The daughter of Charles Wintour, an Evening Standard editor, and his American wife, Nonie, her upbringing was liberal. When the family moved to an elegant house in Kensington, the 15-year-old Anna was give her own self-contained basement flat. She began her career in journalism at just 16, helped by her father. She didn’t graduate from high school, nor did she pursue any higher education — an interesting fact about a hard-working and intelligent woman whose parents met while studying at Cambridge University. She soon left the UK for America, and the speed of ascent of her career (she was made editor of American Vogue in 1988, aged 39) was always accompanied by bitchy remarks — “Nuclear Wintour”, “The Wintour of our discontent”. Anecdotes about her attitude spread like wildfire through the industry, such as the tale that she was prepared to cut off as much 8in from the hems of clothes she called in to shoot, without any consultation with the designer. Or the apocryphal story about her sitting through a smart London dinner party and eating nothing, only to remove a tiny pot of yoghurt from her handbag at the end of the evening and scoff it with a silver spoon.
Gossip follows her wherever she goes. Indeed, a small industry has sprung up around the Wintour mystique. When Lauren Weisberger, a former Vogue assistant, wrote her debut novel, The Devil Wears Prada (said to be a fictional account of working for Wintour), publishers pounced and the novel has now been optioned by Hollywood. A racy unauthorised biography by Jerry Oppenheimer, which claims that Wintour had an affair with Bob Marley, has also stormed the bestseller list. For her part, Wintour never comments.
We meet in an unassuming tourist cafe near the Louvre in Paris, where she is attending the ready-to-wear shows. It might be a low-key moment (the famous dark sunglasses are nowhere to be seen), but Wintour, dressed in a Prada skirt and draped in her signature chinchilla fur, cannot help but stand out from the crowd. She is with André Leon Talley, her faithful Vogue retainer, and although they make a strange couple — an enormous flamboyant black man with this elegant bird-like woman — there is genuine respect between them. Businesslike as always, Wintour would rather talk about fashion than anything personal.
“I love British fashion,” she says in her slightly metallic voice, still English, but tinged with an American accent. “And I find it ridiculous that it gets so little support from the government. It could bring so much glamour and style, as well as money, to London. Sienna Miller and Kate Moss do so much for the city. So much can come out of it — and does — but you don’t seem to handle it the right way.” I am taken aback by how passionate she is.
“If I were Stuart Rose,” she continues, referring to the chairman of the British Fashion Council, “I would go down on bended knee to Rose Marie Bravo [the CEO of Burberry, which currently shows in Milan] to get Burberry back to London. After all, it is a British firm and its designer, Christopher Bailey, is British. That would help to bring back the right buyers and press.” There is a clue here as to how Wintour makes things happen. So is London Fashion Week doomed? “London is never going to die,” she replies sharply. “Britain is too full of creative young designers for that. I think what spoils it is lack of organisation. If only the British Fashion Council could squeeze it in, as it used to, between the Milan and Paris shows. If we could go to London for just two days — which, actually, I normally do — it would be a huge boost, not only for British fashion, but for all of us. After all, look what comes out of London fashion. London designers are always taken seriously for the big jobs. I’m thinking of people like Roland Mouret who, in my opinion, should have been more deeply considered than he was for the Givenchy job.”
The British Fashion Council would do well to listen. Wintour’s instincts for fashion have a good track record. It was she who valued the importance of the supermodel, starting a bidding war around the world by magazines desperate to feature the models chosen by her for American Vogue. Then she went on to change the rules again, by featuring celebrities on the cover and making everyone aware of the likes of J.Lo and P Diddy, long before other magazines acknowledged it was acceptable to feature pop stars and rappers as aspirational figures.
Wintour is unrepentant. “Celebrities are a wonderful thing for fashion,” she insists. “Fashion designers have really responded to the whole red-carpet thing, and I think the public are dying to see them in fabulous clothes and jewellery, but,” she admits, “it does seem to be getting out of hand. There are so many red-carpet events now that, by the time you get to the Oscars, you’re beginning to think you’ve had enough.” But has she also spawned a monster? At this year’s Academy Awards, celebs were paid big bucks to wear a particular designer. Where’s the style in wearing a frock for money? “The public wants to see people in clothes looking like they owned them, rather than being paid to wear them. Take the case of the Trump wedding. We at Vogue were able to steer Melania Knauss towards the right Dior dress, which was the perfect, over-the-top thing for a wedding like hers. And the important thing is that she looked amazing, because she didn’t look like anybody else. She looked like her. It was her own personal glamour.”
And Wintour should know — if anyone understands glamour, she does. Always immaculate, with her Louise Brooks fringe, Chanel dark glasses and top-designer clothes (favourites: Prada, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Tom Ford’s Gucci), she never falls into the traps awaiting the unwary fashion obsessive. However, her penchant for fur has landed her in hot water. Both she and her home have been attacked by the anti-fur lobby, one of whom once chucked a dead raccoon into her soup at a restaurant. In New York, she is accompanied by two bodyguards, but not here in Paris, even though another protester threw a tofu pie in her face as she entered the Chanel autumn/winter 2005 show. Unruffled, and as practical as ever, Wintour slipped backstage to have her hair and make-up redone before reappearing looking immaculate, as if nothing untoward had happened.
And this is her great strength: her discipline. She starts her day with tennis almost at dawn; her hairdresser arrives at 7am and she is in her office before most fashion people have even got out of bed. Her life is regimented, but it needs to be. More than just the editor of a magazine, she is the figurehead of a $160 billion industry, a role she takes seriously, not only in America but also across Europe. She often visits our young designers to advise them on their careers. Mouret recalls that she did so with him two years ago, suggesting that he would be wise to continue to show in London rather than move to New York. “And, of course, she was right,” he says.
This involvement with young designers is what sets Wintour apart from her peers and transcends all the gossip that surrounds her. As Manolo Blahnik says: “I adore her, because she has encouraged legions of young kiddies. It seems as if she can smell something on them, and then she goes ahead and brings it out of them. She encourages, but she never compromises, and she always gave me such sound advice. I love the way she has respect for the old and the new.”
“Anna seems to know the right moment to touch your career,” says John Galliano. “I was lost in Paris — no money, no way of moving my career forward — and she gave me practical help, flying me to New York and hooking me up with a backer.” Says Wintour: “Well, at Vogue, we are in a fortunate position, because we can support designers who wouldn’t be able to go ahead without the exposure we can give.” The story of how one of the Proenza Schouler design duo spotted her on an aeroplane when they were starting out and passed a note to her, which she followed up, is a modern fashion legend.
So, where is the wicked witch of myth? Not easy to find. When you strip away the spiteful innuendo, you are left with a professional mother of two — she is now divorced from her psychiatrist husband, David Shaffer, but in a new relationship with a wealthy Texan businessman — whose main claim to ruthlessness is the ardour with which she follows the work ethos. Yes, she might well be an obsessive. Certainly, she is a perfectionist. And, to most of us, she probably lives an impossibly rigid and regimented life. But in a fashion world awash with dizzy, hysterical queens, Wintour seems to float above it all with swan-like grace.
AN EVENING WITH STYLE AND ANNA WINTOUR
ANNA WINTOUR will give an exclusive talk for Style readers on May 4, at the British Museum. She will be speaking about her work and answering questions from the audience. Tickets for an evening with Anna Wintour, introduced by Style's Colin McDowell, cost £20 each, and are available from Keith Prowse Ticketing on 0870 842 2242. The talk begins at 7pm and will last for one-and-a-half hours.
