Anna Wintour

[Not Plain Jane]

loved the video; thanks for sharing it.

 

[Benn98]

Megan Thee Stallion, and Hot Girl Anna. (thecut.com)

Seems like it's one of 'those' moments in pop you'll eventually find in a Buzzfeed type slideshow titled something along the lines of '10 most unusual Anna Wintour seat mates at Fashion Week'....and so Nicki will be there in the with that crazy outfit, Her Majesty of course, maybe Kim Kardashian too, Cardi....basically anyone considered 'out of the fashion industry.'

 

[Benn98]

Good Morning America interview, featuring the eternal 'my father was my inspiration' storyline:

 

[Benn98]

^ I always thought Tina was her better, in so many ways, and this is another proof of that. Brown is just in a league of her own, the things she did at VF.etc i mean...she always got "it" (her VF Diaries book is such a great read!!). Thanks for posting this video.

Will you be getting this? It's my current weekend read. It's also interesting how none of the fashion press other than Fashionista is talking about this book.

Excerpt from "All That Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, and the Rivalry Inside America’s Richest Media Empire" by Thomas Maier (not the designer, )


Anna Wintour and Tina Brown: Inside their Condé Nast rivalry

For years, these powerful women were the faces of Si Newhouse's media empire, supercharging celebrity culture

THOMAS MAIER
SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 3:00PM (UTC)

At the Royalton, Anna Wintour and Tina Brown could be found at different tables like queens on their own separate thrones.

Other editors, writers, models, and famous faces might mill about at this hotel’s posh restaurant, known humorously as “the Condé Nast café.” But the two star editors, with very different styles and tastes, attracted the most attention.

In the early 1990s, the seemingly limitless largesse of Si Newhouse’s media empire was on full display during breakfasts and “power lunches” at this upscale hangout in midtown Manhattan.

During this era, much of the Royalton chatter, often tinged with a British accent, involved Wintour and Brown, who were quickly becoming celebrities in their own right.

“All of a sudden, Anna walked in,” recalled modeling agency exec Ivan Bart, about the first time he spotted Wintour on the runway-like entrance to the Royalton’s restaurant. “She had such an aura, a presence. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s Anna!’”

At the Royalton, more than 25 percent of the restaurant receipts were paid from Newhouse’s billionaire coffers. Hefty bills were signed by a phalanx of editors, writers, and business executives in his employ. Along the restaurant’s back wall, there was a row of “power booths,” half-moon-shaped seats in green velvet, where the Condé Nast people socialized with name-brand advertisers like Calvin Klein or other fashionable celebrities.

Tucked behind the reservation desk, the maître d’ kept a book containing Condé Nast mastheads so the appropriate seating could be found. One newspaper, the New York Observer, actually printed a map of the seating plan. It identified each booth and table with the editors who sat in them, deciphering their meaning in the overall scheme of Newhouse’s world. The best seats were reserved for Wintour and Brown.

“The celadon banquettes in the restaurant were gorgeously lit,” recalled Candy Pratts Price, a former Vogue editor. “Anna had the first banquette. Tina had a round table [around] which she could almost pull the curtain, like a medical room.”

The Royalton’s management “takes wonderful care of me,” explained Wintour, breezing in for lunch of mashed potato and a very rare hamburger sans the fattening bun. “I can be in and out in less than an hour.” Anna’s cool, thin never-changing appearance—with the same bobbed hair and trademark sunglasses—pleased the fashionistas, usually insistent on the latest look. They viewed Vogue as their bible and Wintour as its high priestess.

The meteoric trajectory of Brown and Wintour’s careers at Condé Nast seemed like two parallel lines destined to collide someday as they came closer to the top. In this rivalrous atmosphere at the Royalton, many nibbled on little bits of gossips. They wondered which editor might be more in Si’s good graces—Tina or Anna? Whom between the two women did longtime editorial director Alex Liberman prefer as his eventual replacement?

Among the “Condé Nasties”—the media’s nickname for Newhouse’s whispering employees—there seemed a yearning for some bloody confrontation between the two editors, like something out of a Mafia movie. Or at least something very public like Newhouse’s televised “off with their heads” firing at Vogue, replacing Grace Mirabella with Wintour, a shock still fresh in everyone’s memory.

