In February, after King Charles made Dame Anna Wintour a Companion of Honour in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the doyenne of high fashion made it clear that retirement was the furthest thing from her mind.
‘This morning His Majesty asked me if this meant I was going to stop working – and I said firmly: No!’ announced Wintour. ‘It makes me even more convinced that I have so much more to achieve.’
In the light of this, what are we to make of her shocking announcement – just four months later – that she is stepping down as editor-in-chief of US Vogue after 37 years?
She may be 75, but few in the fashion world can imagine life without the ferociously demanding and icily remote ‘Nuclear Wintour’.
As papers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic have breathlessly reported, the almost impossibly haughty Dame announced to staff late last week that instead she will be handing over day-to-day operations to a new head of editorial content (identity to be announced) while she continues to reign as Vogue’s global editorial director and chief content officer at its parent company, Conde Nast.
But fashion being the hotbed of gossip it is, few were prepared to take this announcement at face value.
And it wasn’t long before the conspiracy theorists were attributing her departure from the editor’s chair to this ardent Democrat’s long-running feud with the Trump family.
Having repeatedly refused to put First Lady Melania Trump on Vogue’s front cover – an honour Wintour repeatedly accorded the similarly icy Slovenian-American’s Democrat predecessors Jill Biden and Michelle Obama – the editor twisted the knife in January when Vogue published a withering verdict on Mrs Trump’s new official White House portrait.
She may be 75, but few in the fashion world can imagine life without the ferociously demanding and icily remote ‘Nuclear Wintour’
Wintour repeatedly refused to put First Lady Melania Trump on Vogue’s front cover
Vogue fashion writer Hannah Jackson said the former lingerie model, now 55, looked ‘more like a freelance magician than a public servant’, concluding acidly that she ‘still struggles with sartorial messaging’.
Some of the Trumps’ friends turned on Wintour. Bill White, Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to Belgium, encouraged ‘everyone who loves America’ to cancel their Conde Nast subscriptions.
If anyone is qualified to comment on the idea that Wintour could have been kicked upstairs because of pressure from the White House, it’s Graydon Carter.
The legendary and flamboyant former editor of Vanity Fair magazine (also from the Conde Nast stable) famously earned the ire of Donald Trump – then a publicity-seeking Manhattan property developer – when he commented on the smallness of his hands in an interview he conducted for GQ magazine in 1984.
Trump was so upset by the ‘small hands’ reference that he ordered his staff to buy up every copy they could find on New York’s newsstands.
However, Carter – an old friend of Wintour until she launched a power grab for his magazine in 2013 – questions the theory that relations with the White House are somehow linked to the change in her role.
He told the Mail: ‘I do think that the only person at Conde Nast who could have shown Anna the door is the most powerful executive at the company: Anna herself.’
On the significance of her stepping down, Carter – who has previously admitted he ‘found Anna’s efforts to seem intimidating and powerful almost comical’ – added: ‘I mean, we’re not going to have a national moment of silence over it. And whoever Anna picks to be the editor, they will be editing the magazine through her eyes. So no major change there.’
In February, King Charles made Dame Anna Wintour a Companion of Honour in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace
Anna Wintour with the legendary and flamboyant former editor of Vanity Fair magazine Gradyon Carter
What has changed, say other insiders – and may have made Wintour less determined to keep doing it – is the job itself. Being Vogue editor in the heyday of glossy magazines was a life in first class: chauffeured everywhere by limo, patronising the world’s best restaurants and hotels, feted by celebrities and having so many assistants that one could be assigned simply to look after her dry cleaning.
Such lavish spending is out of the question now that the internet has destroyed Vogue’s 20th-century business model. Some critics have even questioned whether the magazine itself is on the way out, no longer the arbiter of taste that it was.
Take Wintour’s recent fawning coverage of Lauren Sanchez, the new Mrs Jeff Bezos. Weeks of coverage culminated in her putting La Bezos on the front cover of June’s digital edition of Vogue in the week of the couple’s opulent – some would say grotesque – Venice wedding.
The accompanying Vogue article breathlessly began: ‘The bride is corseted and cosseted in her high-necked, hand-appliquéd Italian lace wedding dress on the grounds of an 18th-century brick villa outside of Milan. ‘I’m gonna cry!’ says the soon-to-be Lauren Sánchez Bezos.’
Vogue readers who consider the billionaire Amazon founder and pouting, pneumatic Lauren just a little tacky must have felt close to tears, too, the last time Vogue lavished its considerable powers of flattery on the couple in late 2023.
