On Friday, just as New York Fashion Week was getting into full swing, Edward Enninful, the man who shocked the fashion world when he walked away from the top of British Vogue, flew into town to host a party and shock — or at least surprise — it again.
Specifically, he flew into town to introduce his new magazine, 72, to the power players of the fashion world. The magazine is one of the first ventures from his new creative company, EE72 (his initials plus his birth year). The guests could decide for themselves: Did Mr. Enninful’s magazine, a reflection of his own personal brand, have what it takes to compete against legacy titles? Or was this simply a vanity project?
The party was held at the Four Seasons hotel downtown in Wolfgang Puck’s steakhouse, which had been given the supper club treatment. Photos from the magazine flashed on oversize screens. Bistro tables were set with bowls of customized EE72 lighters, free for the taking.
Machine Gun Kelly mingled, as did Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos. Guests nibbled on mini-burgers and steak tartare as an issue of the magazine was passed from hand to hand. At first, they didn’t seem that impressed.
The magazine doesn’t look particularly disruptive, after all. It’s a standard size 214 pages with a celebrity on the cover. Sure, it’s hardcover and perfect bound, like a book, which suggests something to keep rather than discard. But otherwise: fashion (check), beauty (check), art (check), famous people (check). A lot of white space to make the pages look classy (check).
It’s what isn’t there that matters. It takes a while to recognize the absence, as when you look at someone who has shaved their eyebrows.
“No ads?” the hair maestro Guido Palau asked.
He was sitting with Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, fashion doyenne and veteran of Vogue and Elle. They looked at each other. For as long as either of them could remember, ads were the physical embodiment of a magazine’s health and success.
“No ads,” she said. “How?”
Beyond Anna Wintour’s Job
“Vogue was never the end game for me,” Mr. Enninful said. “I always knew I wasn’t going to be there forever, that I didn’t want to be a gun for hire. But I also didn’t want to be saddled with history. For me to come back and do this, it had to be different, and it had to disrupt.”
Mr. Enninful, who is 53 and Ghanaian-British, is used to being an anomaly in fashion. When he started his career, becoming fashion director of i-D at just 18, he was often the youngest person in any room.
For years, he was one of only two or three Black editors at major fashion titles. He was the only one at Italian Vogue under Franca Sozzani, then at American Vogue and then as creative fashion director of W.
“It was weird, because I was born in a country where for a Black man, nothing is unachievable,” he said. “The doctor was Black, the president’s Black, the lawyer’s Black. And then I was thrown into an industry where it was like, ‘You’re the only one.’”
When he became editor of British Vogue, he was the first man, the first gay man, the first gay man of color and the first gay man of color with a disability to take the post. (He has the sickle cell anemia trait and has had six separate retinal detachments. At this point, he is partially sighted.)
As a result, perhaps, he is known in the industry for his talent, his loyalty and his dislike of conflict. “We never argue,” said his younger sister, Akua, who has been his agent for 15 years and is now the chief executive of EE72. “Never have done.”
Stefano Tonchi, a former editor of W, said much the same. “We worked together for almost eight years and never had a big fight,” Mr. Tonchi said. “He has a great sense of what is popular culture and what is the moment. And he makes people feel comfortable. He can get even very difficult celebrities into incredible clothes.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to upset the apple cart now and again. He never shied away from calling out racism in fashion. He wrote about it in his 2022 memoir, “A Visible Man,” and made it his mission at Vogue. The pace of change, however, was not exactly to his liking.
“Someone actually said to me: ‘Oh, we’ve done that. Oh, inclusivity, we’ve done that.’” Mr. Enninful said. “That’s part of why it was so important to come back and set up this company.”
One day during his time at British Vogue, he was on the phone with Oprah Winfrey, and, as she remembered it, he was frustrated with gossip columnists saying he was after Anna Wintour’s job at American Vogue. “I don’t even want it,” she recalled he told her.
She was shocked. “I just assumed he did,” Ms. Winfrey said. “When I did my first, and only, Vogue cover in 1998, I was crying because of what Vogue represented in my mind and in the culture. I just assumed if you were working in this industry, that is what you aspired to. But he didn’t.” She told him to tell Ms. Wintour immediately. He did.
The thing about Mr. Enninful, said the designer Phoebe Philo — they have been friends since they lived next door to each other in the 1990s — is that “he has always been able to see the much bigger picture — to tap into where we are and when it might be time to make a change.”
