A Visible Man by Edward Enninful #VogueUK

Can’t wait to read this memoir !

‘ The British Vogue editor wants to make the media — and the world — a more welcoming place.

In the five years since Edward Enninful became the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, a pattern has emerged: Whenever a new issue of the magazine comes out, it instantly becomes a part of the zeitgest — the cover often goes viral, and the inside images are shared and re-shared across social media.

Aside from his monthly editor’s letter and the glimpses he offers to 1.3 million followers on Instagram, Enninful’s memoir, “A Visible Man,” is the first in-depth telling of his life story.

He walks readers from his childhood in the coastal city of Tema, Ghana — where he fell in love with clothes while watching his seamstress mother build a successful dressmaking business — to his teenage years modeling in London, to becoming the youngest-ever fashion director at i-D Magazine at just 18, to his role today as one of the most important figures shaping fashion, media and culture.
In 2017, British Vogue “had languished creatively and tonally, speaking almost exclusively to an upper-middle-to-upper-class pocket of Britishness,” he writes. “The magazine felt to me like it was drifting ever further from the beating heart of the country — to say nothing of the world at large. I didn’t think it reflected the Britain I knew and felt a part of.”

The industry insights are intriguing, but some of the most memorable and endearing passages in this book consist of Enninful’s more personal disclosures. There’s the time he “wanted to make a show of domesticity” for Maxwell, but his skills in the kitchen were so nonexistent that he “ordered in some homey-looking fare from a local restaurant and passed it off as my own”; and there’s the wardrobe malfunction at Buckingham Palace the day he became a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
He writes poignantly about his close relationship with his mother, his adoration of his siblings and his tense relationship with his father, who “told us all that if he found out we were gay he’d slit our throats,” and who kicked Edward out of the house when he learned he’d been skipping school to go to showroom appointments and photo shoots. The memoir truly shines in its most intimate revelations of Enninful’s sobriety and depression, of what it felt like to soar professionally while struggling personally — and of how he learned to lean on those who love him most.

“A Visible Man” is about a life in the media and fashion worlds, but it is also about a man of many identities finding his voice in a world that has not always wanted to hear it. Enninful is making that world a more beautiful and welcoming place than he found it.

$31 Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing (29 November 2022) from AMAZON