Gabriella Karefa-Johnson On Surviving Ye, Quitting Condé Nast & Speaking Her Mind

Some fall out of Vogue. Gabriella Karefa-Johnson jumped.

When Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the fashion editor-personality who became famous as the first Black woman to style a Vogue cover (in 2021) and even more famous after she got into a social media brouhaha with Kanye West, was interviewing for her first big fashion job at Vogue, she ended up, not surprisingly, in front of Anna Wintour.

Wintour asked Karefa-Johnson where she wanted to be in 10 years. Karefa-Johnson answered — as Wintour once had, when asked a similar question — editor-in-chief of Vogue. Almost exactly a decade later, Karefa-Johnson doesn’t necessarily want that anymore.

In October, after three years as global contributing editor at large, years in which she styled covers that featured Vice President Kamala Harris, poet Amanda Gorman and Margot Robbie (as Barbie), among others, she decided to leave what had once been her dream job. The Israel-Hamas war had begun, and she had become a vocal presence on Instagram protesting what she referred to as the “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, despite the aversion of Condé Nast, Vogue’s parent company, (and, indeed, that of most of the fashion establishment) to any public pronouncements on the conflict.

“I resigned as kind of a material action of solidarity and because it was just time for me to move on,” Karefa-Johnson, 32, said recently. “Everything I said was attached to the institutions I worked for. Not only was that not fair, it was also distracting.”

She had also realised, she said, that she didn’t want to be encumbered by the expectations of perhaps the ultimate establishment publication.

“There’s so many things that these institutions represent that I’m not,” she said. “It works both ways.”

It was the final act in a three-year evolution in which Karefa-Johnson had gone, somewhat unwittingly, from serving a brand to becoming a brand. Now she is trying to figure out what it means to be, as her best friend, Thomas Gebremedhin, the executive editor of Doubleday, said, “untethered” from her former employer.

She has effectively become a test case for what it means to be a voice of fashion in a post-magazine world — a world where the power that was once concentrated in the hands of a few glossy publications is increasingly lodged in the feeds of charismatic individuals, where fashion itself has become part of pop culture, and where personal values are increasingly infiltrating the professional sphere.

But two things tend to happen when an umbilical cord is cut. Either you soar ever upward or you disappear into the chaotic maw of space.

Act I: The Serena Williams effect

The story of Karefa-Johnson’s emergence as a public figure is essentially a morality play involving unintended consequences, social justice reckoning and this peculiar social media moment.

“Basically, when I was an assistant, I would go on these shoots with celebrities and famous models, and we would become friends because I was normal and would treat them like normal people,” Karefa-Johnson said.

She was talking about women like Bella and Gigi Hadid and Paloma Elsesser, who are part of her inner circle. “They would follow me on Instagram,” she said, and when she posted something they liked, they would repost it to their millions of followers.

As she spoke, she was wearing a Public Enemy ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ T-shirt, jeans and Chanel ballet flats and was curled up on the sofa in the living room of the four-storey brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn that she shares with her twin sister, a rapper. She also has an older brother, who is in cybersecurity, and two older sisters. One is a lawyer who works for a social justice nonprofit in California, where they all grew up, and one is in sports marketing.

Her family is very important to her, she said, especially her maternal grandparents. Her grandmother was the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Divinity School; her grandfather, a doctor, was the first foreign minister of Sierra Leone after it achieved independence from Britain and became a republic. They helped raise her and her siblings after her father, an urban planner, died when she was 7 months old. She pointed to her aunt, who was a model in Europe in the 1960s and 70s, as the reason she first got interested in fashion.

In 2020, just before Covid-19 brought the world to a standstill, Karefa-Johnson posted a short video on Instagram Stories (she tends to keep her politics to Stories and her fashion work to regular posts) responding to reactions she had seen to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. She later summed up her response as: “Health care, education, criminalisation of poverty, food deserts — we live in a world that systemically murders Black people daily. So when I see you talk about being shocked by this, it hurts me and upsets me because this shouldn’t be a revelation.” Serena Williams, whom Karefa-Johnson had styled for her Stuart Weitzman ads, reposted it.

Until then, Karefa-Johnson’s guiding principle, especially regarding the fashion world, had been “Just keep my head down and power through and withstand this otherness that I felt pretty constantly and that was overwhelming.”

At Vogue, that approach had taken her from assisting Hamish Bowles, an editor at large, to working with Tonne Goodman, then fashion director, and on to becoming the fashion editor of Garage magazine. Even if she felt like an anomaly in a mostly white world as a 5-foot-10, non-sample-size Black woman who was operating, she said, “in a way that nobody else did.”

In that glossy world, “there was really strategic value in keeping your cards close to your chest and not talking too much,” she said. And she loved to talk.

It was when she started talking online, however, that she realised people were listening, including people who had no interest in fashion. She realised, she said, that “I should take advantage of people listening to try and create the world I hope we can have.”