"The magazine mavens and gossip columnists who have speculated so relentlessly about Wintour's designs on Mirabella's job have made even more of her supposed rivalry with Tina Brown, a fellow Briton,” explained theWashington Post. It seemed only a matter of time until one woman knocked off the other.

Yet, direct confrontations between Brown and Wintour—like their early battle over the services of fashion editor Andre Leon Talley—were relatively rare. Publicly, they eschewed talk of any rivalry in their carefully prepared chats with the Washington Post and other sober-minded publications.

“The press is already hoping for a rivalry between us,” Tina observed privately, early in her relationship with Wintour at Condé Nast. “Anna is too frontal for feuds and Vogue has never interested me. I suppose catfights are the cliché that always dog (as it were) powerful women working in the same business. Actually, her presence upstairs is a bit like suddenly having a sleek-haired race-horse pawing the other side of the fence.”

For these two ambitious editors, better to keep their hands clean and avoid the bloody chum thrown out anonymously to the press sharks at the gossip columns. They would outflank and out-flatter those inside Condé Nast. Being too obvious, too ambitious, not Miss Congeniality, was considered bad form for a female candidate seeking someday to run the billion-dollar Newhouse conglomerate, still very much a male-dominated domain.

So instead, the differences between Brown and Wintour were most apparent in their clashing styles and different tastes, their hard-driving approach to their jobs, and how they were personally perceived by higher-ups who would decide their fate should a final confrontation between them ever take place. For those caught in their fast-paced world, Anna and Tina seemed like two media superpowers, constantly upping the ante, trying to out-do the other, while their minions struggled to keep up.

“I was trapped in an ecology of splendor,” recalled Joan Juliet Buck, a writer and editor who worked at various times for both magazines. “Most of what I earned…went on clothes to wear to parties for Vogue and Vanity Fair that Anna Wintour and Tina Brown threw in an arms-race escalation of launches, celebrations and landmark events.”

Wintour and Brown appeared almost analogous as young British female editors only a few years apart. In an era when society still debated whether women could “have it all” in the workplace, both seemed modern exemplars—married to older men and mothers of young children yet deeply devoted to their high-profile jobs.

“It’s very important to me to have my balance,” explained Wintour, with two children, a boy and girl, born in the mid-1980s. “You can do both—it’s just working out the priorities. To me, it’s unthinkable not to work. It’s unthinkable not to be a mother. Every time there’s a choice where I can put the children first, I’ll do that.”

While at Condé Nast, Tina also gave birth to two children, including a son with Asperger’s Syndrome. “George is a challenged boy,” she later explained of her oldest child. “There are a lot of issues that have been very demanding for us as parents. But when you have a kid that has a disability, you are so thrilled by the small triumphs.” Finding a balance between professional duties and home life was always a challenge. “It’s so damn tough to make the power women-to-mommy switch,” she explained.

Brown and Wintour were part of a group of British literary and media types living in Manhattan in the 1980s, both devoted workaholics swept up in the city’s hard-charging atmosphere. They shared a few mutual friends such as Gabé Doppelt, a staffer at various times for both of them, and jointly threw a book party for British writer Nigel Dempster. “She can come off as chilly but when the dark glasses come off she’s candid and confiding,” Brown noticed of Wintour. When her young son first showed signs of developmental problems, Brown asked Wintour’s husband, Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist, to meet him and Shaffer recommend more medical follow-up.

Yet a sense of competition always seemed present between the two, even when they were pregnant at the same time in 1985. As Tina confided in her diary: “I am now the size of a tank. How can it be that also pregnant Anna Wintour seems to have only a neat couture bulge under a long Chanel jacket while I am now the size of a helium balloon? She’s due two months before me, too—in January!”

Inside Condé Nast’s headquarters, both Brown and Wintour were prized by Newhouse as decisive leaders, known for brilliant snap judgments and a keen sense of what was right for their respective publications. However, beyond their appearance and British heritage, plenty of differences existed between them, the kind that defined their opposite styles.

