Instead, Wintour has an arid sense of humor about her reputation. At a screening of "The Devil Wears Prada," based on a roman à clef by a former Wintour assistant, she wore Prada. During a trip to China last fall, she was asked during a press conference whether she was really like that. "It's true, of course, that I beat all my assistants, lock them in a cupboard and don't pay them," she deadpanned. "She's got an eye-rolling way of laughing at the circus, even while she takes it deadly seriously," says Luhrmann. Wintour herself puts it more simply: "I care deeply about my friends and my family and they know it, but work is work."
Wintour had a fixation with fashion from a very young age. Her father was an Englishman named Charles Wintour who edited London's Evening Standard newspaper and had a reputation for aloofness. Her mother was an American named Eleanor Baker, whom everyone called Nonie. In 1967, 17-year-old Anna dropped out of school to join London's wild fashion dance.
Since then she has climbed from masthead to masthead at fashion magazines in England and here, never losing sight of the only fashionable masthead really worth climbing. The story has passed into legend of Wintour's first interview at Vogue in 1982. Grace Mirabella, then Vogue's editor, asked Wintour what job she would like if she came to the magazine. "Your job," Wintour is said to have replied without blinking. Mirabella circled the wagons, but six years later, Wintour had penetrated and Mirabella was out. (Mirabella remained bitter about it.)
Wintour realized long before most that fashion was about to burst its tight seams and join the broader culture. When she put Kim Basinger on Vogue's May 1991 cover, fashion was still living in the rarefied fantasy of Dovima. In the main, Hollywood stars were no more icons of style than they were models of personal probity or fonts of wisdom. Wintour changed all that with a series of celebrity covers that put Holly wood on notice that it had better get serious about what it wore—Winona Ryder and Sharon Stone in 1993, Julia Roberts in 1994, Demi Moore in 1995, leading up to the celebrity explosion of 1998, when Sandra Bullock, Claire Danes, Renée Zellweger (whose image Wintour managed closely), Elizabeth Hurley and the notorious Spice Girls took turns on Vogue's cover (Wintour concedes she might have pushed the point there: "I'm not terribly proud of putting the Spice Girls on the cover," she says). That was also the year Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton got covers, signaling Vogue's embrace of the wider world. Occasionally, the wider world doesn't hug back. Wintour's 2008 LeBron James cover, shot by Annie Leibovitz to evoke King Kong, was a big loser on the newsstand.
There's also the question of whether Vogue doesn't sometimes allow a fashionable tail to wag a questionable dog. The March issue included a soft-focus look at Syria's ruling al-Assad family. Yes, conceded writer Joan Juliet Buck, "In Syria, power is hereditary," and there are those "souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays" scattered around. But president Bashar al-Assad's wife, Asma, is nonetheless "glamorous, young and very chic."
Still, Wintour called the tune correctly, even if she doesn't get every note right. "Fashion has become as powerful as music was when I was growing up," Luhrmann says. Was it Wintour or was it the world? "That's a little chicken and egg, but she led the way and you have to give her the credit," says a colleague.
Fashion may have overflowed its banks in the past decade, but the $350 billion industry itself remains compact enough for one person to dominate, that person being Wintour. She threw all of Italy into a tizzy last year when it was discovered she would spend only four days in Milan during February's fashion week. Emergency meetings were called, designers frantically demanded to reschedule their shows and every one scrambled to squeeze 88 runway shows into 70 hours to accommodate her abbreviated stay. In 2007, R. J. Cutler was shooting "The September Issue" about putting together Vogue's biggest issue. A friend asked him what it was like watching Wintour work. "Well," he replied, "you can make a film in Hollywood without Steven Spielberg's blessing, and you can publish software in Silicon Valley without Bill Gates's blessing, but it's pretty clear to me you can't succeed in the fashion industry without Anna Wintour's blessing."
In fact, some of fashion's biggest names are where they are in large part thanks to Wintour. She has helped broker corporate marriages for some of fashion's biggest brands—Bottega Veneta at Gucci and Michael Kors at Sportswear Holdings. "She does this very discreetly, but she's really a kind of consigliere to the entire fashion and retail industry," says a former colleague who worked closely with her.
The Michael Kors story goes back to 1981, soon after Wintour joined New York magazine as fashion editor. Kors, a young designer, had just launched his first women's-wear line and Wintour decided in her brisk way that she liked the clothes, and him. Kors hit the rocks in the mid-'90s, filing for bankruptcy in 1993, but Wintour talked him up tirelessly.
In 2002, Silas Chou and Lawrence Stroll were looking for fashion's next big brand. The two partners had made out handsomely buying Tommy Hilfiger in 1989 and taking it public in 1992. Wintour recommended Kors. "When I met Michael, Anna had seen his talent 20 years before," Chou says. "We talked constantly and when the time arrived, her opinions about him were very important." Chou and Stroll bought a controlling stake in Kors in 2003 through their Sportswear Holdings for around $100 million. Retail sales for the Kors brand are now in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
"I came to realize that she's really the McKinsey of fashion," says a former colleague who attended several corporate matchmaking sessions with her. Wintour is more modest: "We can suggest, but in the end, everybody makes up their own minds."
