A wardrobe overspilling with secondhand clothing and a pair of fuzzy donkeys are just some of the more unexpected stars of Chioma Nnadi’s debut British Vogue issue.
While historically Vogue’s September issues are the biggest, attracting new season advertising from luxury brands, Nnadi’s highly anticipated debut has resulted in the highest ever print revenue for an April issue. It will land with a hefty thud on subscribers’ doormats on Saturday while non-subscribers can lug it off shelves from Tuesday.
Last month her predecessor, Edward Enninful, put 40 celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Naomi Campbell on his final cover, leaving Nnadi with a somewhat monumental legacy to navigate. For her first cover, trying to outdo that would be impossible. So it seems British Vogue’s new head of editorial content has decided to set out her own barometer of cool with a single star.
Her cover features the British musician FKA twigs sitting atop a London black cab. In place of a slick studio she is shot outdoors, in Hackney, glaring rather than grinning at the camera. She wears a lemon-coloured silk dress from Loewe (a coup for the Spanish brand led by the Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson) that features a giant silver pin pierced through its front. Her eyebrows are bleached. Her nails are talon-like. It’s more effortless than tightly constructed. “Fashion’s coming home” states the cover line – a nod to London-born Nnadi’s own recent return to “home turf” to take up the role after two decades in New York.
“FKA twigs is an artist who represents the ideal of the modern British eccentric,” writes Nnadi in a cover letter. “She is a shape-shifter who rejects conformity and takes real joy in clothes.”
The joy of clothes is a recurring theme throughout the issue. Nnadi muses on spending hours as a teenager observing students outside Central Saint Martins. “This wasn’t about designer label-spotting – most of the kids didn’t, of course, have enough money to shop on Bond Street – but about noting how they would put together the eclectic pieces they’d found at car boot.”
It’s this ethos that still thrills her. She sets out her fashion values from the get-go with the first six opening pages featuring interviews with vintage collectors. A special shopping section entitled “got to be real” mixes £8,000 bags from Chanel with an £8.50 T-shirt from M&S. A secondhand pair of Simone Rocha cherry red crystal earrings sourced from eBay are given the same still life photography reverence as a fresh-off-the catwalk £3,100 Louis Vuitton bag.
While this high/low shopping approach is commonly championed by gen Z, it’s rare to see such a prevalence of it in a glossy magazine. It’s even more unusual for the average reader to be able to afford multiple pieces from Vogue.
The rest of the content is eclectic, but with more than two decades of experience as a journalist, Nnadi’s curation is carefully considered. There’s an essay on juggling an open marriage with parenting, a deep dive into the effects of neuroscience on skin health and a roundup of new nonfiction from female writers.
If the Vogue of Enninful, who was appointed editor-in-chief of British Vogue in 2017, could be said to have been esoteric and glamorous, the very early signs hint that Nnadi’s may be a little more approachable. She still loves a car boot, wears Adidas Samba trainers on the front row and chose a community arts space in west London for her launch party.
Nnadi’s approach seems skewed towards a younger demographic. So instead of gen X-er Kate Moss, there’s her 21-year-old daughter Lila in a country meadow in a pink satin skirt and bralette, the British designer Erdem’s floral iteration of a Barbour draped off her shoulders. A barefoot and almost barefaced 27-year-old Bella Hadid reclines on a horse while Ayo Edebiri, the 28-year-old actor from The Bear who is one of the coolest women in Hollywood, is snapped candidly on the streets of New York. A lack of older and plus-size models seems a missed opportunity but Nnadi has appointed the US curve model Precious Lee and the 59-year-old stylist Camilla Nickerson as contributing editors.
In 2017 Enninful became the first man and the first black person to be appointed editor-in-chief of the century-old publication. Previously labelled “The Sloanie Club”, during his six-year tenure Enninful focused on making the magazine more diverse and inclusive and frequently made headlines. His cover stars spanned global superstars such as Beyoncé and activists including Greta Thunberg. He invited the Duchess of Sussex to guest edit an issue and styled Rihanna in a durag. People of all ethnicities, genders and ages were included. He also published an issue last year that had five disabled cover stars.
Nnadi, who is the first black woman to helm the title, said she felt she had “big shoes to fill” in taking on the role. The 44-year-old was appointed to the role by Anna Wintour last September. Born to a Swiss-German nurse mother and a Nigerian father who came to the UK to study in the 1960s, Nnadi grew up in central London before moving to Manchester to study English. She cut her teeth at the Evening Standard then moved to New York, working her way up the ranks at indie magazines including The Fader. In 2020 she was made head of Vogue’s US website.
Speaking to the BBC on Thursday she discussed how growing up she did not see people of colour in senior roles. “It’s not something in my wildest dreams that I would’ve imagined for myself … I know how meaningful it is for younger people to see people like me, who look like me, in a position like this.”