The magazine and the Bezoses sparked a firestorm of mockery on social media over the page after page of sympathetically shot photos of Bezos – once Silicon Valley’s nerd king – flexing his biceps in a cowboy hat, T-shirt and jeans as his then fiancee draped herself over him wearing a tank-top that, as usual with her, left little to the imagination.
It’s clear that some fashion world insiders – not to mention commenters on social media – feel that Vogue, which prides itself on being the definitive style bible, shouldn’t be devoting so much splashy coverage to a couple who are anything but chic.
They see it as yet another example of Wintour betraying a demeaning fascination with celebrity, a quality that associates say has always been her weakness.
Lauren Sanchez Bezos on the front cover of June’s digital edition of Vogue in the week of the couple’s opulent – some would say grotesque – Venice wedding
There was a similar outcry and accusations of trashiness when Wintour put a reality TV star, Kim Kardashian, on the cover of Vogue back in 2014.
‘As Anna Wintour closes her era at Vogue, the final cover could have been a bold statement… Instead, it features a woman known for her proximity to extreme wealth,’ said an outraged Vogue reader on social media.
And for all her carefully cultivated reputation as a powerhouse in the fashion business, there was little mourning among her peers. For example, American avant-garde designer Rick Owens was rumoured to have cruelly changed the music at his show at Paris Fashion Week to Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard Of Oz as the news about Wintour percolated through his audience.
Whatever the true reason for her departure and however it has been received, the sheer importance of the announcement hasn’t been lost on anyone – inside or outside Vogue – and the wider fashion industry.
She is after all, famous for being a micro-manager who intently scrutinised every square inch of Vogue’s pages.
No wonder so many people believe that Wintour may have been pushed rather than have chosen to ‘step back’ so she can concentrate on the ‘bigger picture’ of the Conde Nast business.
Nevertheless, it appears that those who would love to see the imperious and often brutal Wintour finally brought low may have to wait a little longer.
Insiders at Vogue and well-connected Conde Nast veterans repeatedly assured the Mail that this boardroom reorganisation is, in fact, little more than a shuffling around of the pieces on the Conde Nast chess board – with Wintour still very much the Queen.
Her tactical retreat from Vogue, says a senior source at the magazine, was actually designed ‘to spread her influence even deeper into all the brands because all magazine editors will report to her’. (The supremely self-regarding New Yorker magazine is the only Conde Nast title that will remain independent.)
The insider added that the move was in fact just ‘making official’ an arrangement already in place – Mark Giuducci, 36, a close friend of Wintour’s daughter Bee, has actually been running Vogue day-to-day but can no longer do so as Wintour has just appointed him global editorial director (a grand way of saying ‘editor’) of another top Conde Nast title, Vanity Fair.
The bevy of names of Conde Nast insiders – all of them young enough to be Wintour’s children – who’ve been mooted for the Vogue job might think that, with so many perks gone, the price of having Anna breathing down their neck is hardly worth the trouble.
Few people in fashion will publicly criticise Wintour when she’s still in charge at Conde Nast – but some clearly believe it was time for a change at Vogue. Hetty Mahlich, editor of the fashion website SHOWstudio, stuck her neck out far enough to say that US Vogue could do with a bit of a reboot as it ‘has perhaps lost a clear point of view in a crowded media landscape’.
An ex-Conde Nast executive told the Mail that Wintour, always so sensitive to the dynamics of power and determined to cultivate an aura (‘That’s why she always wore sunglasses’) would be ‘keenly aware that, whatever the reasons for her stepping down as editor, people will see her as less important and less powerful’.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was little emotion during her end-of-an-era announcement. Insiders said a couple of staff got slightly misty-eyed but there was no ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’.
But such was Wintour’s mystique that she inspired not only, of course, Meryl Streep’s monstrous editor Miranda Priestly in the blockbuster movie The Devil Wears Prada but also the bob-wearing fashion designer Edna Mode in animated film hit The Incredibles.
Her daily rituals – early-morning tennis before having her hair done and only ever ordering rare steak in restaurants – were set in stone for decades, along with the bob and sunglasses.
Back in 2012, it was even reported that President Obama was considering appointing Wintour, who has dual citizenship, US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. The fashion world’s favourite villain could have been a wonderfully entertaining choice for a job that’s so much about charming people. Now, sadly, it looks like we may never know how good she’d be at it.
