There are seemingly many layers to Edward Enninful’s ousting at British Vogue. Enninful handed in his resignation last Friday, saying that he was stepping into a global advisory role for international Vogue editions. Within hours, the rumors began that Enninful had gone up against Anna Wintour and she destroyed him. While I don’t doubt that some version of that actually happened, I also think there was probably a lot more nuance to this entire situation, including the fact that Enninful can and will make a lot more money outside of Conde Nast. The Telegraph had a surprisingly nuanced piece about how a behind-the-scenes ideological battle was part of this Enninful-vs-Wintour issue too. Unfortunately, the piece is called “Why Anna Wintour won Vogue’s war on woke.” The actual analysis is actually spot-on though. Some highlights:

Enninful clashed with Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast: According to some reports, Enninful’s decision was made at least in part because of a clash of ideas, with Lynch concerned about his progressive politics. At heart, Vogue is just another business, and as recent incidents at Nike, Bud Light, Disney and countless others have shown, the corporate world is an increasingly fraught place where you must strike a balance between selling your product and being seen to hold the “right” views.

Enninful’s progressive politics: As well as immaculate fashion chops (he started out as a stylist), Enninful had a contacts book bulging with famous friends. In the years since, he has cemented a reputation for diversity and activism. He featured the first trans contributor, Paris Lees, and cover star, Laverne Cox. Recent covers have featured disabled subjects. Last September he even featured a man, Timothee Chalamet, alone on the cover.

Advertisers loved Enninful: Advertisers were reportedly keen on Enninful’s new direction, which gave them the chance to be adjacent to a diverse, inclusive range of talent with right-on, social-media friendly messaging. It attracted hundreds of millions of pounds in advertising from companies like BMW. There were positive noises about circulation, too. Condé Nast can be opaque about its numbers, but Enninful’s Forces for Change issue in September 2019, which was guest-edited by the Duchess of Sussex and had Greta Thunberg on the cover, sold out in days.

But British Vogue became joyless: For others, however, Enninful’s activism came at the price of an entertaining magazine. “Everything that made [Enninful] not a classical editor (that is to say, a trained journalist with a ‘words’ background) was why he flew so high early on,” wrote Farrah Storr, former editor of Elle, in a Substack post. “Vogue morphed from a playful, albeit slightly horsey, fashion magazine into a deeply political manifesto.” Along the way, she writes, people stopped buying it: instead it was given away or sold at a discount. “It was joyless, too political and seemed to have forgotten its role as a high-end shopping magazine.”

A larger issue for businesses: “It’s pivotal for businesses to have diversity, not only for the moral sense but the business sense, too” says Octavius Black, the chief executive of consultancy MindGym. Black co-founded his management consultancy with a psychologist, so knows a thing or two about behavioural science. “We know that companies that are inclusive outperform those that are not. But some of these issues can become polarising, as it looks like certain protected categories compete with each other. Women’s rights and trans rights can come into conflict, as we’ve seen in Scotland. The risk is you’re appealing to a niche group and end up reducing your appeal to others. You want to be selling why your products are brilliant, and how you as a company are behaving responsibly and ethically in pursuit of that, but not taking a position on divisive social justice issues. You’d be unwise in America coming out for – or against – abortion, for example, which is not to say that it doesn’t matter, but it’s not the role of a company to take a position on those things.”

Vogue’s readership: Progressive views on gender might help win over celebrities, publicists and advertisers keen to bask in a bit of reflected diversity on social media, but they do not necessarily play as well with the core readership. Vogue readers skew older and female, while readers in the new territories into which Condé Nast is keen to expand: such as the Middle East, India and China, may have more traditional views on social matters. The Enninful approach seems to have been deemed too great a risk.

[From The Telegraph]

“You’d be unwise in America coming out for – or against – abortion, for example” – Wintour is a pro-choice Democrat and Vogue has, historically, editorially supported reproductive choice, abortion and birth control. But I get the larger point, which is: Enninful’s tenure at British Vogue was notable for how progressive and inclusive he made the magazine, but it came at the cost of alienating the core readership. Which I agree with, actually – you can argue that Enninful brought new readers, younger readers to the magazine, but if your core readership of middle-aged (white) women are canceling their subscriptions, what is the real cost-benefit analysis? Can you “make up” those lost readers in new readers, readers from a younger generation which doesn’t believe in buying fashion magazines at a newsstand, a younger gen which has already seen the new collections on social media? Is the purpose of British Vogue to give readers what they want or what they need? It’s not a woke-vs-non-woke thing, it’s about the changing landscape of print media.

All that being said, for all of the crying about “wokeism,” Enninful was overwhelmingly a political traditionalist who sucked up to the white establishment in the UK.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.