For example, though Wintour was the editor of a major magazine, she generally didn’t write anything. Her editorial strengths were expressed in the visual presentation and overall contemporary concepts found in Vogue. By contrast, Brown’s sharply-honed skills as a feature writer was evident throughout Vanity Fair, right down to her willingness to pay top dollar for staffers who got into the best parties and shared her vision.

In dealing with employees, Anna preferred a more hierarchical approach, like the post-war Fleet Street newsrooms once run by her father Charles. Everyone at Vogue seemed to know their place in the social pecking order. Like their austere leader, many Vogue staffers were bone-thin women who favored the finest clothes.

Meanwhile, at Vanity Fair, Tina acted as the impresario for a wide-ranging cast of characters, as if mirroring the theater experience of her parents. Rather than by fiat, she seemed inclined to convince with a good idea or a creative suggestion. Words rather than haute couture appeared her obsession. “I guess my style secret is that I like uniforms,” Brown later explained in denying any friction with Wintour. “I like white shirts in the summer and black shirts in the winter.”

During these early years at Condé Nast, Tina clearly enjoyed the limelight more than Anna. When interviewed by the press, Brown took pride in coming up with pithy quotes, knowing from first-hand experience how a writer delights in an amusing comment or memorable insight. Certainly, Brown reaped the rewards of her good PR.

Wintour steered clear of inquiring questions by journalists or dutifully put up with them with polite rote answers and a guarded mien. Indeed, Wintour’s most memorable public expression was her cool stoic look exiting a limo or along the runaway in Paris, Milan, or New York. She left an impression rather than words. In the fashion world, Anna created a persona for herself, the way Americans once projected their fanciful dreams onto a silent Greta Garbo.

Perhaps Anna wouldn’t need publicity in the long run. Wintour’s taciturn style, far different than Tina’s constant fireworks sparking “buzz,” suggested there might be other factors at play in deciding who would run Condé Nast.

To borrow the well-worn metaphor of another Briton, philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Brown was the fox and Wintour was the hedgehog in their slow march to the top. Brown embraced America in all its glory and crazy experiences, while Wintour ultimately viewed it through the singular lens of fashion.

In the early 1990s, Brown’s great success at Vanity Fair made her seem a natural choice someday to replace Alex Liberman—far more so than Wintour, still only a few years into her tenure at Vogue. The smart money, especially among those journalists outside Condé Nast, predicted Brown would be running the whole place in the not too distant future.

But Tina, as vainglorious as she was independent-minded, didn’t seem to understand Alex’s psyche—his underlying need to be deferred to, rather than challenged. This paradox was illustrated in April 1991, during Liberman’s fiftieth anniversary at Condé Nast, when Newsweek ran a revealing profile of the 78-year-old master.

“Some former high-level employees say that disagreeing with Liberman can prove fatal,” Newsweek reported. “Others, like Vanity Fair's editor Tina Brown, argue that he appreciates intelligent disagreement; he simply has no patience for mediocrity.”

The Newsweek story’s implications were telling, like foreshadowing in some Russian novel. How many times did Brown engage in “intelligent disagreement” with Liberman? And did Alex really “appreciate” such conversations with a woman half his age, the same kind of female magazine editor that he had patronized for a half century—even if Tina considered herself less “mediocre” than the others?

Touted as Si Newhouse’s whiz kid, Brown always seemed convinced that her talents and wit would win the day. She didn’t seem to appreciate fully how her considerable achievements in reviving Vanity Fair would be received warily by such an aging delicate egotist as Liberman. Tina failed to heed the lessons learned by her predecessor, Leo Lerman, who eventually concluded “Alex is evil—a dreadful being, a wretched murderous Russian of the blackest blood.”

Anna took a very different approach inside Condé Nast. Like Brown, Wintour’s name was also touted as a possible Liberman replacement. As early as 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported that “stories have been printed that Wintour wants Liberman's post once he retires.”

But rather than outshine the old master, Anna seemed more intent on courting him. Far more than Tina, Wintour went out of her way to seek out Liberman’s advice, to make sure her vision for Vogue coincided with his own.

