Dressing down a fashion diva
It’s a safe bet that when Anna Wintour dropped out of school at age 16, even her nearest and dearest didn’t predict much success in her future. Certainly not that the once willful, rebellious teen known for her micro minis, club-hopping and rogue boyfriends would go on to reign as High Priestess of Fashion for 25 years and counting.
But Wintour fooled them and became top editor at Vogue magazine and one of the most glamorous and powerful individuals in the world’s $160-billion fashion industry. Seated front and center at shows in the great fashion houses, she has only had to nod her bobbed head and anoint a particular new look in her magazine’s pages, and retail sales of that particular style would soar. Advertisers have flocked to appear in Wintour’s Vogue, eager to have their products displayed amid the rarefied ambience she creates in her editorial pages.
She has been, in effect, a very classy salesperson, a trendsetter, a woman of such innovation and inimitable prescience about style that she has managed to survive all these years despite what some have alleged to be very unsettling personal traits. Meanness, for one thing.
And it is that compelling combination of power, style and audacious attitude that has drawn enough interest for two books to be written about her in recent years.
In the 2001 novel “The Devil Wears Prada” (presumed to be a roman a clef because author Lauren Weisberger worked as Wintour’s assistant), a fictional fashion editor treats her underlings like serfs, belittles and torments them during 18-hour workdays, assigns them such tasks as caring for her dirty laundry, picking her dog up from the vet, keeping lovers at bay while she’s off with other lovers -- and fetching thousands of expensive meals, which she often tossed in the trash if they were not precisely what she ordered or were no longer hot when she got around to eating them.
Now, biographer Jerry Oppenheimer has written an unauthorized account of the celebrity editor, 56, a diva deemed so icy by some that they’ve dubbed her Nuclear Wintour. Oppenheimer says that after the bestseller success of Weisberger’s book, he sensed enough interest in Wintour to warrant a “serious and balanced biography” that would not demonize her, but would accurately present her life story.
After spending about a year researching her life, he says, he came away “with great respect for Wintour’s “incredible creativity. For her first Vogue cover, she paired $50 jeans with a $10,000 jewel-encrusted blouse. That was a shocker. Jeans on a Vogue cover had never been done before.” And it recalibrated the fashion world’s thinking. He also came away with the belief that Wintour “treats people in a way that is sometimes simply awful.”
“Front Row -- Anna Wintour: The Cool Life and Hot Times of Vogue’s Editor-In-Chief” is the result of all his research. Oppenheimer had no access to his subject, who refused to talk to him and who also requested that her friends, family and anyone who worked at Vogue -- and wanted to continue working there -- also shun him, he says. (One person from the staff did converse with Oppenheimer, with Wintour’s blessings. She told him only good things about her boss.)
With a print run of 100,000 copies, reviews of “Front Row” have been mixed. Booklist called it a “fascinating read about one of the great queen-bee bosses and her mission to determine and define fashion.” Kirkus Reviews labeled it a “gleefully vicious biography.” Others haven’t been as enthralled. The New York Times called it a “tell-not-much” and the Washington Post noted that without intimates as sources, the book’s depiction of Wintour was more a “collection of visual symbols” than an in-depth portrait.
Lack of access is not unusual, Oppenheimer says. He’s made a career of writing unauthorized biographies of what he calls “powerful, iconic women” (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barbara Walters and the recent Martha Stewart opus, “Just Desserts”). But this latest effort suffers from what might be called a lack of dish, not to mention depth. There is little of the deliciously lurid personal detail, the insider’s up-close view of this woman who is still such a queen on the international fashion stage. And Oppenheimer displays no knowledge of the kind of haute couture ensembles that float around Vogue.
Nonetheless, there are undoubtedly thousands of “fashionistas” (Oppenheimer’s favorite word) who will cling to every tidbit about the life and times of this petite woman who was born rich and thin, with fabulous glossy brown hair and what he describes as a perfect little oval face that has beguiled men and terrified women forced to deal with Wintour’s obsessive drive, from age 14, to get to the top of the Vogue masthead.
