Fashion’s Visible Man
Edward Enninful is one of the most influential figures in modern fashion media. Born in Ghana and raised in London, he rose from a teenage model with no industry connections to become a celebrated stylist, a magazine editor and, more recently, a founder of his own media company. His career has been defined by a stubborn insistence that fashion should look like the world that consumes it, and by a gift for turning that conviction into images people remember.
Enninful was born on 22 February 1972 in Ghana. While he was still a child, his family emigrated to the Ladbroke Grove area of West London, where he grew up with his parents and five siblings. His mother worked as a seamstress, and he has often credited her work, with its vivid fabrics and patterns, as his first education in fashion. Watching clothes being made at home gave him an eye for construction and color long before he knew that styling could be a career.
His entry into the industry came by chance. At 16, he was scouted as a model on the London Underground, and he later described that brief modeling career as his baptism into fashion. Through it he met the people around the groundbreaking British magazine i-D, including co-founder Terry Jones, and he began assisting the magazine’s fashion director, Beth Summers, while still a student. He also studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, balancing coursework with shoots and a growing set of creative relationships.
When Summers left i-D a few weeks after Enninful’s eighteenth birthday, Jones gave him her job. At 18, Enninful became the magazine’s fashion director, reportedly the youngest person ever named a fashion editor at a major international title. He held the role for more than two decades, helping to shape the look of British youth culture and building a reputation for casting that welcomed models of different races, ages and body types long before the wider industry embraced the idea.
From there his reach grew well beyond i-D. He became a contributing editor to Italian Vogue and American Vogue, and he later served as creative and fashion director of W magazine, where his editorials drew considerable attention. One of his best-known projects was the July 2008 issue of Italian Vogue that featured only Black models. The issue sold out in the United States and the United Kingdom within 72 hours, and Condé Nast printed an extra 40,000 copies to meet demand. He also styled the 2018 Pirelli Calendar, which featured an all-Black cast.
In 2017, Condé Nast named Enninful editor-in-chief of British Vogue, succeeding Alexandra Shulman. He took over in August of that year and became the first Black editor in the magazine’s history. The announcement described him as an influential figure in the worlds of fashion, Hollywood and music, and he arrived with an unusually wide network of photographers, designers and celebrities, as well as a clear mandate to open up a publication that had long been seen as exclusive.
Over the following six years, Enninful reshaped the magazine’s content and its audience. Covers and features showed a broader range of faces, including activists, athletes and artists as well as actors and models. In September 2019 he handed the magazine to the Duchess of Sussex as guest editor for an issue titled “Forces for Change.” Circulation and advertising grew under his direction, with reports that the magazine attracted 140 new advertisers. He also received an OBE for his services to diversity in the fashion industry.
In 2023, Enninful announced that he would leave British Vogue, and he took on a wider advisory role at Condé Nast before departing. His farewell cover for the March 2024 issue gathered forty famous women, among them Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams and Cindy Crawford. He has said that the decision to leave was entirely his own, explaining that as he approached his fiftieth birthday he felt he needed a new act. It was an unusual choice, because few people walk away from the top job at Vogue.
That new act arrived in 2025 with EE72, a media and entertainment company he co-founded with his sister, Akua Enninful. The name combines his initials with his birth year; Akua serves as chief executive and he is chief creative officer. The company’s flagship product is 72, a quarterly print magazine and digital platform, and it has also moved into design through a collaboration with Moncler, his first venture into creating a collection. Instead of reforming a major institution from within, he is now building one he owns.
Enninful’s story is also a personal one, which he told in his 2022 memoir, A Visible Man, and he married Alec Maxwell that same year. His legacy rests on the idea that representation and excellence are not in conflict, and on a long list of images and issues that proved the point. Whether at i-D, Vogue or EE72, he has consistently treated fashion as a way to tell stories about who gets seen. For a young Ghanaian immigrant who once had no connections in the industry, that may be his most lasting achievement.
