Farewell, Anna Wintour: sphinx-faced, super-enduring doyenne of global fashion. The news that the editor-in-chief of US Vogue has stepped down after 37 years marks the end of an era, but I don’t mean her reign over couture and catwalk.
What her bow marks is the golden age of magazines, when editors were celebrated as celebs in their own right and whose names were synonymous with their product. Mark Boxer at Tatler, Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair, Nick Logan at The Face, Bill Buford heading Granta, Alan Coren at Punch and Tina Brown presiding over Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and the Daily Beast. But “Nuclear Wintour” outsaw all of them, while the only famed editor still at his desk and outdoing Wintour by two years and still counting is my first boss, Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s Lord Gnome.
Magazines shaped my life after my publican parents turned their saloon bar into a comfy sitting room with sofas, log fires and piles of glossies. As my mother put it, “There’s Country Life for the life you want, Hello! to gawp at other people’s lives and Private Eye for the truth behind the lives.” Each copy was grey from being thumbed by riveted customers. By 1991, when the cousin of one of our regulars sent me off for an interview with Hislop at the Eye’s Soho offices, I was quivering with nerves at the prospect of meeting a demi-god. But even then, I didn’t quite grasp how infinitesimally lucky I was to enter magazine journalism at a time of editorial giants, wide readerships, big ad revenue and significant sway.
It was an age when editors decided who was a star in the making – or fading. Front covers rather than TikTok anointed and cemented talent, while media bigwigs, rock stars and actors hung out together at the then newly-founded Groucho Club, feeding on each other’s influence. The idea of a “chief content creator” wasn’t even a twinkle in a Californian tech bro’s eye – he was still at kindergarten.
All the lesser hacks relied on editors and their lavish expense accounts to lubricate the fun. Michael VerMeulen, the American editor of British GQ – where I landed my second job – negotiated an expense account of £40,000 on top of his salary and used to sweep his entire staff out for Groucho jollies. Vermeulen with his flamboyant lingo of “big swinging dicks” (any man he admired) and “doesn’t blow the wind up my skirt” (a lacklustre features pitch) made such great copy that the Guardian sent a journalist to report on what it was like to work in his orbit. I have long cherished the memory of him telling me that when a girlfriend congratulated him on his sexual performance, he instantly replied, “Don’t tell me, tell your friends!” His death, one August bank holiday weekend after an excess of cocaine, was front-page news, and all of Mag Land mourned.
Even back then, Anna Wintour rose above it all like a phoenix born of ice, who would never be glimpsed in civilian settings. A good friend went off to work at US Vogue and reported back that the maestra had her own work lavatory, forbidden to all others, so worker bees couldn’t bear witness to her doing something as human as going to the loo. (This was apparently even the case at her Met Gala balls, where even Hollywood superstars couldn’t share her personal facilities.)
During my brief stint at Conde Nast, before I was fired for sleeping with the deputy editor – reader, I married him – rumours of impending visits from Wintour took on the aspect of Elizabeth I descending on an earl’s country estate to test his coffers and loyalty. Even that friend who went to the Vogue took on some of her boss’s grandiosity. When I bumped into her at an intimate London book launch, I was startled to find she affected not to know me, a phase that happily passed.
There was real power in the corridors of glossies back then, and this could distort personalities even more than the charlie so many meeja folk snorted. An actress or model who couldn’t land a Vogue cover was denied the super-stamp of being in fashion, and so it was for men who couldn’t make a splash on GQ or Esquire’s hoardings. Pamela Anderson may have equalled Princess Diana for sheer fame in the 1990s, but Wintour would not yield her the ultimate accolade of a cover: the sex tape that leaked of Anderson and drummer Tommy Lee deemed her trashy beyond redemption. But in 2023, Anderson had a radical image overhaul, ditching the bombshell slap and going makeup-free to Paris Fashion Week, and every event since. It was intellectual, interesting – and it’s got her on the list for the last two Met Galas.
This year, Anderson went a step further, with a severe bob and sculpted dress that gave her a faint whiff of catwalk Rosa Klebb. She’d have probably worn a straitjacket if it gained her admission to fashion’s front row. Because that, in the end, was Anna Wintour’s nuclear-force superpower: the quiet devastation of a “No”. She was not just an editor, she was the ultimate bouncer with Prada gloves.
