Hello and welcome two ways to change the world. I'm Krishnan Gurumurthy and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is the editor of British

Vogue. In fact, he's in charge of all Vogue publications in Europe, Edward and in Fulham

were interviewing him because he's written a remarkable book called A Visible Man. Now

it's not the kind of memoir you might expect from an editor of Vogue because it's really

a book about being an asylum seeker, a black man, a gay man in the fashion industry who got

his job at Vogue and decided to transform it. Let me just read one little line from the

book where he said, I have a thick skin, I can handle it but I won't stand behind

and allow the next generation to go through the same kind of treatment if I can help it.

I have the power to do something about it. If I'm not here to lift up the younger generation

then what the hell am I doing? Edward thank you very much dude for it. Thank you for having me.

How bad were things? How bad were things growing up? No I mean in the industry that you came

into change? Well I came into an industry that sort of had a very thin definition of what

beauty was, like you're a centric and you know I come from a background where all women were

celebrated, women of all different races, different religions, age, that's what I came from.

So for me, from the age of 18 when I started at ID Magazine to now, my message has always been,

let's show the beauty of women, the diverse range of women and I've always shown that. So for me,

it wasn't even anything new, it was just something that was always with me for my childhood.

Why do you think that wasn't being done? I think there was just a myth that women of color

don't sell on magazine covers, women of color was somehow seen as down market when it came to

advertising and I knew that was wrong, I knew that was wrong and I knew that when I looked around

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