British Vogue’s editor-in-chief Edward Enninful has addressed speculation that he’s next in line to take the editorial seat at Vogue magazine currently occupied by Anna Wintour.
“Everybody focuses on American Vogue. Everybody wants to know what I’m doing, but I would like to tell you that I don’t want Anna’s job. I’ve spoken to her about it a few weeks ago,” he said during an exclusive interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in London on Monday.
Rumors about Wintour’s impending departure come and go as regularly as fashion weeks, but she and and Vogue’s parent company Condé Nast continue to bat them away.
When pressed, Enninful said that if he was offered the job atop American Vogue’s masthead he would say “not today.” He also reiterated that Wintour has no plans to step down any time soon, revealing that they had spoken on the subject while at Paris Fashion Week in early October.
Since taking the helm at British Vogue in 2017, Enninful has been widely praised for bringing more diversity to the magazine’s covers. He currently also serves as Condé Nast’s European editorial director.
“I can really do better in the world than maybe I can on one magazine.”
Edward Enninful
Edward Enninful and Anna Wintour at the Richard Quinn Fall-Winter 2022 show during London Fashion Week in February 2022. Credit: David M. Benett/Getty Images
Enninful cut his teeth at youth culture title i-D magazine, where he was made fashion director at just 18 years of age. Enninful was awarded an OBE for his services to diversity in the fashion industry in 2016.
The Ghanaian-born editor, who immigrated to the UK in the 1980s, has been candid about his personal experiences with racism in the fashion industry over the years, including an incident of racial profiling which took place at Vogue headquarters in London in 2020, when he was asked by a security guard to enter the building via the loading bay, rather than the front door. “It just goes to show that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’ve achieved in the course of your life: The first thing that some people will judge you on is the colour of your skin,” he said via his social media at the time.
Many of these experiences are detailed in Enninful’s new memoir “A Visible Man,” which he’s been busy promoting in recent months while attending Spring-Summer 2023 fashion shows across New York, London, Milan and Paris.
Though Enninful made it clear American Vogue was not currently on the cards, there may still be change on the horizon.
He admitted that while touring his book around the world he realized he “can really do better in the world than maybe I can on one magazine.”
When asked if he’d continue in his current roles, Enninful said “Well we’re working on that right now, we’re working it all out right now. But I know whatever I do will be very creative because that’s my strength.”
