The knives are out for Anna Wintour
As the legendarily icy editor of US Vogue, she has ruled the fashion scenefor two decades. But now the buzz among Manhattan's media elite is that the gilded era of Anna Wintour may be drawing to a close. Ian Burrell reports.
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
For two decades, the London-born Anna Wintour has edited American Vogue, making it the world's most influential fashion journal, and yet, even now it not clear that many of her fellow US citizens are quite sure who she is.
Anna Wintour, who is as close to royalty as it is possible for a fashionista to be, was at Buckingham Palace last week to collect an OBE in the Queen's birthday honours. As she affixed the red ribbon of her medal to the shoulder of her suit, selected from the latest Chanel autumn/winter collection, she mused that "It's a great honour, but many of my American colleagues are not quite sure what it is."
For two decades, the London-born Wintour has edited American Vogue, making it the world's most influential fashion journal, and yet, even now it not clear that many of her fellow US citizens are quite sure who she is.
Her force of personality has even close colleagues trembling in their Manolos, but she combines it with a charm that has seduced advertisers into filling 2,700 pages of advertising last year and an instinct for American culture that maintains Vogue's readership at around 10 million. It is a magazine that appeals both to the moneyed women of Manhattan and the chattering classes of the Midwest.
The New York website Gawker claimed yesterday that Si Newhouse, the 81-year-old head of Condé Nast, had extended his annual winter vacation in Vienna in order to spend time in Paris meeting Carine Roitfeld, the slender and highly regarded editor of ParisVogue. Drooling as it speculated, Gawker punted the "hot delicious rumour" that Roitfeld was being lined up as Wintour's successor, a notion that it claimed had served as a tasty appetiser for Condé Nast colleagues dining at New York's Waverly Inn.
A week earlier, a diarist from New York magazine's fashion blog, approached Wintour at the National Book Awards and asked her bluntly if she was about to quit. "I'm so sorry, I think that's an extremely rude question. Please leave me alone," replied the editor. Undeterred, the journalist asked again: "May we ask what you would do if you did retire?" At which point, Wintour was reduced to a terse: "No. Just go away."
All this is grist to the mill to those who seek to portray the Briton as an ice woman, a real-life female version of the sort of upper-class English baddie beloved by Hollywood and acted out by Charles Dance or Christopher Lee. So frosty is this snow queen perceived to be, that she is habitually referred to by the nickname "Arctic Wintour", although once upon a time, her detractors preferred "Nuclear Wintour".
As one fashion journalist put it yesterday: "People are scared of her. I'm scared of her. She's scary, formidable and frosty."
The personal attacks peaked two years ago with the release of The Devil Wears Prada, the film adaptation of a fashion novel by Lauren Weisberger, a former personal assistant to Wintour at Vogue. Commentators did not hesitate to make the comparison between Miranda Priestly, the domineering fashion magazine editor character played by Meryl Streep, and Wintour.
"She's had to put up with an unbelievable amount of nastiness, mainly from female journalists because of jealousy," says Colin McDowell, the founder of the cutting edge festival Fashion Fringe and editor-in-chief of the website Distill (
www.distilldigital.com). "Of course, all these hacks, who have crawled halfway up the ladder and then stopped, exhausted, are going to look up and say 'I don't like her'."
McDowell harbours no such feelings. He sees Wintour as being "focused on excellence", rather than ruthlessly determined. "She is the most important person in the international fashion world, more important than any designer. She leads the industry and has used American Vogue as the central industrial tool for disseminating what's important to her, which is fashion that sells," he says admiringly.
Wintour has become a target for environmentalists because of her determination to wear fur. The organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) has made her a favourite target. Peta's international president, Ingrid Newkirk, another English-American, has relentlessly pursued the editrix, once approaching her in a Four Seasons hotel and tossing a dead racoon on to her plate. Wintour discreetly covered the deceased mammal with a napkin, and placed an order for another pot of tea.
"She has stuck to her beliefs," says McDowell. "She has been attacked, had dead animals thrown at her, custard pies. She always comes away with her dignity – she never shouts, she never screams."
***
The idea that Wintour might step down is not wholly fanciful. Aside from the contract issue, her predecessor Grace Mirabella left the editor's chair at the age of 59. The Englishwoman has thoroughly proved herself and, according to one Condé Nast source quoted by the New York Post last month, "She feels she has done it all and had enough."
These are not the happiest times for magazines, especially high-end titles. The pain of Wall Street has had a direct impact on the sales of the luxury goods companies that are Vogue's most important clients. As sales have declined, so have advertising budgets, with the result that Wintour's magazine has in recent months been thinner than she would have liked.
