Again the ‘only one’: Edward Enninful, André Leon Talley and the sartorial contours of racialized masculinity in fashion publishing

Abstract

Journalists have a habit of describing British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful as ‘unassuming’ or ‘understated’, referring to his personal uniform ‐ black pants, white shirt and dark jacket ‐ as a signifier of his accessibility and his politics. This personal style is rendered remarkable in an industry that prioritizes figures who deploy visual excess or else work to shore up the dialogue between fetishism and alienation already endemic to the industry. Furthermore, Enninful’s position as the first Black male editor of the publication makes him the cultural heir to André Leon Talley, whose own style is an exercise in using Baroque ornamentation as a way of existing outside of the prohibitive racial imaginary that would claim him, demanding an expansion of what constitutes Black masculinity. In this article, I argue that Enninful, who both dialogues with and produces the visual grammars of Black masculinity in fashion, inherits this iconography and its sartorial strategies of racial and gendered transgression, but rejects their deep reliance on the continual, public production of the self. Enninful refuses to offer himself up to the industry for easy consumption; he refuses to deploy his own body as a space for the continual production of creative labour. I argue that this withdrawal ‐ of his sartorial self and the performative and material labour that self requires ‐ both marks and harnesses a moment of crisis within the traditional fashion industry, importantly enabling an expanded political discourse on racial justice within the contemporary fashion industry.