Anna Wintour: Power, Fashion, and 35 Years of Vogue
Anna Wintour has occupied the editorship of American Vogue since 1988. That is, by any measure, an extraordinary tenure — longer than any American president serves, longer than most CEOs survive, long enough to have witnessed the invention of the internet, the birth of social media, the collapse of the print magazine industry, and the near-death and partial resurrection of fashion itself during a global pandemic.
She has survived all of it. That survival alone demands analysis.
But the question of Wintour’s legacy is more complex than her survival suggests, and it deserves the same rigour she has brought to the assessment of others — which is to say, a great deal.
The Architecture of Power
To understand Wintour’s achievement, it is necessary to understand what Vogue was before she arrived and what she made it.
When Wintour succeeded Grace Mirabella as Vogue’s editor-in-chief in 1988, the magazine was competent but conservative — respected within the industry but not feared, influential but not commanding. Mirabella had made Vogue practical and middle-American, a decision that had irritated the fashion establishment but served the magazine’s circulation.
Wintour rebuilt the magazine around a different set of values: fashion as high culture, fashion as news, fashion as the meeting point of culture, politics, and luxury. Her first cover — a model in jeans and a jewelled Christian Lacroix top — announced her direction precisely. The mixing of high and low, the unapologetic luxury, the confident eclecticism. This was not Mirabella’s Vogue.
What Wintour created was less a magazine than a cultural institution — one whose authority extended well beyond its pages to shape the entire fashion industry. Designers whose clothes appeared in Vogue received commercial validation money could not buy. Designers whose clothes Vogue ignored faced questions their backers could not easily dismiss. The magazine’s cover was not merely advertising space but an industry designation: this person, right now, matters.
The Editor as Power Broker
The most significant aspect of Wintour’s career is not what she did editorially but what she built structurally — a model of editorial power that made the editor not merely a journalist but an industry figure with real commercial and cultural authority.
Her relationship with designers is the best illustration of this. Wintour has been, by multiple accounts, genuinely helpful to young designers she has chosen to champion — John Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Tom Ford in his early career, and later Thakoon, Prabal Gurung, and others. She has attended their shows, placed their clothes on covers at moments when that coverage was commercially significant, and used her network to connect them with investors and retailers.
This patronage is real and its effects are measurable. Vogue’s support for emerging designers has helped launch genuinely important careers. But it is also, obviously, patronage — which means it operates through personal favour, idiosyncratic taste, and the particular hierarchies and blind spots of one person’s worldview. The designers Wintour chose not to champion do not appear in the historical record of this patronage.
The Met Gala: Her True Monument
If Wintour’s editorship of Vogue is her career, the Met Gala is her monument. Since taking over as co-chair of the benefit in 1995, she has transformed it from a New York society event into the most-watched fashion spectacle in the world.
The scale of this achievement is genuinely remarkable. The Met Gala now raises over $15 million in a single evening for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute — significantly more than any other cultural fundraising event in New York. It has given the Costume Institute resources to mount exhibitions — “China: Through the Looking Glass” (2015), “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” (2018), “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” (2021) — that have attracted millions of visitors and produced substantial scholarship on the relationship between fashion and culture.
The Gala is also, as anyone who has watched its red carpet knows, a spectacle of almost baroque excess. The invitation list, the dress code, the table seating — all of it is managed by Wintour with a precision that borders on ceremony. The cultural commentary the Gala generates annually — who was invited, who was not, which looks achieved the brief and which failed it — is itself a form of fashion criticism, engaged with by people who rarely think about fashion at any other time of year.
Wintour’s management of the Met Gala is the clearest expression of her particular genius: the ability to make fashion feel like it matters, culturally, in a way that extends beyond the industry to the general public.
The Problems
Any honest assessment of Wintour’s legacy must address the criticisms that have accumulated over her tenure, and some of them are serious.
Racial representation
American Vogue under Wintour has, as discussed elsewhere in Vanity-X, an inadequate record on racial representation in its pages. The first solo Black woman on the cover of American Vogue was Beverly Johnson in 1974 — fourteen years before Wintour’s editorship. Wintour’s record on this in her early decades has been critiqued extensively, and her own acknowledgments of failure in this area (which have come in recent years, prompted in part by the 2020 racial justice reckoning) have been notable for being more candid than is usual from figures of her status.
In a 2020 open letter published in Vogue, Wintour stated directly: “I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, and other creative talent. I take full responsibility for this.” That is a statement of real accountability, particularly remarkable given that it was published in the magazine she edits.
Whether the subsequent changes — in editorial staff, in cover subjects, in the direction of the magazine’s content — represent genuine institutional change or managed optics is a question that will be answered over the decade ahead.
The culture of fear
Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) is fiction, but the culture it describes — a workplace of extreme hierarchy, emotional volatility, and management by fear — reflects a broader reality of Wintour’s management style that has been documented by numerous former employees. The sunglasses worn inside, the monosyllabic responses, the unannounced and devastating editorial judgements: these are not character inventions.
This matters not merely as a matter of workplace culture (though it does matter as that) but because the culture of fashion media more broadly — its hierarchies, its internship economy, its tendency to treat exploitation as character-building — is in part a culture that Wintour has perpetuated and been seen to model.
The fashion intern who works unpaid or near-unpaid for the prestige of fashion credentials is a system Wintour’s own career prestige has sustained. This is not entirely her responsibility — it is a systemic issue of the entire fashion media industry — but the most powerful individual in that industry cannot be entirely absolved of responsibility for the incentive structures her prestige helps maintain.
What She Protected
Wintour has also protected things worth protecting. The commitment to fashion as a serious cultural form — not decoration, not shopping advice, but a genuine expression of what a culture values and who it is — is a commitment she has maintained against considerable commercial and editorial pressure in an era when media has largely abandoned the pretence of quality in pursuit of clicks.
Her resistance to digital-first editorial priorities — her insistence, maintained long past the moment when many said it was sustainable, that Vogue was fundamentally a print product with craft and permanence at its core — was commercially imprudent but aesthetically principled. Whether it was right is a question the industry has not settled.
The Question of Succession
Wintour’s succession, when it comes, will be the fashion industry’s most consequential editorial event in decades. The institution she built is so thoroughly shaped by her personality, her taste, and her particular brand of authority that it is not obvious what Vogue looks like without her.
What is clear is that whoever follows her will inherit a different magazine than the one she inherited in 1988. The print landscape is different. The reader relationship is different. The authority of the editor-in-chief — which Wintour has exercised so absolutely — is dispersed in the social media age in ways that a single editor can no longer control.
What she built was extraordinary and particular to its moment. The question of what comes next is not, ultimately, about fashion. It is about what authority looks like in an age that has less and less tolerance for hierarchy.
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