Oppenheimer also asserts that even those who helped Wintour get to the top were not immune to her viper strikes. Alex Liberman, the revered editorial director of Conde Nast, which owns Vogue, recognized her great talent and helped engineer her takeover of the top spot there. Then Wintour abandoned him like an old Jimmy Choo shoe, Oppenheimer writes, a person who had served his purpose and was not needed any more.
“There is no such thing as loyalty with her,” Oppenheimer says in a telephone interview from his Connecticut home, during which he admitted that he knew nothing about the fashion industry until he started writing the book, and was “truly amazed” to learn that it is “such an incredibly bitchy world.”
Those interested in finding out exactly how Wintour got to where she is won’t be surprised to find it wasn’t easy. She took a succession of jobs, starting in 1970, at Harpers & Queen magazine in London, where she was born and raised.
Her mother (an American heiress) and father (a wealthy London newspaper editor) met while both were at Cambridge University in England. Why these sophisticated, well-educated parents allowed their daughter to quit school at 16 and set her up in a private apartment in their London townhouse is never addressed by Oppenheimer, who alleges that Wintour dropped out simply because she couldn’t tolerate the unfashionable skirt lengths of the private school uniform she was forced to wear.
Even at her first job, Wintour’s talent at spotting hot new models, photographers and fashion trends was apparent, Oppenheimer writes. But she got herself in trouble by trying to put her boss out of work, then quit when it became clear that she would not succeed. She then left for the United States, where her boyfriend of the moment had gone to live.
She subsequently held jobs in New York at Harper’s Bazaar, Viva, Vogue, Savvy, New York, House & Garden (not necessarily in that order), and spent a stint in London before she finally landed back at Vogue in New York, this time as editor in chief.
At some jobs she succeeded, at others she failed. She was even fired once or twice. “At House & Garden, she changed the title to HG and started introducing fashion into its pages. Insiders started calling it House and Garment,” Oppenheimer writes. When she introduced celebrities into the mix, they started calling it Vanity Chair, and joking that HG actually stood for hot gossip.
“She totally devastated the magazine,” which lost much of its core advertisers and readership, he says. “So much so, that Conde Nast had to set up an 800 number to handle all the subscription cancellations.” But everywhere she worked, her uncanny talents were apparent, if not exactly always appreciated. The real trouble with Anna, Oppenheimer writes, is that she won’t or can’t communicate, leaving underlings to divine what she wants, and then fear her wrath if they get it wrong.
It appears that no one has gotten to know her well -- at least, no one who was willing to talk about her to Oppenheimer.
One of his main sources for Wintour’s early life was a discontented best friend from her childhood, a woman who says that, as a teen, Wintour was cruel and took perverse delight in buying clothing gifts that were sizes too small for her friend, as if to emphasize that the girl was chunkier than the svelte Wintour.
Later on, when the friend married, Wintour’s wedding gift was a box of brown stationery with her friend’s married name spelled incorrectly. Oppenheimer writes: “It was clear that Anna had given the off-the-wall and inappropriate gift spitefully and on purpose, a
Oppenheimer writes of Wintour as a kind of sex kitten with a great face, legs and hair and a childish, needy air that drove her succession of hunky lovers to distraction. In romantic liaisons, she was the exact opposite of the cruel commandant persona she affected in the office, he says. There, “Anna’s imperious manner manifested itself even in the elevators and hallways of Vogue,” he writes. “It was an unwritten rule that Anna didn’t permit anyone to ride on the elevators with her and that staffers were expected to let her go first and take the next one. There was even a rule imposed about how Anna was to be addressed and when and where one might speak to her.”
Wintour married a doctor, had two children and divorced in 2000, after starting a liaison with another man. She is still top fashion editor of the world, as much a magnet for the paparazzi as the models on the runway -- although Oppenheimer notes that the February issue of Vogue “may not have quite as many ads” as others on the newsstand. “And you know,” he says, “fashion is a bottom-line business. If the figures don’t shake out, anything could happen. Even to her.”
