MIGUEL ENAMORADO

“I didn’t know I could be this growing up,” Miguel Enamorado said, pointing to the magazine covers he’s styled so far as Fashion Director at Harper’s BAZAAR – among them the August 2019 issue featuring Serena Williams in a gold Ralph Lauren Collection cape that shines just like a medal.

As an immigrant from Honduras, Enamorado’s world shifted quickly when his family arrived in Miami, and he had to readjust to a new, American system of schooling. He’d always been interested in working in the arts and attended Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami’s Design District. After graduating, he attended FIT where he thought he’d go into fashion design, but shifted career goals once he was introduced to the magazine world.

His first editorial experience was at Cargo magazine, a shopping guide for men from Conde Nast Publications Inc. After it folded in 2006, Enamorado went to Interview magazine where he spent 10 years working under the then- leadership of editorial director Fabien Baron and creative director Karl Templer.

The editor began to style more when he became the magazine’s fashion director. He spent a lot of time in the Interview archives admiring the incredible names in the historical mastheads of industry titans like American artist Richard Bernstein and editor André Leon Talley.

His colleagues at the time Karla Martinez (now Editor at Vogue Mexico and Latin America) and Dania Ortiz (currently Fashion and Accessories Director at Town & Country) were some of the other Latinxs in the room. They even jokingly referred to their friend group as Entrevista (which means interview in Spanish).

But for Enamorado, diversity isn’t binary and has to include the entire spectrum in order to really be inclusive. The legacy he hopes to leave behind is radical visibility. It’s important to him that his three names appear on the masthead each time: Miguel Alberto Enamorado.

“It’s part of our Latinx culture to have all these names. I’ve always been called Miguel Alberto in my family, mostly because if you’d just say Miguel there’d be four other people who’d answer,” he jokingly added.

He styles with the generations of women in his family and early life in Honduras as the main point of reference and inspiration – the way he’d watch his mother or abuela put together an outfit helped filter his way of thinking and defined his modern-day approach to styling.

As the current Fashion Director for Harper’s BAZAAR, he’s had the privilege of working with bon vivants like Penelope Cruz, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Demi Moore, and Susan Sarandon, making a name for and adding himself as a notable stylist in our industry today.

The world knows of the indelible styling works of Polly Mellen and Grace Coddington, but what did that career trajectory look like for Enamorado or anyone aspiring to be the next great one?

That question resonated with me as I thought of the important symbolism behind him taking up so much literal space on a piece of paper in a masthead with a very melodious, romantic and unequivocally Latinx name. For Enamorado, Latinx Heritage Month is an opportune time to provide positive visibility to those contributing to the culture.

“If you as a young Latinx do not see that as a possibility for you, you won’t try to achieve it. But if you can see Nina Garcia at ELLE, Karla Martinez de Salas at Vogue Mexico, and even myself at Harper’s, you will create people who will also want to do this and know that they can too. I’m not any different than you or anyone that will read this,” he said. “The more that we as Latinxs are in it, the more people like us can understand that they can too.”