How 'A Black Issue' of Italian Vogue Won a Brit Insurance Designs Award

How exactly did Italian Vogue‘s “A Black Issue”—published to wide acclaim and stellar sales last July, it featured only black models—best the likes of Miuccia Prada, Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz, Maison Martin Margiela, and the Barbican’s stunning Viktor & Rolf exhibition to win the Design Museum‘s 2009 Brit Insurance Designs of the Year award for fashion? On the occasion of tonight’s award ceremony in London, Sarah Mower explains. “What swung the award for [Italian Vogue editor-in-chief Franca] Sozzani is the way she used the power of Vogue to reach beyond the boundaries of fashion,” writes