This stealth approach seemed the only way to overcome Brown’s celebrity and the speculation that she was the certain choice to lead Condé Nast someday. Instead, when the time came to choose his replacement, perhaps Alex would suggest her name to Si rather than Tina, who seemed her only other competitor on the horizon.

Salon.com

 

[Miss Dalloway]

^ Ah, will get it, just have to, but honestly never heard of this book before. Just got the new book about Conde Nast by Susan Ronald, and it might be interesting....

 

[Benn98]

^Haven't heard of that book! Will seek it out.

4am starts and no apologies: could Anna Wintour’s masterclass transform my life and career?

The Vogue editor-in-chief has released a video guide to creativity and leadership. I watched it to find out what I could learn from the master

Hannah Marriott
Tue 24 Sep 2019 17.47 BSTLast modified on Tue 24 Sep 2019 18.12 BST

Anna Wintour is the most powerful person in fashion. Even her hair obeys her. The Vogue editor-in-chief has also just released a new online course in creativity and leadership. To be properly transformed you’ll need £29.99 for a month’s Masterclass subscription. As the Guardian’s fashion editor, I had a go, to see if I could bring some Wintouresque efficiency to my own life.

‘Own your decisions and who you are – without apology’
This, says Wintour, is the key message of the course. I try to apply it to Tuesday morning in the Guardian fashion office. Before I start, I warn the team: “I’m about to stop apologising every time I speak to anyone. Sorry. It’s not real, it’s for a piece. Sorry.”

Make feedback fast and direct
Wintour’s leadership style inspired one of fiction’s greatest bosses, Miranda Priestly. (See: “By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me” and: “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking”). The real Wintour, however, believes managers should be clear to be kind: “People work so much better when feedback is fast, direct and honest and they know where they are,” she says. “Nobody works well when the atmosphere feels slow and lazy.”

I put this to the test on Tuesday, when my colleagues, Leah and Helen, noticed a spider brooch Lady Hale was wearing at the supreme court. In other words: breaking fashion news (category: jewellery and accessories). Instead of discussing at length whether we should cover it, I went with my first instinct. Yes! Of course we should! Within two hours it was live on the website.

Wake up between 4am and 5.30am
Now this is something we have in common – thanks to my one-year-old son. Wintour isn’t blearily shoving a bottle in a screaming baby’s mouth and – at best – sticking on the Today programme, however. At 6.30am, she reads all American and British newspapers. At 7am, she plays tennis. She is at her desk with “breakfast” (“which is Starbucks”) at around 8am. Such “hyperorganised” behaviour allows her to “remain responsive and available” to her team. Still, I have questions. How does she read all of the major newspapers from two countries in half an hour? And: when does she sleep?

Have a take-home bag
Wintour’s contains proofs and articles to read, pitches and CVs to consider, and other publications to look at. So she’s working all night because, admirably, she doesn’t want to waste her team’s time when coming back to them with decisions. So. When does she sleep?

Absorb what is happening culturally
Wintour cares more about what prospective employees are reading than what they are wearing. And she ensures she imbibes as much culture and life as possible herself. Theatre? Cinema? Books? So. When does she sleep?

‘Details of your incompetence do not interest me’
OK, she doesn’t really say this – that’s another Priestly quote – but the real Wintour admits that “in-depth conversations and trying to examine things from every possible angle” aren’t really for her. “For me, being clear and decisive has always worked.” This one I can try in the office, so I do, removing all of the “maybes” and “would that be OKs” and “ahs” and other self-deprecating throat-clearing from my work correspondence for a whole morning. If you’ve been up since 5am – like Wintour and me – such energy-saving behaviour is liberating.

The Guardian

 

[Benn98]

River Rafting with Donatella Versace, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Lady Gaga here:



Vogue

 

[Benn98]

Behold, people. One day when fashion students will study how the industry dealt with the virus, this picture will make the cut.
Obsessed with it. The colours, the way that jumper is falling on her. It's so far from her personal style and yet so refreshing!

Only just discovered there's a fake account for her on IG, and the comical part is that some of the blue tick brigade respond to the images as if she's uploading herself. LOL.