Act II: Talk and consequences

That is why, when Garage magazine closed and Vogue started wooing her to return, she decided it would be on her terms.

“Magazines were realising that if they were invested in diversity and inclusion, they needed to actually have people of colour working for them,” she said. Karefa-Johnson has her own theory of tokenism. She grew up in predominantly white spaces, including her California neighbourhood; the Thacher School, a boarding school in Ojai, California; and Barnard College in Manhattan.

She realised that “everybody had a leg up,” she said. “Maybe it’s nepotism, maybe it’s your dad playing golf with the CEO of LVMH. If diversity and inclusion is my leg up, you work what you have going for you.”

At the same time, she went on, “I was contending with these feelings of like, ‘Okay, I’m trying to get to the top and be respected in an industry full of people whose values don’t align with mine, so what does that say about me?’ I realised that the only way I could be good with that was if I didn’t hide anymore. I’m not going to pretend a part of my personality isn’t loud and political and silly and interested in the Housewives and reality TV. And if I experienced pushback — this person isn’t very Vogue, or this is not a Vogue story — I would fight for it.”

There are stylists who are geniuses at creating a fantasy world, stylists who are almost sculptural about images and stylists who are good with celebrities. Karefa-Johnson decided she would be a stylist who used fashion like a Trojan horse to deliver points about the politics of race, size and access.

When she was assigned a story about puffer coats, for example, she decided to shoot only Black models in Iceland, to “decolonize the outdoors,” she said. She refused to feature Dolce & Gabbana in her stories after the Dolce designers made racist and fat-phobic comments.

“It was definitely not ideal that I worked in a fashion magazine that they support financially and was not willing to shoot their product,” she said. And she kept posting her thoughts.

Yet, as Elsesser said, “There are consequences to representing something different.”

Karefa-Johnson learned exactly what that meant in 2022 when she was in Paris for the shows and went to Ye’s newly rebranded YZY collection, which included a ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirt. Afterward, and for the next few days, she wrestled with that in various posts on her Instagram stories.

The designer, formerly known as Kanye West, was not happy with her and went to war on his Instagram, posting a picture of her with the words “This is not a fashion person” and criticising her clothes.

“The only reason he thought that he could come for me is because he thought I was not someone who brokered power,” Karefa-Johnson said. “He thought a fat Black woman could not possibly be somebody who has any sway in this industry, and certainly not somebody who works at Vogue. It was humiliating. This super-famous person who I respected despite his shortcomings is validating my worst fear to a huge audience.”

Vogue defended her, as it had when her Kamala Harris cover was attacked. People were upset about the picture, which they felt was too casual, and the lighting. The vice president’s team remained mum, even though, Karefa-Johnson said, they had chosen all the clothes.

Act III: Freedom

Her statements about the Israel-Hamas war were more controversial. There were limits, it turned out, to how one can effect change from the inside. So, although Karefa-Johnson calls Vogue her personal “Roman Empire” and Wintour “A Dubs”; and although Goodman raves about her talent and intelligence and says she is one of her “best friends”; and Wintour says “we are really proud of the work we did together,” Karefa-Johnson decided to leave before her words became a problem. (Wintour said that Karefa-Johnson’s departure was “entirely her decision.”)

“It’s a risk,” said her mother, Suzanne Karefa-Johnson, a physician with a focus on hospice and palliative medicine, who said she and her daughter had discussed the trade-off between the freedom of going solo and the safety of the institution, especially in light of the aggressive criticism Karefa-Johnson had received on social media after she spoke out about Israel.

This will be her first ready-to-wear season without the armature of her former employer.

“I feel like I’m going to get, like, Row 7, Seat 45,” Karefa-Johnson said. She isn’t sure if the hairstylists and makeup artists she worked with at Vogue will continue to work with her. “The idea that ‘I have to make sure you’re okay with the powers that be before I work with you’ is something I’ve constantly pushed up against. Now I’m not attached to some of those powerful systems, we’ll see what I’ve got on my own.”

In truth, she’s not entirely on her own. She has a team of agents at talent agency WME plotting her next move. She is consulting for Nike, has done design collaborations with Target and Moschino, occasionally models, and is shooting fashion features for independent magazines like Document. In September, she used her contacts to help young designer Torishéju Dumi stage her first fashion show (she got Naomi Campbell to model), and she is continuing to style Joseph Altuzarra’s New York Fashion Week show, as well as Etro in Milan.

She is also writing a book about her experiences. Working title: Not a Fashion Person.

“So, thank you, Kanye,” she said.

Goodman said she thought Karefa-Johnson might end up as creative director of a brand. “That could really break open all the issues,” she said. Gebremedhin said, “I could see her going into advocacy work.”

Wintour had a different idea.

“I always told her she should have a talk show,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Vanessa Friedman

Photographs by: Amy Lombard and Lelanie Foster

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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