There will never be another Anna Wintour at Vogue. She's made sure of it

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Anna Wintour's departure from American Vogue, the citadel she turned into a nation state, complete with its own Manolo wearing Praetorian Guard and increasingly partisan politics, has been predicted ever since I've been writing about fashion. More than 30 years.
The difference is that had she swept off a decade or so ago – to become US ambassador to the UK under President Obama, as she was reported to have very much wanted – her reign at Vogue would have been viewed as an incontrovertible success. Like her or loathe her, worship her every move or find many of her choices and causes questionable, US Vogue under her watch, was for many years, both financially and creatively, a masterwork. She has been a brilliant Vogue editor. The stampede to replace her would have made the rush for the BA lounge in T5 look passive.
In the end however, the news comes as a slightly damp squib and, true to current Condé Nast form, a fudge. Yes, the 75-year-old is stepping down from her role as editor-in-chief, but she remains chief content office for Condé Nast and global editorial director for Vogue. Her successor at the magazine will, like all the other Condé Nast 'editorial content directors' report into her. The rumoured $2 million a year salary (plus unlimited expenses, accounts at The Ritz in Paris, the town cars purring outside the Condé Nast office at all hours, first class flights, clothing allowance, favourable mortgages etc) that came with her job, will be as distant a memory as Marie Antoinette's infamous diamond necklace.
There are no more editor-in-chiefs at Condé Nast. The fun, the glory, the glamour and the heady creative independence of those jobs has gone, along with the characters who once inhabited them – the nonchalantly stylish Carine Roitfeld and then Emmanuelle Alt, who successively edited French Vogue; the ultra elegant and wily Franca Sozzani who ran Italian Vogue for three decades, the shrewd, intelligent Alexandra Shulman who edited British Vogue for 25 years – Wintour saw them all off, as well as Edward Enniful, who at one time it was supposed, would ultimately succeed her.
They've been replaced by far less expensive Wintour acolytes, plucked from the world of influencers or lower down the masthead. Nothing wrong with that in theory – at least it reflects the economic realities of Condé Nast, which despite the many 'innovative' announcements of its chief executive officer Roger Lynch, continues to lose money.
In practice, the results are frequently lacklustre. The people who always made Vogue count – not the readers silly, but the players in the fashion, film, theatre and other industries who would have killed to be in its pages, can now go directly to their followers on social media. Vogue's most active presence is on Instagram, where its tone veers between preachy 'activism' and crude popularism.
Meanwhile Condé Nast itself appears to be suffering from one long existential crisis. Is it even still a publishing house (the one that brought us Vanity Fair, Glamour, GQ, World of Interiors, House & Garden, Tatler and numerous international editions of Vogue), or, as it lately suggests, an events company that makes money from rubber-neck red carpet products such as Vogue World?
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 Woolly 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.
Equally there are plenty who testify to her kindness, whilst her ability to fundraise – delicately arm twisting the rich to hand over $300,000 a table for her Met Ball whilst elegantly kneeing them in the accounts department for a donation to the Democratic party – is spectacular. She's an operator of the highest order, drawn, since she was a London teenager, sniffing out the most expensive labels and most beautiful folk, to power. The late André Leon Talley, once an editor at large at US Vogue and her personal dresser and advisor until they fell out, wrote 'Anna has mercilessly made her best friends people who are the highest in their chosen fields'.
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.
She authorises every editor's foreign trips and keeps an eye on their public exposure, which perhaps explains why, unlike in the days of Roitfeld or Alt, no one in that company has anywhere near the profile she does. Her successor at American Vogue is unlikely ever to be another Wintour – the new structure there simply won't allow it. Names in the running include Chioma Nnandi, the charming, self-effacing British journalist and long time Wintour protege, currently editorial content director of British Vogue. Sarah Moonves, who edits W Magazine, to industry acclaim (and who, in 2019, helped organise its buyout from Condé Nast where it was floundering) is another. Laura Brown, the popular, ebullient Australian former editor of US In Style, now a social media personality, or Eva Chen, another Wintour mentee, who has a huge job at Instagram, would both be quite the catch too, in the unlikely event Condé Nast could match their current earnings. But will any of them want it?
'Après moi, le deluge,' is one description of Wintour's legacy strategy that keeps repeating itself over the past decade. In 'stepping back' from her editorship, yet simultaneously maintaining a vice-like grip on all the others, it seems one prophecy about her that may come true.