The Ghanaian-born son of Ladbroke Grove brought a diversity to the magazine and society that will never be forgotten<\/p>\n
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 \u201csuccessful\u201d part). Out of the blue, I received a message on my BlackBerry, something about Vogue Italia using only Black models and \u201cexperts\u201d predicting it would be the worst-selling edition ever \u2026 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> of <\/a>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.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Ghanaian-born son of Ladbroke Grove brought a diversity to the magazine and society that will never be forgotten 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}