A Visible Man by Edward Enninful review – inspiring if preening memoir
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Loading... - Addae Kwei
- 13 Sep 2022
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It was the astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus who first came up with a model of the universe that placed the sun rather than the Earth at its centre, a formulation published in 1543 to which the rest of us have held fast ever since. But it seems that an alternative point of view may now be abroad. Read the opening pages of A Visible Man, and you’ll find that its author, Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, is in grave danger of believing himself to be the burning star around which our planet revolves.
Why has Enninful written an autobiography? It seems that the urge, fierce and momentous, came upon him in the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was at its height and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis had filled streets with protesters. The world having “tilted on its axis as the most significant social justice movement in decades met the worst international health crisis in a century”, Enninful felt “a familiar gnawing sensation” somewhere deep inside himself. “The world had stopped,” he writes. “Then it had exploded. It was time.” He would now respond to those who’d long begged him to tell his story, and carefully take stock of his career in fashion, scrutinising it against “the backdrop of a world I helped to change too, in my way”.
Blimey. I know grandeur’s traditional when you’re the editor of Vogue; Enninful’s boss, Anna Wintour, is reputed to be able freeze innards at 100 yards (though not his, perhaps – later on, he commits to paper the treacherous notion that when he worked for her at US Vogue, he was “creatively stifled”). The cars and the parties, the freebies and the sucking up do get to people in the end. Nevertheless, as opening statements go, this is out there. It’s also a sign of things to come. In the Enninful lexicon, key words include “destiny” (his own, and that of friends such as Rihanna and Naomi Campbell), “gifts” (as in “God-given”) and “talent” (ditto). Though he’s open about his weaknesses, too – among them his kindness, his sense of humour and his Stakhanovite work ethic. Read More...
