It is no doubt Nigerians always flourish wherever they find themselves and Nikki Ogunnaike’s move to GQ, the men’s style platform under Condé Nast, is just another proof of the fact.
With her recent move from Elle as the style Director to GQ as the deputy fashion director, second to GQ’s fashion director, Mobolaji Dawodu, the fashion department of GQ is now being run by two Nigerian-Americans. How very inspiring for aspiring or young African and black writers in the fashion industry!
After graduating from the University of Virginia with honors in Sociology and Media studies, Nikki Ogunnaike started her career at Vanity Fair working as a market assistant before moving – while also changing her career path – to InStyle to kickstart her editorial career.
After about four years working in print at InStyle, Ogunnaike jumped ship to Glamour’s digital platform when digitization of magazines was just beginning to take off, first working as a style editor, writing fashion and covering beauty before she was promoted to senior fashion editor.
After being in the Condé Nast family for three years, Ogunnaike moved to Hearst’s Elle magazine’s digital publication in 2015 as a senior fashion editor, after which she became fashion features director and style director.
Nikki Ogunnaike has come so far having started out from the bottom in an industry where there weren’t a lot of people of color who worked or made decisions; working her way up to her representing the Elle brand on television and online videos, creating original video content including her highly viewed online reality show to now being the deputy style director at GQ.
Announcing her move to GQ replacing former deputy fashion director, Matt Sebra, Nikki shared her excitement over an Instagram post where she cheered to new beginnings; “is this where I say “some news”?? #thenewgq.” With this move, we are very certain GQ is about to make a turn for the better and we’re very excited about what’s to come.
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