Why Anna Wintour will never go out of fashion

The Age

19 hours ago

Since first shocking the fashion world by putting a model in an exquisite Christian Lacroix jacket and ordinary blue jeans on her first US Vogue cover as editor in 1988, Anna Wintour has known how to make headlines.
This week was meant to belong to Irish designer Jonathan Anderson, who was making his debut in Paris as creative director of the most celebrated luxury label, Dior. By announcing the search for her successor in the editor's chair at Vogue, Wintour hijacked the conversation, reminding everyone who truly rules fashion.
For 37 years, Wintour has steadfastly pushed fashion to the forefront of popular culture. When Wintour began at Vogue, few people outside the magazine's glossy pages knew the names of the designers at Chanel or Louis Vuitton. Now your barista knows how to say Balenciaga and could be wearing it.
By filling Vogue's covers with Hollywood stars such as Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Aniston, along with performing artists Madonna, Britney Spears and Rihanna, she has consistently blurred the lines between fashion and celebrity. Thanks to Wintour's democratisation of luxury, most celebrities now either have lucrative contracts as fashion ambassadors or their own clothing or beauty brands.
If you are Kim Kardashian, whose first Vogue cover was in 2014, you have all three.
With her signature bob and sunglasses, Wintour has become a star herself, never quite rising above the derisive nickname 'Nuclear Wintour', earned for her no-nonsense management style. 'I have great affection for Anna, but she took to power rather than being the cozy, conspiratorial friend she used to be,' former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told The New York Times in March. 'I'm impressed by her ability to take on more and more responsibility.'
Other nicknames came along, including the title from the 2003 book The Devil Wears Prada, written by her former assistant Lauren Weisberger, which went on to become a movie and musical. At the musical's London premiere in December, Wintour told the BBC that it's 'for the audience and for the people I work with to decide if there are any similarities between me and Miranda Priestly'.
Viewers of the 2009 documentary The September Issue were given glimpses of her very Miranda Priestly-like imperious nature and the fear she instilled in designers, eager to win her approval and the fashion pages that came along with it. Stefano Pilati, then creative director at Yves Saint Laurent, memorably trembles when a less-than-enthusiastic Wintour arrives in his studio. Pilati was replaced in 2012.