One of the people Wintour counsels regularly is Bernard Arnault, whose LVMH luxury conglomerate owns Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs and Fendi, among others. In 1993, Wintour and Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley put a down-and-out designer named John Galliano together with financial backers John Bult and Mark Rice, which relaunched Galliano's flagging career. She later proposed him to Arnault, who hired him first for Givenchy and then for Christian Dior (which is controlled by Arnault's holding company). In 1997, Wintour pushed Marc Jacobs to Arnault for Louis Vuitton. "She pointed us towards unexpected choices," Arnault says. "I speak very openly to her, and this was quite audacious—it was not about picking the big names of the moment. It took her to see that there was a stylistic closeness between John and Dior. She was the discoverer."
It looks like Galliano needs Wintour more than ever now: In late February, the designer was abruptly suspended from Dior after a Parisian couple accused him of yelling unprovoked anti-Semitic barbs at them in a Paris bistro. When a video clip recorded last October surfaced soon after showing a visibly drunk Galliano at a bar making similar racist remarks, he was fired. Of his downfall, Wintour says, "This is all so tragic."
Last July, Wintour met with then–French Minister of Industry Christian Estrosi. She suggested politely that the French government do more to support young French designers financially. Her own CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which raises millions for young American designers, has become something of a model in Europe. She got the idea in 2001, when the World Trade Center disaster disrupted New York's fashion week, leaving young designers financially stranded. The fund now has a $10 million endowment, and has launched similiar programs in Milan and London.
"She tackles things that are really much bigger than what any other editors take on," says François-Henri Pinault, head of luxury-goods giant PPR. Pinault is currently discussing how to finance support for young designers with Estrosi. Not that Wintour came right out and asked him to. "She's much more subtle than that," he says.
When I met Wintour in her big, artfully tidy office at Vogue, she had been up since 5 a.m.—her normal waking hour. On most days she goes off to play tennis at 6, but lately she's been nursing a sore elbow and can't play. Which didn't mean no tennis. She was watching her friend Roger Federer play a tough five-set match against Gilles Simon at the Australian Open. Simon had beaten Federer twice before, and Wintour was uneasy. "At least he's through," she said afterward, visibly relieved.
Wintour first sought out Federer at the 2002 U.S. Open, before he won his first Grand Slam. He was a bit taken aback. "I didn't really know who she was," Federer says. She's since become a trusted adviser and a close friend, not only to him but also to his wife, Mirka, and agent, Tony Godsick. "I bounce all kinds of ideas off her—what to wear on and off the court, photo shoots, sponsors, everything," he says. For her part, Wintour has never asked him for anything, but, he says, "That day will come, and when it does, I'll be very happy to work with her."
The unusual part, say her intimates, is that there's never a direct quid pro quo. On the other hand, if Wintour does ask for something, there aren't two possible answers. "If I get a request for something I don't want to do," says Marc Jacobs, "first I get an email, then a phone call from someone at Vogue, and now I don't even bother to say no—I know the next call is from her."
Jacobs describes a den-motherly attitude that those who see only her hard surface sheen don't suspect she has. "She gets such a bad rap. She stands by the people she believes in, and if you're not one of those people, perhaps you take a different view." Wintour has supported Jacobs since her earliest days at Vogue, when, he says, "everybody was trashing me. It goes way beyond an editor-fashion-designer relationship." Which is how Jacobs found himself sitting next to Wintour on the Jimmy Fallon show, speaking out about Fashion's Night Out.
If there's a risk to having a rat pack, even a large and glamorous one, it's the possibility that it could make Vogue's pages seem overly clubby. Wintour reflects a minute when I ask her about this, and puts it another way. "I try to remain open to new people, but obviously there's a stronger element of trust with people you've known for a long time," she says. "I think we have a Vogue vocabulary, and there are certain people we like to have as the backbone of the magazine—Vogue's signposts. We try very hard to integrate the familiar signatures with people we feel are new and up-and-coming, but I would rather err on the side of being a little more familiar than being too . . . What's the right word? . . . Edgy."
With all of her globe-trotting, matchmaking and event-planning, it's easy to forget that Wintour's bread and butter is running a magazine. Like the rest of the magazine industry, Vogue was badly hurt by the economic crash. Revenue fell 5.55 percent in 2008, then a further 27 percent in 2009 to $289 million, but now it appears to have rebounded. Revenue for 2010 was up 18 percent to $342 million, according to the Publisher's Information Bureau—although it remains below the 2007 peak of $419 million—and it's up almost 11 percent for the first quarter of this year, behind Elle's 14.3 percent and abreast of InStyle's 10.9 percent. Vogue is solidly beating both in total number of ad pages.
Wintour launched the redesigned Vogue.com last September, on the eve of New York Fashion Week. After starting slowly with 545,000 unique visitors, the site registered 896,000 in January. That's still fewer than the 2.4 million who visited Style.com, the omnibus Condé Nast site that used to host Vogue, but it's a healthy upswing, even more so when you consider Style.com is 10 years old.
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