The age of the icy editrix is over. Anna Wintour, the most powerful force in fashion with a reputation for indomitable imperiousness, has stepped down as editor-in-chief of American Vogue after 37 years.
This is a major earthquake in the fashion and media worlds, where Wintour has reigned from the top since 1988. It also marks the real, final end of the golden era of magazines, a heady time of expense accounts, limos to the office and newsstand-derived power to shift both hemlines and markets.
At 75, Wintour isn’t retiring: she will retain the titles of chief content officer for Condé Nast (which no longer defines itself as a magazine company) and global editorial director for the Vogue brand. “Anna will still be overseeing Vogue globally, but a new Head of Editorial Content will be added at Vogue U.S.,” Condé Nast spokesperson Cydney Gasthalter told the Star in an email. “She is still very much staying at Conde/Vogue, despite misleading headlines floating around.”
Wintour will choose her own successor. But the world that successor inherits is a very different beast than the one she tamed. The ad dollars migrating online no longer support the door-stopper-thick September issues Vogue made famous.
Her own image was so recognizable it became a literal caricature — the signature pageboy bob, giant dark sunglasses, demure floral prints, bare legs, stilettos. Wintour understood the cultural capital of consistency; she herself was a brand. You can’t get bigger than Meryl Streep playing you in a movie.
After a rebellious teen period — she was a dress code rebel at private school — and a stint working at Harrods and the youthquake fashion hub Biba in London, Wintour skipped university to cast her die in journalism. In this pursuit she was an original nepo baby: Wintour’s father was Charles Wintour, formidable editor of London’s Evening Standard.
Charles was known as “Chilly Charlie.” Following in his footsteps, Anna’s ruthless tactics later earned her the nickname “Nuclear Wintour.” She cleaned house whenever she took over a magazine, from British Vogue to Home & Garden to American Vogue. This wasn’t unusual for a new editor arriving at a title, but it became an infamous calling card, amplified by Streep’s frosty characterization in “The Devil Wears Prada” — which did reveal some depth and vulnerability at the end of the movie. Wintour addressed this reputation on “60 Minutes” once: “If one comes across as sometimes being cold or brusque, it’s simply because I’m striving for the best.”
What Wintour accomplished was remarkable: She surfed the cultural zeitgeist for four decades, often shaping it as she saw fit. In the early 1990s, she recognized and harnessed the power of the supermodels, then pivoted to stoke an emerging obsession with celebrities that continues to this day. She made a Vogue cover the pinnacle for movie stars, rock stars, athletes and politicians (and their wives). She saw the arrival of reality stars on the scene and rather than snobbishly ignore them, she curated them, famously and controversially putting then-couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West on the cover circa 2014.
As the internet began eating into print profits, Wintour led another pivot to live events, including the Vogue World fashion show and the ever-expanding Met Gala. Originally extremely exclusive, the personally gate-kept guest list was gradually expanded to include influencers and the millions of eyeballs they delivered, as content creators took over the runway front rows from traditional fashion journalists.
One of the most interesting things Wintour did was bring politics and fashion together. She has raised money for the Democratic party, and used Vogue to showily support its candidates and superstars such as Michelle Obama, Jill Biden and Kamala Harris.
Now, fashion coverage has become a political flashpoint. Vogue has long been in the crosshairs of conservatives due to Wintour’s progressive viewpoints; current first lady Melania Trump has only been on Vogue in a wedding-dress-esque gown when she married then-just-business and TV personality Donald Trump in 2005. Recently, the magazine has been criticized for covering the fashion at Trump’s second inauguration and what Conservative women such as Ivanka Trump and Usha Vance wear, and for including billionaires seen as nouveau oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sanchez at the Met Gala and on a cover. But it all shows that under Wintour, the Vogue imprimatur mattered.
A focus on social justice was fairly recent. Throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, the people in Vogue were relentlessly white and thin, gatekept by a defiantly fur-clad Wintour, often a target of PETA protesters. But after the Black Lives movement of 2020, Vogue deliberately began to share the spotlight with more diverse talents and voices.
This year, as many of the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of that time were stripped across the United States, the long-planned Met Gala themed Superfine: Tailoring Black Style showcased Black dandyism and resistance through fashion. In May, Wintour spoke to Robin Givhan of the Washington Post about the earlier years of her tenure: “I felt I had let people down.”
A magazine editor myself as the ’90s melted into the 2000s, I regularly sat in eyeshot of Wintour on fashion’s front lines. She wasn’t chummy, but she was always prompt and professional and, in my experience, unfailingly polite. She did smile. Once, when I was eight months pregnant, we were both trapped in a stuck, lurching industrial elevator at a Calvin Klein show. I was panicked and must have looked it; Wintour broke character and gave me a kind look. Coming from her it was weirdly reassuring.
Suzy Menkes, the 81-year-old former fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune who is still on the fashion critique beat, recalled yesterday on Instagram the time she and Wintour showed up to an Ungaro show wearing the same Versace blouse — Imagine! The horror! The accompanying photo showed Wintour smiling widely.
Meanwhile, the Vogue Instagram account posted a quote from Wintour, her only comment so far on the quantum shift: “Anybody in a creative field knows how essential it is to never stop growing in one’s work. Now, I find my greatest pleasure is helping the next generation of impassioned editors storm the field with their own ideas.”
But the current tumultuous media, fashion and cultural landscape will be a tricky one to navigate for Wintour’s successor — who will notably be named “head of editorial content” not editor-in-chief.
Amy Odell, author of “Anna: The Biography,” speculated yesterday based on industry sources that possible successors could include Lindsay Peoples, editor-in-chief of The Cut, or Chioma Nnadi of British Vogue. These are big stilettos to fill, and the candidate will have to navigate working with Wintour, still ultimately holding the reigns. But it will be a fabulous job for the right person, with range and scope to create a future vision for Vogue.
As Odell wrote, “There will never be another editor like Anna Wintour. And there may never be an editor who, like her, always managed to come out on top.”
This transition has been rumoured and anticipated for decades, but it’s remarkable how much control Wintour has retained over her own career. Perhaps that is her most remarkable accomplishment: she always got the last word.
