Anna Wintour: The mastermind behind Vogue & Teen Vogue
by JACQUELINE SCOTT
Intern Lifestyles Reporter
Characters Miranda Priestly of “Devils Wears Prada” and Faye Summers of “Ugly Betty” were based upon her.
S.I. Newhouse dubbed her “the greatest Vogue editor of them all,” designer John Galliano calls her his “fairy godmother” and her Vogue sidekick Andre Leon Talley says, “the Red Sea parts when she walks through the room.”
She is known by all in the fashion industry for her signature bob hairstyle – which the New York Post claims she had by age 14, oversized sunglasses and ‘dragon lady’ ice queen demeanor.
Her name: Anna
Wintour. As editor in chief of Vogue since 1988, she is the mastermind
behind the masterpiece. Wintour also laid the foundations of Teen Vogue
before turning over the title of E.I.C to Amy Astley.
Before Wintour, Diana Vreeland served as E.I.C of Vogue for 17 years.
Vreeland’s beige office walls were quickly becoming a metaphor for the
magazine. It was becoming boring. It was expected. It was trite.
That’s where Wintour came in, with her visual sense. Worried Condé Nast
executives and publisher S.I. Newhouse swore her in for a much-needed
magazine facelift.
Born in London to an editor father and social worker mother,
she attended school up until age 16. After dropping out, she made it
her career ambition to delve into fashion journalism.
According to Biography.com, Anna began in the fashion department of
Harper’s & Queen, in London. Bouncing back and forth between New
York and London, from publication to publication, she finally moved to
New York in 1976 to serve as fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar.
In 1983 she was named the creative editor of Vogue, and in 1986 she
returned to London to stabilize British Vogue until she began her E.I.C
reign in 1988.
In her first year at Vogue, Wintour gave the magazine a revamp.
Mirabella headshots of mostly blondes were traded in for full shots of
Patti Hansen, Cheryl Tiegs, or Kim Alexis.
The New York Post even hailed Wintour in 2005 as the innovator of showcasing real women and affordable clothing:
“Her much commented-upon debut cover in November 1988 featured a
19-year-old Israeli model in a $50 pair of faded jeans and a $10,000
jewel-encrusted Christian Lacroix T-shirt; another showed a black model
in an Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket, a $44 bikini, and a J. Crew
bandanna. Wintour’s approach hit a nerve—this was the way real women
put clothes together (with the likely exception of wearing
multi-thousand-dollar T-shirts).”
Wintour also stripped away the endless text-heavy pages of the
Mirabella era by focusing on the subject at hand – fashion. Editorial
spreads and latest trends were just a few colors that Wintour brought
to the artist’s palette.
And as her ice queen and dragon lady nicknames may suggest, some
critics, the Post says, believe Wintour’s aesthetic to be too
elite and too rigid.
Without her fine-tuned attention to detail and her commitment to the
Vogue family, however, Condé Nast would not have pushed to the
forefront Vogue’s offspring in February/March 2003, Teen Vogue.
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