Anna — how Wintour reached the pinnacle of her profession

The morning after Donald Trump was elected president, Anna Wintour stood in front of her editors and wept. It was a rare and, to staff, shocking display of emotion for the notoriously cool and collected Wintour, whose glossy magazine had in 2016 publicly thrown its weight behind Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Wintour is a woman “endowed with the rare ability to turn attachments — to both outcomes and people — on and off like a switch”, as journalist Amy Odell writes in Anna, a new biography of American Vogue’s longstanding editor-in-chief. But for a moment at least, Trump’s success threw her.

Widely considered the most powerful person in fashion, as well at publisher Condé Nast, where she is chief content officer and global editorial director, Wintour has been the subject of fascination and scrutiny since she became editor of British Vogue in 1985. And yet she has remained as seemingly mysterious to her confidantes, assistants, colleagues and the press as to the rest of the world. Through more than 250 interviews and extensive research, Odell assiduously charts how Wintour reached the pinnacle of her profession — and then superseded it, spreading her influence into Hollywood, Broadway, government, even sports.

As the book tells it, Wintour’s earliest ambition was to edit American Vogue. But despite her well-connected London upbringing as the daughter of Evening Standard editor Charles and his American wife Eleanor “Nonie” Wintour, the path there is far from smooth. Leaving school at 16, she is fired from her first job at the hip boutique Biba in the mid-1960s, under suspicion of stealing clothes, and is also dismissed from her first New York job at Harper’s Bazaar. Andy Warhol, who thought Wintour was “a terrible dresser”, declines to hire her as a fashion editor at Interview magazine.

Is Wintour a tyrant who should have been let go years ago? Or a boss whose style of leadership would be praised in male form?

When Wintour finally lands the top job at American Vogue, she cleans house. The staff permitted to remain find her “scary”, a micromanager who regularly kills stories and photo shoots deemed substandard. Odell notes that “there is debate about how creative Anna is as an editor”, and she argues that what ultimately secures Wintour’s place at the top — and keeps her there — is her personal brand, of which her stylishness and superhuman work ethic are central. Although she has a weakness for “pets” such as writer André Leon Talley (who in the 1990s is afforded a $350,000 salary to write a monthly column), what she relishes is control.

Wintour’s Vogue is a creative and commercial success but her job is far from secure. When Ron Galotti joins as publisher in 1994, he and Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse warn Wintour to feature more advertisers’ clothes in editorial pages, or else. She does, and during the late 1990s grows her power within the company and, more importantly, without. Acting as a sort of GM of the fashion industry, it is Wintour who gets John Galliano funding for his young label, and lands Marc Jacobs his creative director job at Louis Vuitton. Vogue covers, once exclusively reserved for models, become sought-after prizes for celebrities, though they must hustle for Wintour’s approval: Oprah is made to lose 20 pounds before she becomes the first black woman to have her own Vogue cover in 1998.

But it is The Devil Wears Prada — the 2006 film based on the book by former assistant Lauren Weisberger, starring Meryl Streep as the queenly, Wintour-inspired protagonist — that turns Wintour into a bona fide celebrity. It also, says Odell, makes her untouchable at Condé Nast, even as the tally of her various missteps — Vogue’s relentless body-shaming, the lack of racial diversity in its staff and pages — adds up. These errors are easy to condemn but Odell is careful to remind readers that Wintour’s attitudes were once the norm. “A creature of habit, she often simply fell back on working with her favourite people, like photographer Mario Testino,” Odell writes of the lack of black photographers shooting for Vogue.

A takedown biography of Wintour would have been easy, and Odell resists the temptation, seeking to paint a more nuanced portrait without any input from Wintour herself (who opened her Rolodex to Odell, but declined repeated requests to be interviewed).

But the book lacks a strong point of view. Is Wintour a tyrant who should have been let go from Vogue years ago, or an effective boss whose leadership methods would be readily praised in male form? Odell, an opinionated writer, is curiously reticent on these and other questions.

Wintour obsessives will no doubt revel in the details of her diet (whole-milk lattes, rare steaks, caprese salads without the tomatoes), and management style. But as for the woman behind the manicured bob and dark sunglasses? The mystery remains intact.

Lauren Indvik is the FT’s fashion editor

Anna by Amy Odell, Allen & Unwin £20, 464 pages

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