NUCLEAR WINTOUR WINDS DOWN: There will never be another Anna Wintour at Vogue. She’s made sure of it.
In the midst of Condé Nast’s descent into the banal, the most frequently asked question asked about Wintour’s embattled tenure has been “why is she still bothering?” One theory is that she wanted to surpass Edna Woolman Chase’s 37 year tenure as US editor-in-chief. In the event she has only equalled it.
Or perhaps she felt she had some “reputational” issues to finesse. In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, demonstrators with placards massed outside Wintour’s picturesque red brick downtown townhouse to protest against what they saw as Condé Nast’s (and her) long history of elitism and racism.
The case for the prosecution against Wintour has been going on since she was first appointed editor of the then genteel and cosy British Vogue in 1988. Her brusque manner, Stakhanovite work ethic and immunity to the cold (she wore micro minis throughout her two pregnancies there) inspired the moniker “Nuclear Wintour”.
Many of the ideals, values and people she has championed in her magazine – fur, P Diddy, Mike Tyson, more fur, Kanye West, Harvey Weinstein, John Galliano and Asma al-Assad – seem tone deaf, especially viewed with hindsight. There are numerous witnesses to her rudeness. You don’t inspire a culture defining book and a film (The Devil Wears Prada) by being bland.
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Wintour publicly apologised for her alleged sins after the BLM debacle, vowing to right the wrongs. Condé Nast is now more inclusive of skin colour and (a little more) inclusive of body type. On an unforgivable downside, in its general confusion about what it’s meant to be (you’d have thought the clue was in the name), Vogue, particularly online and on social media, has become a fetid hotbed of blatantly uninformed, anti-Israel propaganda, identity politics and keffiyehs. I know of at least one Jewish digital content editor who left a job she initially loved under Wintour because the perceived attitude of her team, which she felt powerless to challenge, became unbearable. Other Jewish editors still in the company are deeply unhappy – feeling unheard and unsupported by the powers that be.
What does this have to do with Wintour? It’s happening under her watch. For the past decade, she has been ever more promoted within the company until her purview reaches just about every nook and cranny. “Anna knows what’s on every page,” one European director of editorial content told me.
As with Graydon Carter stepping down as maximum editor of sister Condé Nast publication Vanity Fair, Wintour retiring as editor in chief (though remaining as “chief content office for Condé Nast and global editorial director for Vogue”) is yet another example of what Joe Nocera recently dubbed “The Luxurious Death Rattle of the Great American Magazine.”