you know we have to represent the world we live in today do you fear that the fashion industry is reverting to type and to a time a couple of decades ago when basically a very particular quite narrow model of eurocentric yeah eurocentric do you worry about that i mean look i've been there and the early 90s when black models disappeared completely.

11:28And we're going through that time again. And like I said, you know, I feel like launching my company is the perfect time to be able to sort of say, hey guys, let's create an even playing field for everybody. Let's be inclusive again. But the fashion industry in itself is very cyclical. Things move so fast. So unless there's sort of gatekeepers sort of reminding people, You know, it could easily sort of end up in a place where people don't feel very welcome. So can I be really clear about that? I want to get into what EE72 is, which is your company. But what do you think we're potentially going back to?

12:02I think we're potentially going back to sort of an industry that's just sort of one type is the norm. You know, being European is the norm. Being super thin is the norm. But also we're in an industry in flux at the moment because this is the perfect time to be able to shape an industry. what do you want to do with ee72 look i want to create sort of a company entertainment and media company where everybody's welcome born of inclusion and empathy um it's not a traditional media company i mean you know and to be clear it's beyond the website because you're doing something which is uh pretty crazy which is you're coming out in print yeah four times so it's a quarterly quarterly and issue one is going to have no adverts no ads are you mad i so the business model we're creating doesn't rely on print to survive the main heart of the company is the platform you know where we sort of engage clients where we have podcasts events are so what i can offer clients is a package so we work on what is that package is that a curated event is that a curated influencer event can we give you space on the website and selling that way we've realized it's so profitable because right now clients want something more than just paid pages so julia roberts is on the front julia roberts on the front why julia roberts i love julia roberts i mean you You know, when I was at British Vogue, she was one of my, what do I call it, bucket lists.

13:40And I could never get her until the penultimate issue. And I remember just loving what she stood for. She's a real human being. She lives in San Francisco with her kids. You know, she doesn't have a nanny. She goes shopping on her own. She's outspoken. She's ageless where I'm concerned. When I talk about inclusivity, people always automatically go to race. But my work at British Vogue, my work has always been about women who I call ageless. And it was very important to me that the first cover was a woman of a certain age. It's the age where women are seen as invisible when they hit their 50s or 60s.

14:20And I felt like talking of inclusivity, that is the kind of woman I wanted to target for the first issue. Sort of the invisible woman. There's such an emphasis on being young, especially now, you know, with all these beauty procedures, you know. And what I love about Julia is she hasn't had any work done. She's a naturally effervescent, beautiful woman. And I feel like, yes, she does represent a generation of women who kind of feel unseen. I think women get so beautiful the older they get. The wisdom they have, the way they navigate the world. I just find them so beautiful and you know I said going back to British Vogue you know I had Dame Judi Dench on the cover you know it's not a fudge She was the oldest ever oldest ever but like I said there's too much emphasis on youth So interesting you say women in their 50s become ever more beautiful Yeah What do you think when you see a woman who's beautiful what makes them beautiful in your eyes?

15:18Oh my god it's definitely more than physical for me it's how they think for me it's how they carry themselves how they see the world Like I said, I grew up with my mother watching my bodacious aunts, who are women of a certain age. So that's what I grew up with, these incredible women. I never placed beauty on youth necessarily. Do you feel like there is a kind of attempt, a kind of political, cultural attempt right now to assert that beauty is actually quite narrowly defined? I mean, you know, I feel like that's always been the case. but also look in other parts of the world, look in Africa, that standard is different.

15:56But, you know, my whole career, I've just seen beauty in all its shapes and forms. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? I don't really pay much attention to what is beautiful. If I did, I wouldn't have done the work I've done in my career. I wouldn't have shone a light on all those sort of invisible women. You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.

16:37It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story? What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:16BBC's expert sports journalists. More than the score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for more than the score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

17:33For this episode of The Interview, I spoke to Edward Enninful. He was enjoyable to talk to. It's not the first time I've spoken to Edward Enninful. He's a remarkable character, a pioneer in many ways, pretty well connected if you look at his social media accounts. But it's clear, too, that he's a man with a mission. He thinks that the industry that he loves has been not hijacked, but somewhat taken over by particular conceptions or ideals of beauty, which tend to be European, and he wants to broaden them out to celebrate the craft of garment making and think of fashion in much more universal and non-racial terms.

18:04OK, let's return to my conversation with Edward Enninful. You said something about influencers and the fact that, you know, you might do work with them in your new kind of online platform. Do you think of the movement from this kind of culture of pre-internet where a few key gatekeepers and curators decided what the culture was to this era of mass, everyone's got their own social media channel. Do you see that as broadly a good thing because it's been democratic and opened up, you know, fashion or different career opportunities to lots of other people? Or do you think the downsides outweigh the upsides because it's created a kind of obsession with the self?

18:43Instagram suggests that you should live your life as a kind of exhibition. It's a sort of damaging to kids. How do you think about that movement to a kind of smartphone age? I feel like things can exist side by side. We can have these incredible curators. And I feel like there needs to be maybe a little bit of gatekeeping, especially when it comes to the really young, yeah, some kind of curation. I believe, you know, I'm a curator. Of course, I would say that. But there needs to be people that people can listen to, that can lead the way a bit, can help young people especially. This is about the nature of influence.

