Anna Wintour, a polarizing and trailblazing editor, announced last week that she will be stepping down as the editor-in-chief of Vogue after 37 years but will remain as the Condé Nast magazine group’s chief content officer. During her reign, she became the ultimate arbiter of fashion who successfully pushed to broaden the magazine’s coverage beyond clothes, shoes, and accessories to include all of pop culture and politics. But she also had a reputation as an extremely tough and mercurial boss, the presumed role model for The Devil Wears Prada, the book by a one-time Vogue assistant that became a movie starring Meryl Streep.
Today, some critics would have you believe that the now 75-year-old editor should be regarded as a poster child, perhaps the ultimate symbol, of the excesses of New York City’s publishing elite at the glitziest of publishing houses, Condé Nast. But so what? Wintour’s supporters could make an equally strong case that she stood for something!
As the British-born editor reportedly said in her surprise farewell announcement to staffers on the morning of June 26: “Anybody in a creative field knows how essential it is never to stop growing in one’s work. When I became the editor of Vogue, I was eager to prove to all who might listen that there was a new, exciting way to imagine an American fashion magazine.” Under her stewardship, Vogue emerged as the unrivaled top fashion glossy in a viciously competitive field. Wintour, with her classic bob hair-do and signature shades, became one of the most recognizable figures in New York City’s coolest industry: publishing.
Her longevity, alone—especially in a publishing house once infamous for its abrupt editorial upheavals—is astonishing. If Manhattan’s publishing biz had a Mount Rushmore, Anna Wintour would certainly be on it. I have a sneaky fondness for people who get the job done on their terms.
If Wintour had a peer from another field during her heyday, it may have been someone rather unlikely: legendary NFL coach Bill Parcells. Parcells didn’t care if he was liked. He did want and expect to be respected by his players.
And Parcells notably won big. He led the Giants from the wilderness of mediocrity to win two Super Bowls in five years. Wintour’s detractors would have us all believe that she was a fashion-driven egomaniac.
I keep coming back to her longevity in a cauldron of an industry. One by one in this century, the magazine industry’s New York-based industry giants have stepped away: Newsweek’s Mark Whitaker, Time’s Jim Kelly, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, New York’s Adam Moss, Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, Talk’s Tina Brown—who rose to fame inside the same Condé Nast publishing house at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker while Wintour was building her legacy at Vogue. Today, The New Yorker’s David Remnick may be the last link to the legendary editors in a golden age of publishing.
To get an idea of the bygone era’s glitz, Wintour and the magazine she edited were once the subject of the R. J. Cutler documentary The September Issue, about the making of the September 2007 Vogue. which contained a record 840 pages. The film opens with Wintour heading to her office, which was at the time in Times Square, in a classic black town car reading an email from designer Tom Ford on her Blackberry.
Is She Really the Devil? (No) For better or worse, much of the public’s perception of Wintour may lie in Meryl Street’s mesmerizing performance as a fashion magazine editor in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. It is widely suspected that Wintour inspired the Streep performance, as Lauren Weisberger, the author of the book of the same name, had served as Wintour’s assistant.
(It has been reported that Streep hinted that she was pegging her performance more on many men she had encountered in Hollywood over the years.) In any event, Streep turned in one of her most clever and indelible performances by portraying a demanding, feared, and very successful fashion-magazine icon. For my two cents, Wintour should take the comparison of herself and Streep’s Miranda Priestly as a source of pride.
Good Old-Fashioned Sexism? It can be argued that a good deal of the criticism of Wintour’s managerial style is based on good old-fashioned sexism. As the thinking goes about strong-willed and highly successful women executives, if a man behaved this way, the media would heap praise on him and say that his toughness, if you could call boorish behavior that, is what catapulted him to stardom.
Could she have been nicer? Sure—but would she have maintained the magazine’s cutting-edge excellence for nearly four decades by being cuddly? I wish I could contribute personal remembrances of Wintour and talk about my many encounters with this titan of industry.
But I have never interviewed Anna Wintour. I covered the media beat from 1999 to 2013, so I am well aware of her reputation. Aside from building Vogue, she singlehandedly made the Met Gala the ultimate red-carpet event in the Big Apple.
Last year it raised $31 million for the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, selling individual tickets for $75,000 and tables for $350,000. Sponsors ranged from TikTok and Instagram to Louis Vuitton. She was the driving force that put it on the top of the city’s many gala red-carpet events.
She didn’t do badly for herself either in her career. With her seven-figure salary from Condé Nast, Wintour amassed a personal net worth of $50 million, certainly not in the billionaire ranks, but the very top for a working journalist. And she did it by relentlessly focusing on the stars of fashion, entertainment and politics, very rarely herself.
Today, Wintour should be celebrated. Her legacy is complete. She should wear it proudly.
