A VISIBLE MAN

A memoir from the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue.

The son of a Ghanaian military officer and his gifted dressmaker wife, Enninful (b. 1972) discovered his love of fashion early in life. He spent his boyhood in his mother’s workshop, “transported by the whole experience…the colours, the fabrics, the loving attention of my mother and her staff.” Hiding his love of fashion and glamour from his disapproving father (“The Enninful boys would be doctors and lawyers: respectable, distinguished, cerebral, credentialed, dull”), he began exploring what would later become a career as a fashion stylist. In 1981, after a political coup in Ghana, the family moved to London, where the author suddenly came face to face with racial prejudices he had not experienced in his birth country. At the same time, the ethnically diverse working-class neighborhood where he spent most of a closeted gay adolescence helped Enninful establish the beginnings of an identity based in the vibrancy of street culture. His entree into the world of fashion came when he accepted a modeling job for the independent London fashion magazine i-D, “the closest you could come then to a pure documentary of British youth and their culture tribes.” Enninful soon stepped behind the camera to work as a photographer’s assistant, a fashion commentator, and, finally, a stylist. His professional successes eventually gave him the courage to come out as a gay man and endure the wrath of a father who threw him out of the family home. His forced independence became the catalyst that propelled Enninful to increasing levels of success at i-D, Vogue Italia, and Vogue in the U.S., where he worked with the legendary Anna Wintour and pushed for greater diversity among the magazine’s models. That experience led Enniful to British Vogue, where, as editor-in-chief, he transformed staid layouts into groundbreaking statements about fashion, culture, and race—all of which he captures in this vibrant memoir.

Inspiring reading for the style-inclined.