Edward Enninful's Step Back from British 'Vogue'

Condé Nast has done a great job of framing his new role as some kind of promotion. But you typically release news on a summer Friday when you want to bury it.

On Friday, Edward Enninful announced that he would leave his role as editor-in-chief of British Vogue next year. This confirms the Back Row prediction that something big would happen with Condé Nast in 2023.

Earlier in Back Row: 9 Fashion Predictions for 2023

The fashion world-shattering news was framed in a letter to “the heads of editorial content at Vogue France, Vogue Italia, Vogue Spain and Vogue Germany, all of whom report to him” as Enninful taking on “a broader role in enhancing Vogue globally,” according to Vogue Business. Next year, Enninful wrote he would take on the new position of “editorial advisor of British Vogue and global creative and cultural advisor of Vogue, where I will continue to contribute to the creative and cultural success of the Vogue brand globally while having the freedom to take on broader creative projects.” His replacement at British Vogue will report to him until they are “onboarded.”

I know what you’re thinking: that’s a lot of corporate speak for my summer Friday! I mentally checked out from the office on Wednesday night!

Sure, Condé Nast has done a great job of framing this almost as a promotion for Enninful, but you typically release news on a summer Friday when you want to bury it. Also, it’s clear that this is Enninful distancing from Vogue. You don’t spend more time on something when your goal is to “take on broader creative projects.” Maybe that means lucrative partnerships with fashion brands, styling campaigns and fashion shows and stuff like that, that have more money to throw around than Condé Nast. Maybe working on Vogue World London reminded him that no matter how good he is at his job, no matter how beautiful the images he creates are, fashion editorial is a dying art, magazines barely exist anymore, and it’s kind of impossible to turn them into street fairs, even with the cute Fendi baguettes. Maybe he knows, as we all do deep down, that the future of magazine content is AI. And as for working on that, no, thank you?

Given how beloved Enninful is by fashion followers, this doesn’t seem fantastic for Vogue, which has been phasing out boldface-name editors for years. Business of Fashion points out that most of the Condé editors-in-chief in Europe have been replaced by “a crop of younger, web-savvy (and less well-paid) heads of editorial content” who report to Enninful. The plan to replace Enninful with “a head of editorial content for British Vogue” suggests that his successor will not have the same work scope overseeing European Vogues, and might just end up rolling up under Anna Wintour, whose current title is chief content officer and global editorial director for all of Condé Nast.

Enninful has been one of the most celebrated people in fashion since he became British Vogue’s first Black editor-in-chief in 2017, igniting instant internet frenzy with his memorable first cover featuring Adwoa Aboah. He was a long-rumored successor to Anna, which culminated in him telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in October, “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 also said that Anna had no plans to step down any time soon, and that he had discussed it with her at Paris Fashion Week earlier that month.

Enninful’s first British Vogue cover.

A few things seem likely to happen soon: Anna will be accused of somehow causing or architecting Enninful’s departure. Media narratives will probably be that she didn’t want to compete with a star like Enninful and/or that she wanted to cut costs by putting him on a freelance contract. I’m already skeptical of them because so many rumors about her over the years turned out to be untrue when I reported ANNA: The Biography.

But that’s just the micro, gossip impact. The macro impact seems more haunting and significant. Condé Nast is still publishing good work, but unlikely to all of a sudden start nurturing new star editors like Anna or Enninful — or pouring more money into the kind of creative output for which they are known. Publishing companies like Condé Nast have spent so long chasing cheap scale to land ad business that the content on sites at Condé has been so watered down as to be more or less indistinguishable from so many of its competitors. Much of this content is the anodyne kind designed to draw clicks from Google. (How many Barbie explainers do we need, truly?) And this is not due to lack of talent in editorial departments! It’s due to a gross misuse of it.

I keep hearing from editors that Google traffic is way down across the board, and that the future feels scary and uncertain. I fear that the fewer stars a magazine has, the easier it will be to replace human beings who work at them with machines. If I were writing a prediction list today, I’d probably say that that’s exactly what we’re going to see at legacy lifestyle and fashion publications before the end of the year.