19:15And there are a few people online who are now kind of able to launch their own channels who are uninhibited. They don't need a commission. And that's a great thing. Has it transformed fashion for the better, do you think? I think it's made fashion more democratic, more welcoming. It's made fashion less scary, more approachable. But the industry in itself has to sort of figure out, you know, where we stand, what we stand for. It's an industry in flux, the fashion industry right now. Because before there was, you had to read magazines to get what was going on. You had to sort of, who's the designer who was in or out.

19:50Now, even the way of selling is different now in the fashion industry. You don't need to go to the designer store like we used to. No, you just go to where your friends are going. Here's the drop, come and buy it. So the whole system is sort of looking at itself and trying to figure a way forward, I think. In that context, can I put to you two criticisms of the fashion industry? One is about fast fashion, that fashion costs the earth, basically. Although there's huge amounts of effort going into things like recycling and reducing carbon footprints. Basically, fashion as an industry for decades, if not longer, has incentivized mass production of things that exist for a few moments and then they're gone.

20:31Do you think there's something in that? I mean, you know, I know that the fashion industry is a great polluter, but it's not the only industry. And I feel like at the moment, the fashion industry is sort of getting it from all angles. But we also have to realise that this is also the industry where stories can be told. You can use fashion to sort of put a spotlight on, you know, people of a certain age, people from different backgrounds. Yes, it is a polluter, but also that side. Now we have to sort of speed up the side that is positive and is inclusive. All those things that slowly people seem to be forgetting.

21:06You know, it's not just clothes at the end of the day. It's what you stand for. That's one of the things. I feel like fast fashion. Okay, fast fashion's here. Yes, it's a big polluter. But a lot of young people will also argue that they can't afford the prices. So what do we do as an industry to sort of create things that maybe young people can buy? I think that's the conversation now. That was going to be my second criticism, which is that a lot of fashion is basically just completely unaffordable. And therefore, of its nature, I mean, interestingly, you grew up working class. I mentioned Kate Moss.

21:37She grew up working class. I mentioned Naomi Campbell. She grew up working class. But you guys, you know, you've been on a sort of class journey. But is there something to the criticism of the industry which says fashion basically is a way of selling very, very, very expensive things to a lot of people who can't afford it? And that luxury just costs too much. I mean, you know, luxury has always been for the elite. But now that, you know, fashion is sort of an even playground. Yes, there are ways in which companies can think of a new generation. How do we reach this elusive Gen X? How many rooms have you been where people are trying to capture Gen X?

22:13I think, yeah, there needs to be solutions or we're going to lose a whole new generation. A lot of people worry about the impact of fashion on particularly young girls. And they think that there's a danger that the fashion industry, particularly its adoration and adulation for very skinny women, does terrible, toxic things to young girls' minds. There's a lot of people that separately worry hugely about the impact of social media on young girls. And there's a lot of research coming out which shows there's been a very, very sharp rise in anxiety and depression in the last 10 to 15 years, which might coincide with the explosion of social media.

22:48When you put fashion and social media together, people really worry about the impact it's having, not just on young girls, but on young minds. what do you think the fashion industry needs to do to try to stop these toxic behaviors and to try to stop damaging young minds and the way young people think of themselves fashion is it has to be more inclusive it has to speak to sort of people outside the normal demographic it has to be more more welcoming it has to talk about issues that maybe hasn't talked about in the past mental health issues. You know, you had advocates like Adwoa Aboa back in the day, was one of the first models to say, hey, I'm having mental health issues.

23:31We need more role models like that. Is that why she was your first cover star? She was my first cover of British Vogue, because she represented beauty on one hand. She's very beautiful. She was a model, but also she was somebody who says, I need help. I've been through so much. My mental health is not at its best. And that really opened up conversation to millions of young women. So we need Going back to the internet, we need those kind of leaders, people who can share their pain, people who are not scared to talk about what they've been through. I feel that that's what young people need. Role models, more than anything.

24:04And we need to make space for those role models to speak. Different points of views, pluralism, hearing different voices. Do you feel excited for this new chapter? Oh my God, I'm so excited. If I may say, we're nearly 40 years since a fifth of six boys turns up in Vauxhall at his aunt's house from a military barracks in Ghana, finds out he's gay, is black, working class, gay in a time of 1980s London. You've had an extraordinary 40 years, 50 plus years, but do you feel that you're about to embark on a whole new chapter? I feel like my whole career has been leading up to this, to be able to create something new, something for generations to come, for all the little Edwards in their room.

24:43Like if I can do it, they can do it too, to be able to have a voice away from a masthead, be able to sort of work even closer with people from my generation and a new generation.

24:59Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with education activist Malala Yousafzai, the president of Botswana, Duma Boko and banking titan Jamie Dimon. Until the next time, bye for now.

25:30If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport and the more than the score podcast will be following all the action bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the bbc's expert sports journalists more than the score for the bbc world service listen now search for more than the score wherever you get your bbc podcasts

26:40Thank you.