AAny book that claims to offer a glimpse of Anna Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of US Vogue, is a guaranteed bestseller. This is as true of fiction (The Devil Wears Fashion by Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger) as it is of inane biographies (Jerry Oppenheimer’s Front Row: the Cool Life and Hot Times of Anna Wintour) and works of art. forced from those who know. her (2020’s The Chiffon Trenches, in which her former close friend and colleague, the late André Leon Talley, claimed that she is “not capable of simple human kindness”). No other magazine publisher has exerted such a fascination on the public. But why?
According to Amy Odell in her semi-authorized biography, Anna (Wintour herself did not contribute, but Odell thanks her “for letting me into her world”), the answer is sexism: “It’s probably [Wintour]Her fearsome reputation that first springs to mind when her name is mentioned…Although if a man did his job as well and with similar affectations, his discipline and commitment would probably be celebrated,” he writes. This is a very zeitgeist point to make, but is it really true? If a male editor hired a female journalist and then fired her to have her hair cut, her wardrobe changed, and her skirts cut “to regulation 19 inches,” as Wintour did according to Odell’s book, would that be celebrated? And if a male editor commissioned a boastful article about Asma al-Assad in 2010 and then, going against the advice of the article’s author, Joan Juliet Buck, and some of her staff, insisted on running it in the magazine just because he ” I liked the Asma picture,” and then didn’t renew poor Buck’s contract when there was a public backlash, would that be applauded? (Full disclosure: US Vogue asked me, multiple times, to interview al-Assad for them in 2010. I declined.)
I’m not saying all this to criticize Wintour, because, occasional blind spots aside, I think she’s a great magazine editor. Like Odell, I think a lot of her speech about herself, where she’s conflated with Miranda Priestly, the intimidating editor of The Devil Wears Prada, is extremely silly. But I also don’t think that the cod-feminist arguments in her defense, which go against the facts, act as a correct corrective, much less bring anyone closer to the truth.
Odell makes a big game out of how much Wintour loves her kids, which doesn’t give anything away, other than that she’s human.
I have met Wintour several times. Spoiler alert: she has always been perfectly polite to me, but there is no denying that women are scary. The only time I’ve ever seen a room of reporters truly tremble in fear is when I sat in a features meeting at US Vogue and Wintour asked her editors if they had any ideas. She’s not mean, like Priestley, but she’s amazingly gruff and more likely to tell you that you’re wrong than right. Odell tries to soften her up by using the same trick a women’s magazine editor once told me when I interviewed a female politician: “To make her more relatable, emphasize that she’s a mother.” Odell makes a big game out of how much Wintour loves her children Charlie and Bee Shaffer, which is undoubtedly true, but doesn’t reveal anything other than that Wintour is human, which she had already guessed.
Wintour, I strongly suspect, enjoys his reputation as the Genghis Khan of fashion: after all, when he went to a screening of The Devil Wears Prada, he was, of course, wearing Prada. He is unapologetic about taking unpopular stances, such as his notorious fondness for real fur and his even more notorious aversion to fatness, both in others and in herself. Odell is a scrupulous investigator, but I’m less interested in the size of Wintour’s first mortgage than in understanding what drives her to keep working when she’s been at the top for decades, where she learned not to worry about being liked, and where that fat . aversion comes. Odell hints that Wintour’s toughness comes from her father, Evening Standard editor Charles Wintour, but it doesn’t seem like he was around much when she was growing up. Anna is more a defense of the subject of her than a vision of her, more interested in the decorative embellishments than the intricate tailoring beneath her.
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