 

[Kite]

There is an Instagram dedicated to all of her looks....









there are hundreds of posts! They posted my CoverChallange thinking it was a spoiler and someone forwarded it to me.

 

[Yohji]

Anna Wintour attends the Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2021/2022 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on July 06, 2021 in Paris, France.

Nicolas Ghesquiere and Anna Wintour attend the Louis Vuitton Parfum Dinner at Fondation Louis Vuitton on July 05, 2021 in Paris, France.

zimbio.com

​

 

[puresoul]

Anna Wintour attends the Chanel Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2021/2022 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on July 06, 2021 in Paris, France.

hawtcelebs​

 

[puresoul]

Paco Rabanne Menswear FW22/23 PFW​

dailymail.co.uk, zimbio
​

 

[kasper!]

Source:IG wintourwardrobe

It looks like a Dries skirt! Has she ever worn Dries?

Skirt was from LV by Marc Jacobs 2001 S/S

 

[blueorchid]

New York Magazine - April 27, 1992
"War of the Poses: Bazaar's Liz Takes on Vogue's Anna" by Michael Gross
Featuring: Liz Tilberis & Anna Wintour







books.google

 

[vogue28]

Vogue's 73 More Questions with Anna Wintour:

 

[vogue28]

An article via The New York Times in conversation with Anna Wintour:

Karl and Anna, a Love Story in Clothes by Vanessa Friedman

Anna Wintour remembers the designer Karl Lagerfeld, and how she’s worn his clothes to the most important events in her life.

Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and global editorial director of Condé Nast, has been the maestro of every Met Gala since 1999. But this time, it’s personal.

Not just because the exhibition the party honors is devoted to the work of the much celebrated designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, but because Mr. Lagerfeld was one of Ms. Wintour’s closest friends for decades. He created the clothes that, she said, “I’ve worn to the most important events in my life — to my wedding, to my children’s weddings, to Met Galas and state dinners and tennis championships at which I watched my heroes compete for their dreams.”

Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour at the CFDA Awards ceremony in 1993.Credit...Robin Platzer/Getty Images

For her, she said, Mr. Lagerfeld’s designs were “a uniform, a kind of armor and a way of holding certain moods and memories close. His fashion does for me what fashion should. It makes me feel more confident in being myself.”

Now, when she wears his work, she said, “I still feel that I have him near.” The Times asked Ms. Wintour to pick some of the favorite Lagerfeld designs that still hang in her closet and describe the memories they evoke.

‘I don’t remember when or where I first met Karl, or what I was wearing.’

A Lagerfeld design from the Chanel spring 2003 couture collection.Credit...Giovanni Giannoni/WWD, via Getty Images

Ms. Wintour wearing the dress at an amfAR gala in New York in February 2003.Credit...Evan Agostini/Getty Images

The AmfAR Gala Dress
I wore this collaged Chanel dress to the amfAR gala in New York alongside Hillary Clinton when she was in the middle of her first term as senator in 2003. I wanted to feel both chic and confident. I was delighted when, some years later, my daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, wore the same dress to her first Met Gala. Karl, who liked to strike a pose against nostalgia, took one look at her and said, “Recycled!” In fact, Karl’s dresses are enthusiastically recycled in my family, treated with reverence — but not too much. My daughter, Bee, is planning on wearing this dress to a Met after-party this year.

Honestly, I don’t remember when or where I first met Karl, or what I was wearing. I was probably nervous, because I was always nervous meeting people in the early years of my career. What’s certain is that he quickly put me at ease. He loved meeting people, and he loved to talk. We were both masters of compartmentalization — we kept our working lives quite separate from our friendship — and when we met socially, fashion was never our subject.

Karl was interested in so much else and seemed eager to escape the snow globe of his public life. In public, he embraced his image as the high priest of chic and surfaces and whatever was absolutely new. In private — a side he guarded far more carefully — he was different.

‘Karl’s dresses are enthusiastically recycled in my family.’

