Vanessa Kingori: The Trailblazer

Kingori believes in maximising on serendipity. Her success has arrived not through premeditated planning but by seizing the opportunities that have come to her, a trait she inherited from her grandmother and her mother, who has an MBE for services to midwifery. Her grandmother picked cotton on a plantation in St. Kitts and was the descendent of slaves. She wanted more for her children. “She had this idea that the world was really big, and they should go out into it.” Kingori’s mother left the island aged 17 and travelled to the UK, where she knew no one, to train as a nurse. Kingori was born in Kenya and grew up in St. Kitts, before moving to the UK aged seven to join her family. They settled in West London, where she was the only Black girl in her class at convent school. “But I was not race-aware,” she says of that time, “because when you come from a Black country, there’s nothing that tells you that being Black is something of note. I’m grateful for that naivety. By secondary school I was more aware.”

She credits her early years in Kenya and St. Kitts with instilling an appreciation of both creativity and commerce. “You could make something or have an idea and go out to the market that weekend and turn it into money. The intersection of creativity and enterprise has always been something interesting to me.” She was entrepreneurial from an early age, “I always had money making little businesses,” she says. Her first was designing personalised stationery, which she sold to classmates. Then, making contacts in other years she expanded through the school. It was an early indication of her formidable sales and network-building skills. “I’m grateful to the teachers for not shutting me down,” she says.

Art school wasn’t an option, though. Her family expected more. “The whole ethos of my grandmother and my mother was that every generation should do better than the last.” She studied management and sociology at Royal Holloway University of London, but after graduation she still didn’t know what she wanted to do. “I used to have anxiety about that. Perhaps because of my family being working-class but aspiring to work in middle-class spaces, the paths were not visible for me.” She modelled and worked in events, but it wasn’t until she got a job at the Evening Standard that things fell into place. She loved working with editors and excelled at selling ads. “I was working in the sales team. But in the middle of it all was creativity,” she says. “Selling is an art. Edward’s nickname for me is Mama Kingori. He says I remind him of those slick women in African markets who are selling, and I’m here for it. I do think I have some ancestral sales skills,” she says, adding, “everything, everything in life is a negotiation.”

jacket by VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, skirt by GUCCI, boots by JIMMY CHOO

The publisher and editor relationship has historically been confrontational, with the publisher’s priorities (make as much money as possible) often not aligning with the creative goals of editorial. Kingori has always seen it as a collaborative relationship, though. “That’s where you get the most magic,” she says, taking the approach to new levels at Vogue, where Enninful’s message of diversity has cut through commercially, radically changing the cultural conversation. “If you are going to do something, do it big and do it properly, that creates momentum,” says Kingori. She cites the magazine’s May 2019 issue, which came with a special 80-page supplement featuring Jane Fonda on the cover and numerous women over the age of 55 inside. Generously sponsored by L’Oreal Paris, it was a huge commercial success and opened the door for other older women such as Dame Judi Dench and Miriam Margolyes to be considered worthy Vogue cover girls. Under Kingori, Vogue has also burst off the page into real life, with a slew of money-spinning parties and events. She saw the potential of this early on, when Enninful held a signing session for the March 2018 issue, which featured Gigi and Bella Hadid on two covers wearing Versace. People camped out overnight to get editions signed by the new editor-in-chief. “There was well over 1,000 people there,” recalls Kingori, who had to break the news to the queue that he had only signed 200 copies, “And people said, ‘I just want to meet him’. It was a lesson for me in trusting your gut and it opened up a huge revenue stream. We had a 750 per cent increase in revenue on experiential lines that year,” she says.