The Deal With Julia Roberts
Mr. Enninful’s new company, which has 25 employees, split between New York and London, is largely remote. It has one backer, whom he declined to name. Aside from the magazine, there is a website and creative services arm, and there are plans to expand into podcasts, video and potentially film. Maybe even products.
Mr. Enninful works mostly out of the living room in his home in the Kensington neighborhood of London, which he shares with his husband, the filmmaker Alec Maxwell, who is also the chief visual officer of EE72, and their Boston terrier, Riri, named after Rihanna. (The company also has a small space in Soho House.) He has exchanged his old uniform of all black for the occasional white and light blue, though not everyone likes the change.
“I went to an English summer party, and I had a suit on that was an orangy color,” he said. “All my friends were like, ‘Never wear that again.’”
If the lack of ads is initially the most unexpected thing about the first issue of 72 — which costs $20, comes out four times a year and appears at the same time online and in print in 20 countries — the second most surprising is that Julia Roberts on the cover. She’s so … um, familiar.
“The question everyone asked is, ‘Who’s on the cover?’” said Sarah Harris, 72’s editorial director. She followed Mr. Enninful to EE72 from British Vogue, where she had spent more than two decades. “‘Is it Beyoncé? Is it Rihanna?’ No one guessed Julia.”
Throughout his career, Mr. Enninful was known for his highly stylized, striking images, the kind that might seem weird or even off-putting but that fashion people adore. Their expectation was that, in going out on his own, Mr. Enninful would push this boundary even further. The fact that he didn’t seemed like a letdown. (Many willingly expressed their disappointment on social media.)
But Mr. Enninful has bigger goals than impressing fashion people. There’s a reason 72 will be sold in specialty magazine stores as well as in places like Barnes & Noble and Waitrose, the British supermarket chain.
Mr. Enninful wanted Ms. Roberts, whom he met when he put her on the cover of British Vogue for his penultimate issue in 2024. “She’s not led by the Hollywood machine,” he said. “She brought up her kids, does her own housework.” That is also why she is wearing a suit from Ms. Philo, another fashion person who walked away from an establishment career to start her own thing.
The New Model
One of Mr. Enninful’s greatest skills is the accumulation of friends and contacts. “You can put him in a room with anyone, and he’ll leave with a new best friend,” Ms. Harris said.
According to Ms. Roberts: “I’ve worked with a lot of nice people, and it’s nice to run into them later at a dinner party. But to work with someone and the next day we’re texting each other five times, as I did with Edward — that’s unusual.”
The reach of his network is pretty clear from the contents of 72, which includes an opening story called “My Space” featuring people like Ms. Winfrey, Pharrell Williams, Stella McCartney, Gwyneth Paltrow and the film director Luca Guadagnino snapped in their favorite places (mostly their homes). The cover was shot by Craig McDean, and Inez and Vinoodh took portraits for another piece — Vogue stalwarts all, though there is a feature from a 25-year-old Ghanaian photographer, Jude Lartey, introducing readers to his world.
Mr. Enninful did not style any of the shoots inside, not even Ms. Roberts’s. “I’m retired from styling,” he said. He did sign off on them all, including a six-page shoot of a collection he designed for Moncler, photographed on the model Adut Akech.
The collection, called EE72 x Moncler, was the first project he did after Vogue. In many ways, it is the perfect example of how he sees everything working — and how he managed to offer a magazine without ads.
Think of it as a jigsaw he is putting together, wherein an investment here leads to a podcast or an event over there. The magazine is in some ways a catalog of what buying into Mr. Enninful’s creative universe can get you. So was the party, which was sponsored by Moncler and Google Shopping and included a room where guests could be scanned with Google’s new technology and “try on” clothes from the Moncler collection. Similar events are planned for each fashion week city, each with a different sponsor.
“It’s like an advertisement for the service you can get from a collaboration,” Mr. Tonchi said. “The money is not for the magazine. It’s for the service.”
The effective result is to free 72 from some of the strictures of legacy media. “Any magazine has numbers you have to sell on the newsstand, advertising numbers you have to hit,” Mr. Enninful said. The way he has structured the enterprise, it’s really about the platform. “The platform powers the magazine, but we don’t depend on the magazine to exist,” he said. “We’re not here to do, ‘Give me a page, you get a credit.’”
Mr. Enninful is reworking the math.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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