Anna Wintour to Step Down as US Vogue Editor-in-Chief

[nationalsalt]

From Deuxmoi

View attachment 1392248

Selby Drummond went brunette in March...

 

[caioherrero]

Selby Drummond went brunette in March...

She’s the best friend of Bee.

 

[callmejaeden]

It’s Chloe After All…​

As expected, Anna Wintour has chosen a longtime supplicant, imbued with a Hollywood pedigree and a can-do disposition, to take over American Vogue—the latest and most natural step in a never-ending succession journey.

The fashion industry will support Malle in this position, and her pedigree will add to the allure. The child of Candice Bergen and the late auteur director Louis Malle, she arrives with pop culture bona fides.Photo: Darian DiCianno/BFA.com

LAUREN SHERMAN
September 1, 2025

Anna Wintour is clear-eyed, determined, and optimistic, but rarely daring. The formula for Vogue hasn’t changed all that much during her decades of leadership. Her tenure in the Condé Nast corporate suite has been defined by choosing editorial leaders whose visions would largely fit within hers. And this balance influenced her search for the next editor of American Vogue—now called the head of editorial content.

During the process, Wintour told candidates that she was looking for a journalist whom she could empower to transform the brand into a live-action content machine while she spent more time abroad mentoring regional editorial leaders who were struggling to attract both advertisers and audiences in their respective markets. In the end, she settled on the practical, reasonable, rational choice and hired Chloe Malle, who currently runs Vogue.com, as her replacement to run American Vogue’s daily operations. Malle was my bet from the beginning, though I don’t say that with a told-you-so smirk. Wintour doesn’t aim to provoke. She seeks solutions, and Malle is the path of least resistance. Wintour is slated to make the announcement as early as Tuesday. Reps for Condé Nast and Vogue did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Malle did not respond to a direct request for comment.

There were, of course, a range of candidates, a handful of whom were taken seriously enough to meet multiple times with Wintour and Roger Lynch, Condé Nast’s oft-misunderstood C.E.O. The duo made it clear to contenders that they were looking for someone with an opinion, who would push back on them, and who also understood that this was a business that needed to be more than a magazine—a worker bee who could showboat a little, too.
The names that were still being floated near the end were largely insiders: Malle, W magazine editor (and longtime Wintour acolyte) Sara Moonves, and Nicole Phelps, who runs the tradesier Vogue Runway and Vogue Business. Moonves may be Wintour’s rightful heir apparent, with her vision and authority and connections, but returning her to the fold would have required extracting her from a company that she partly owns and placating her partners, and Wintour doesn’t like tricky. (Moonves is also said to have flat-out turned the position down because, fundamentally, it isn’t an editor-in-chief job. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Phelps was the longest shot, but will be a valuable asset to Malle as she assumes more responsibility. The only real outsider that I’m aware of was Stella Bugbee, the editor of the Styles section at The New York Times, and I’m told she pulled out of the running in mid-August. Bugbee, an iron-willed former art director, would have been the most provocative choice—but it’s unlikely that Roger and Anna would have really gone for a foreigner.

I presume that Malle’s first responsibility will be a bit of high-touch housekeeping that requires a fair amount of institutional knowledge: to sprinkle in a new generation of talent while sunsetting some of the old guard, all done with the tacit approval of Wintour but without implicating her. She’ll likely introduce some new creative juice as many of the magazine’s stalwarts—including global creative director Raúl Martinez—lurch toward retirement. I suspect that a creative partner—someone like fast-rising stylist and creative director Carlos Nazario, who I’m told was interested in the head-of-content position—will be recruited to refresh the visual language.

Malle’s appointment seems like a simulacrum of Mark Guiducci’s ascent at Vanity Fair—both are loyal, longtime Wintour surrogates who manifested some glamour in a meat-grinder age—but they actually have different remits. Guiducci needs to attract new advertisers and cover over a disastrous and elongated experiment, while Malle needs to not mess up relationships with advertisers and gingerly transition many of her longtime colleagues out of roles that are no longer pertinent to the business. Malle’s management of the Lauren Sánchez cover—cajoling sources to give up additional details while managing the shoot and logistics—was a good example of how the brand can balance the whims of clients and the internet in this multichannel world.

The Murphy Brown of It All​

The fashion industry will support Malle in this position, and her pedigree will add to the allure. The child of Candice Bergen and the late auteur director Louis Malle, she arrives with pop culture bona fides. She’s also obviously smart and capable—and even funny, as displayed via her dogged (no pun intended) pursuit of Dogue, a canine sendup of the magazine, which she’s already published twice (probably once too many).

Young consumers may never grasp the profundity of Murphy Brown in the history of pop culture, or the cutesy life-imitating-art twist from Bergen’s later turn as a Vogue editor on Sex and the City. But the fact that Malle springs from the world that made Nora Ephronand Mike Nichols famous will be compelling to the media and the industry.

To wit: I first learned of Malle when I, too, was a little girl. My aunt, an art director in New York, was an avid reader of W magazine and couldn’t stop talking about this 1988 cover story on Bergen, just as she was about to be catapulted into the zeitgeist by Murphy Brown. I remember my aunt calling up my mother and going on for ages about how Bergen was appalled by the tacky gold shirts that the 3-year-olds were wearing at her daughter’s fancy nursery school. Also, my aunt added, Chloe was only given one present for Christmas, per the article. This display of patrician rebellion against the nouveau riche of the 1980s was easy to admire. Malle has a similar charm.

As for Wintour, her step back—or aside, or up, however you want to characterize it—does mean something. Whether Malle will truly succeed her in the big chair is anyone’s guess. (A refresher: Wintour’s Vogue title is now global editorial director; she is alsoCondé Nast’s chief content officer.) I can guarantee that there is no one in that building, or beyond, who knows how that more consequential transition will get sorted out—not even Wintour. Perhaps Malle will take to the position and prove she is ready to forge a post-Wintour path. But Lynch and, more likely, the Condé Nast board will have to know what they want that path to be.

puck.news