The paint box dress on the Chanel spring 2014 ready-to-wear runway, in real life and on Ms. Wintour, as she rode with Mr. Lagerfeld at the premiere of “The Return,” his film about Coco Chanel, which was shown in Dallas in 2013.Credit...FirstVIEW; Vincent Tullo for The New York Times; Mark Graham for The New York Times
The Paint Box Dress
I first wore this paint box dress, inspired by the colored paints and pencils that Karl always kept scattered across his desk, to a fantastically over-the-top Chanel extravaganza that he arranged in Dallas a decade ago, one of the first such runway productions in unlikely locations. (This “traveling” model for fashion shows, breaking away from the staid runways in Paris or Milan, was enormously influential because Karl did it. Other houses soon followed.) This event was complete with a drive-in movie theater, a bucking-bronco ride and a rodeo.

Since then, that paint box dress has been to many tamer parties in our family, including my son Charlie’s wedding. Bee has also worn it to possibly too many of the weddings of her friends.

‘We’d exchange a few words or a text or two, and from these Karl was able to draw what would be just right.’

A Chanel gown from the Mr. Lagerfeld's spring 1983 couture collection. At right, Ms. Wintour wearing the dress at the state dinner for the French president in December 2022.Credit...Chanel; T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times; Vincent Tullo for The New York Times
The Trompe L’oeil Dress
Karl’s dresses don’t seem to age or date to a specific era. They stay with us as we cross time and live our different lives. This trompe l’oeil dress, a homage to Coco Chanel’s love of jewelry, was part of Karl’s first Chanel couture collection in 1983. It had been in my closet for a good long time before I found the perfect occasion to wear it at President Biden’s state dinner for Emmanuel Macron.


Over the years, Karl designed some dresses specially for me, but we never talked about what these should be. It was more like osmosis. We’d exchange a few words or a text or two about an occasion, and from these Karl was able to draw what would be just right — for the event but also for me. He absorbed a lot more from people than he showed.

However broad his own interests, he always seemed to have room for other people’s, and over the years he sent me vintage prints in honor of my love of tennis and porcelain. Karl didn’t play tennis, and he didn’t care for porcelain the way I did, but it was his quiet way of being attuned to other people’s minds.

‘In the early days of our friendship we would meet at the Café de Flore, where Karl was a habitué.’

A Lagerfeld sketch of the Chanel feather dress Ms. Wintour wore at an event at his home in 2002. Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

The Feather Skirt
Karl was always sending me sketches that he could create in an instant but might just as quickly ball up and toss away. One of them shows us on the dance floor, a memento of the ways we used to spend our time together in Paris. In the early days of our friendship we would meet at the Café de Flore, where Karl was a habitué. Later, he’d take me to chaotically planned, totally glamorous dinners at his house, and those incredible nights often ended with dancing.

Karl was a great dancer, and a greater night owl. As we got older and wiser and outwardly more respectable, we gave up the late nights and the Café de Flore, and I persuaded him to meet me for dinner at my hotel (Karl was perpetually, sometimes preposterously, late, and this way I found I could get some work done while I waited for him to show up). But the feathery skirt from that sketch, both ethereal and down to earth, is a reminder of that era of late-night dancing.

When one of his late parties ended, he would go home and, alone, read Hegel and sketch deep into the night. He sent me books constantly, in volume — strange, unexpected books of the kind known only to people who spend time prowling the backs of shops.


Once I was supposed to fly across the Atlantic to present him with an award in London. I’m not wonderful at adjusting to time differences, and I don’t particularly like public speaking. I am always early — in this case arriving two days in advance — and on the day of the event, a few hours before it began, I got a vaguely alarming text: Karl was just taking off from Paris. A couple of hours later, another one: Karl had landed and was in the car, but had stopped off at a bookshop.

About an hour before the presentation, there was a third: Karl is on his way but wanted to visit a gallery. Finally, within seconds of our curtain call, Karl burst into the wings with an entourage of 15 and his usual surprised “Am I late?” We were swept onstage.

‘His favorite dress on me.’

