The scene is May or maybe June 2008, PO (pre-Obama). I was toiling away at my desk while dreaming of escaping my finance job in the City of London to become a successful writer (still working on the “successful” part). Out of the blue, I received a message on my BlackBerry, something about Vogue Italia using only Black models and “experts” predicting it would be the worst-selling edition ever … hence we, Black people had to go out en masse, and buy it. Before the day ended, I had received the same message, or a variation of it, dozens of times.
Whether it was a sincere plea for communal solidarity or a sinister viral marketing campaign or both, it worked: despite being in a language I can barely order a glass of water in, for the first time in my life I bought a fashion magazine from the newsstands. I was far from alone: the magazine sold out in 72 hours on both sides of the Atlantic, triggering a huge reprint of 30,000 copies in the US, 20,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the UK. The moment made clear, to even a layperson, that fashion had a serious diversity issue. Put more precisely, fashion had an anti-Blackness issue, which would make it pretty much a conventional western industry or institution.
About 10 years later, British Vogue would have its own Obama moment, when Edward Enninful was appointed editor. Enninful, a Ghanaian-born, British-raised son of Ladbroke Grove, was a veteran stylist (he was, in fact,........