More damaging have been the failings of some ventures to which she has been closely linked. In October, Condé Nast announced that it would be cutting back the much vaunted Men's Vogue from 10 issues a year to two. Meanwhile, the music-led Condé Nast title Fashion Rocks has been put "on hiatus for 2009", to use the words of the company's president Richard Beckman, who has been alarmed by the scale of the advertising downturn. Both those titles are overseen by Wintour.
But what of the idea that Roitfeld might be tempted to cross the Atlantic and become Wintour's replacement? The role would surely appeal to the ambitious Parisian, who had previously been linked to the top job at Harper's Bazaar, the biggest rival publication to American Vogue and also edited by an Englishwoman, Glenda Bailey.
In reality, the chances of Newhouse offering Roitfeld the position appear minimal. Senior sources at Condé Nast yesterday virtually laughed the idea into touch. "I would eat my hat if such a changeover came about," said one. "It is borderline theatre of the absurd."
The reason for the disbelief is that French Vogue is a vastly different proposition from its American counterpart. Roitfeld is considered to be the most radical of all the Vogue editors. "She's allowed to do the frilly frou frou fashion in Paris, but Anna Wintour has to cater to Middle America," one fashion journalist pointed out yesterday.
***
Roitfeld's Vogue has been described as "the polar opposite" of American fashion magazines, hardly considering whether the clothes that it shows in its shoots are wearable or accessible to the readers. It has little interest in putting Hollywood actors on its cover, preferring to profile edgy musicians or the youngest, newest catwalk models. One publishing industry source yesterday described French Vogue as somewhere between other editions of Vogue and the British fashion and culture magazine Pop.
Besides, Condé Nast sources say that Roitfeld does not possess the experience to take over at American Vogue, particularly when difficult economic conditions demand stable leadership. "Not at this tricky moment would you replace a knowledgeable editor who knows the American market thoroughly with an editor from Europe who is not experienced at that type of magazine."
This is not to say that Wintour is only interested in fusty clothing. She has been pivotal in the careers of highly creative designers including John Galliano and Marc Jacobs, recognising their talents, and going out of her way to secure them backers and venues for their shows.
If Wintour is today an archetype, she has worked at it. She has worn her hair in her trademark Louise Brooks bob since the age of 14, when she was a pupil at the North London Collegiate School. Her father, Charles Wintour, edited the London Evening Standard and, just as his daughter would later become regarded as an ice maiden, was known as "chilly Charlie" because of his cool manner. He helped secure his 15-year-old daughter a job at the famous fashion boutique Biba and she was soon a fixture of London's Sixties club scene. Anna Wintour briefly dated the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster before she became a fashion journalist, beginning her career as an assistant at Harper's & Queen.
In her mid-twenties she moved to New York where, according to her biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, she worked on a women's adult magazine, Viva, hung out with Bob Marley and briefly dated Eric Idle before arriving at Condé Nast at the age of 33. Despite rivals repeatedly referring to her cold demeanour, the man described as the love of her life was the playboy Jon Bradshaw, 12 years her senior. In 1984 she married the child psychiatrist David Shaffer, with whom she has two children. The couple divorced in 1999 and Wintour now dates the millionaire communications executive Shelby Bryan. "She's ambitious, driven, insecure, needy and a perfectionist," begins the foreword to Oppenheimer's 2005 biography Front Row. "And she's considered the most powerful force in the $100bn fashion industry."
Wintour rose to the editor's chair at American Vogue in 1988, transforming it from the safe magazine she had inherited from Mirabella, who had been in the job for 17 years. She rises at 6am to play tennis and have her hair done, before arriving by 8am at the office, inside which she is known to wear sunglasses. Though designers crave her presence by their catwalks, she has never lost sight of the importance of making the clothes that appear in her magazine feel accessible to her readership, a crucial factor in her success in maintaining circulation at around 1.2 million. "The success of American Vogue," says a Condé Nast colleague, "is a reflection of the personality of Anna Wintour and the knowledge she has of American women and American society."
But though she understands her market, some Americans, it appears, still don't get Anna Wintour. While the barbed, and often anonymous comments continue to come in from fearful yet spiteful rivals, the famous editrice is hoping to soon be shown in a better light. A new documentary on the making of an issue of Wintour's Vogue, a project with which she fully co-operated, is expected to be screened as part of the next Sundance film festival. It will, she hopes, be fairer than The Devil Wears Prada. In any case, as she pointed out last week at Buckingham Palace, Wintour wears Chanel.
I love this thread so much. She probably had a steak instead, imagine her chewing it with all her might, not caring whether or not it will ruin her Chanel coat.
