Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, has revealed that losing his eyesight is his “biggest fear”.
The Ghanaian-born editor, who became the iconic fashion bible’s first Black editor-in-chief in 2017, has struggled with poor vision for most of his life.
In recent years, he underwent four operations to retinal detachments and wears high-powered glasses to help him see.
Enninful spoke to the BBC in a new interview ahead of the release of his memoir next wek, A Visible Man.
He said: “I never had good eyesight anyway. I always had my minus 10 glasses and I had four retinal detachments [needing] surgery each time.
“Then three weeks looking at the ground in a dark room and not lifting up your head. And yes, it was very psychologically intense.
“But what I’ve also learned is… you don’t need perfect vision to create. You don’t need 20/20 vision to see images. So that’s the irony of it: though I have bad eyesight, I’m still able to create images that people seem to resonate with.”
The 50-year-old, whose career began at the age of 18 as fashion director at i-D magazine, also lives with thalassaemia, an inherited blood condition that makes people very anaemic and can cause severe pain.
Elsewhere in the interview, Enninful also opened up about spending 14 years on an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) programme.
“I found fellowship [in the AA],” he told the broadcaster. “I found everybody was sort of even. It didn’t matter whether you were the head of a company or someone who slept ont eh streets. It just levelled everybody.
“It got very bad because imagine how I was – I lost one home, which was Africa, and came to England. Then I lost a second home when I was kicked out.
“And then I went into the gay scene thinking I found my tribe and again, got so many rejections.”
Enninful’s family, including his parents and five siblings, moved from Ghana to Vauxhall, south London, when he was 13 years old.
He was later thrown out of the house after confessing to his father that he had been skipping university to pursue a career in fashion. The pair were out of contact for 15 years, but have now been reconciled.
Enninful now lives in west London with his husband, creative director Alex Maxwell, who he married in February this year.
