She has the most fashionable job in the UK, but Chioma Nnadi is also an avid hiker and outdoorswoman who believes getting outside is the best way to stay calm.
At the start of every day, Chioma Nnadi walks to work. “It’s early morning Soho,” she says, “so you never know what you’re going to find. But having that time to myself is really important.”
Chioma is a city girl through and through. She was born and raised in central London, studied English Language and French Literature in Manchester and began her career with music mags in New York. She relocated back to the Big Smoke after being made Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, among the country’s most coveted jobs, in 2023. When the news was announced, The Times declared, “The devil wears Sambas”, riffing on Chioma’s trainer of choice. Perhaps no other shoe could have been more synonymous with city life (Sambas are a trend that, apocryphally, Chioma herself started).
“Everyone was worried that we were going to be eaten by coyotes.”
But Chioma is also an avid outdoorswoman, which presumably makes her an outlier at Vogue HQ. One struggles to imagine her mentor, Anna Wintour, ever stuffing her bob into an Arc’teryx beanie, or predecessor Edward Enninful lacing up a pair of Merrell Moab 3s. She, however, rocks up to our interview in her Canada Goose and glows about the great outdoors like a guru does about the gods.
So, bonafide Londoner she is, raised in a Fitzrovia flat and decked in designer thrifted from Portobello, but she’s equally adept outdoors and has been on “too many hikes to count”.
Growing up, she would go on yearly holidays to the Swiss countryside with her nature-fanatic, Swiss-German mother, spending idyllic weeks frolicking in The Sound of Music mountains and barbecuing by the river. She would race older family members on marathonic walks (“I was a very competitive child”) and, later, complete her Duke of Edinburgh Award, though she quit after bronze because she didn’t like lugging around her tent. Regardless, her relationship with nature – more so than her kingmaker industry contacts or her 5pm meetings – is one of the most important in her life.
Nature is, she explains, essential to self-care, of which she is something of a junkie, previously admitting to trying “every trend going”. When she’s feeling stressed, she’ll find a tree and sit by it for 10 minutes to reboot her nervous system. If it’s a sense of untetheredness tugging at her, she’ll take off her shoes (today, a pair of new-season, black-and-turquoise Chanels, so new that they’re “hard to find anywhere”) and push her feet into the ground. If she can curl her toes into some grass, all the better.
She brusquely mentions the science to back up her methodology, but really it’s life-worn experience that has taught her the importance of all this. Chioma speaks about her outdoor escapades as pivotal moments in her life: she recalls once getting her New York friends lost on an upstate getaway (“everyone was worried that we were going to be eaten by coyotes,” she laughs), or getting her partner to unwittingly answer The New York Times’s ‘36 questions to fall in love’ (“when did you last sing to yourself?”, “name three things you and your partner have in common”) on a hike.
There is an earnestness that approaches religious reverence to the way she talks about the outdoors. It “humbles” and “awes” her, she explains “you can never quite capture how beautiful it is from the top of a mountain”, so she doesn’t bother with photos. It has also, in a way, saved her – especially in her deepest lows, in the ebbs of the anxieties that have affected her life.
“I came back to the UK during the pandemic,” she says, after having spent two decades in New York, “and it was a difficult time for me. I think, like most people, I really craved community. Having that much time alone wasn’t something that I was used to.”
“I’d forgotten you could just get yourself up and go outside.”
She recalls that lockdown summer when UK temperatures bubbled to merciful highs, a reprise from the doom and gloom lingering in every other facet of life. As the world tentatively opened back up, and as she was stuck feeling “really low and depressed”, Chioma met with her older brother who drove her to the South Downs. “We stopped on the way and just had fish and chips. I was really grateful to him. I’d forgotten you could just get yourself up and go outside.”
For now, Chioma isn’t quite ready to leave London, less than three years into the big Vogue job. But she could see a future for herself somewhere more peaceful, emulating her mother who has now moved to the Gambian wilderness, “off the grid, with no running water or way to contact her.” Chioma might not go that far, but the urge is a dilemma she is “still trying to resolve”.
In the meantime, she’s enjoying the urban solace of London and its outdoor spaces: Hyde Park and Hampstead Heath, where she used to go blackberry picking with her mother. “I like feeling the sun on my skin and having these simple tools to make myself feel better.” If that can be Switzerland or South Downs, that’s all well and good. Brazil, Morocco, Japan or the other global locations that pepper her Instagram, even better. But even a morning stroll through Soho, she says, can be “the perfect way to start my day”.