A scrupulously researched attempt to explain fabled Vogue editor Anna Wintour fails to probe deeply enough
Any book that claims to offer an insight into Anna Wintour, the longterm editor-in-chief of US Vogue, is a guaranteed bestseller. This is as true of fiction (The Devil Wears Prada, by Wintour’s former assistant, Lauren Weisberger) as it is of schlocky biographies (Front Row: the Cool Life and Hot Times of Anna Wintour by Jerry Oppenheimer) and hatchet jobs by those who know her (2020’s The Chiffon Trenches, in which her former close friend and colleague, the late André Leon Talley, claimed she is not “capable of simple human kindness”). No other magazine editor has ever held such fascination for the public. But why?
According to Amy Odell in her semi-authorised biography, Anna (Wintour herself did not contribute, but Odell thanks her “for allowing me into her world”), the answer is sexism: “It is probably [Wintour]’s fearsome reputation that first comes to mind when her name is mentioned … Though if a man did her job as well and with similar affectations, his discipline and commitment would likely be celebrated,” she writes. This is a very zeitgeisty point to make, but is it actually true? If a male editor hired a female journalist, and then packed her off to get a haircut, a better wardrobe and skirts cut to “the regulation 19 inches”, as Wintour did according to Odell’s book, would that be celebrated? And if a male editor commissioned a puff piece about Asma al-Assad in 2010 and then, going against the advice of the writer of the piece, Joan Juliet Buck, and some of her staff, insisted on running it in the magazine just because he “liked the photo of Asma”, and then did not renew poor Buck’s contract when there was a public backlash, would that be applauded? (Full disclosure: US Vogue asked me, several times, to interview al-Assad for them in 2010. I declined.)