A gold suit from the Chanel fall 2014 couture runway, now part of Ms. Wintour’s collection. At right, Ms. Wintour and Mr. Lagerfeld at the opening of the Foundation Louis Vuitton in October 2014.
The Gold Trompe L’oeil Dress
Karl’s Chanel suits put me in mind of his dogged, unexpected strength. They are uniform and armor, a testament to slow and controlled change, but there’s something vividly human in them, too. When we went together to the 2014 opening of the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Karl told me that my gold trompe l’oeil dress was his favorite on me of any piece I’d worn. Since then, I’ve worn it many times. It’s Karl at his finest: the classic profile made new, the sparkle and simplicity, the way it puts forward an idea of strength in femininity.

Karl frequently surprised the world as a designer (he loved to turn heads), but it was as a friend that he surprised me most. Many years ago, when I was facing my first summer vacation with my children after my divorce, I was frozen. I wanted to show them a good time, but I felt in pieces. It was Karl, of all people, who sensed this and swooped in to lend a hand.

He had a vacation house in Europe, by the beach, he told us, and we should spend some time there. When we arrived, to my surprise, he’d planned a whole summer camp’s worth of activities for my young children — surfing lessons on the beach, day trips to the nearby art museum, dancing after dinner in the evenings. Karl was perhaps even less a kid person than he was a porcelain person, but he went all out when I most needed it. That isn’t something you forget. A real relationship with Karl was an association and connection built incrementally, over years.

‘I wore a lot of short skirts at the time, but none more happily.’

A sketch by Mr. Lagerfeld of Ms. Wintour wearing a short suit from the Chanel fall 1993 collection. Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

The Short Skirt Suit
Karl could be serious, but I’ll remember his tremendous sense of fun. In the early 1990s he designed a lot of very short skirts. We photographed a spread of them in Vogue, and I kept wondering whether the skirts were short enough. Whether in consideration of this question, or simply as a way of teasing me, he sent me a short skirt suit of my own. I wore a lot of short skirts at the time, but none more happily than his.

Or there was the benefit Chanel staged in the meatpacking district in 1991, when the uptown crowd descended to West 12th Street in an endless array of buckled leather and ruffled tulle, all of it Chanel. I remember a journalist asking him if he had ever seen so many middle-aged women in biker jackets and miniskirts. Karl’s reply was quintessential Karl, generous and coolly deadpan: “As far as I’m concerned there are no middle-aged women.”

‘He was always looking ahead to the next thing.’

The poppy dress from the Chanel spring 2015 couture runway. At right, Ms. Wintour in the dress at the “China: Through the Looking Glass” gala at the Met in May 2015.Credit...FirstVIEW; Vincent Tullo for The New York Times; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

The Poppy Met Dress

I never wholly figured out his contradictions. He was someone who could be rigorous in his diet, which was notoriously stringent and health-minded, and then consume a tsunami of Diet Coke. He had his love of books and magazines and printed matter but also needed the very latest technology and devices at his fingertips. He was always looking ahead to the next thing, to the future — with a fear, I always felt, of falling behind, of being caught out.

He would have been alarmed to find himself the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But “A Line of Beauty” is an appreciation and embodiment of his genius. Since 2005, I have worn his dresses to almost every opening gala for the Costume Institute that I have co-hosted. This poppy dress, which I wore to the “China: Through the Looking Glass” show in 2015, was an example of Karl’s dexterity and quick wits at his desk. On the runway, it was short, but, with a sweep of his pencil, it became ankle-length — and it worked beautifully that way.

Our friendship meant everything to me, and I miss him deeply. I am grateful for all the moments, such as this one, that can bring his work to life and, in the process, keep him near.

NYTIMES.COM

 

[vogue28]

Anna Wintour on Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel in Vogue:

 

[Zorka]

Dame Anna Wintour has been granted a Companion of Honour in King Charles' first Birthday Honours List.

1news.co.nz

 

[KaKe]

Behold, people. One day when fashion students will study how the industry dealt with the virus, this picture will make the cut.
Obsessed with it. The colours, the way that jumper is falling on her. It's so far from her personal style and yet so refreshing!

Only just discovered there's a fake account for her on IG, and the comical part is that some of the blue tick brigade respond to the images as if she's uploading herself. LOL.

are they studying it now? i don't think so.

 

[Thefrenchy]