Age, Biography, and Wiki
Anna Wintour is a British-American media executive born in 1949. She is most famous for her role as the editor-in-chief of Vogue, a position she has held since 1988. Wintour's career in fashion began in London, where she worked for Harper's Bazaar before moving to New York in 1975. Her leadership at Vogue has been instrumental in shaping the magazine into a global fashion authority. Wintour's biography is detailed on her Wikipedia page.
| Occupation | Journalist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 3 November 1949 |
| Age | 75 Years |
| Birth Place | London, England |
| Horoscope | Scorpio |
| Country | England |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Anna Wintour is known for her signature style, often donning her iconic bobbed haircut and designer sunglasses. While specific height and weight details are not widely reported, her fashion sense and presence are unmistakable. Wintour's physical appearance is as much a part of her persona as her fashion acumen.
Another common criticism of Wintour's editorship focuses on Vogue increasing use of celebrities on the cover, and her insistence on making them meet her standards. She reportedly told Oprah Winfrey to lose weight before her cover photograph. Likewise, Hillary Clinton was told not to wear a blue suit. At the 2005 Anglomania celebration, a Vogue-sponsored salute to British fashion at the Met, Wintour is said to have personally chosen the clothes for prominent attendees such as Jennifer Lopez, Kate Moss, Donald Trump, and Diane von Fürstenberg. "I don't think Vreeland had that kind of concentration", says Women's Wear Daily publisher Patrick McCarthy. "She wouldn't have dressed Babe Paley. Nor would Babe Paley have let her." By persuading designers to lend clothes to prominent socialites and celebrities, who are then photographed wearing the clothes not only in Vogue but more general-interest magazines like People and Us, which in turn influence what buyers want, some in the industry believe Wintour is exerting too much control over it, especially since she is not involved in making or producing clothes herself. "The end result is that Anna can control it all the way to the selling floor", says Candy Pratts Price, executive fashion director at Style.com. She has been credited with killing grunge fashion in the early 1990s, when it was not selling well, by telling designers if they continued to avoid glamour their looks would not be photographed for Vogue. All complied. Another Vogue writer has complained Wintour excluded ordinary working women, many of whom are regular subscribers, from the pages. "She's obsessed only about reflecting the aspirations of a certain class of reader", she says. "We once had a piece about breast cancer which started with an airline stewardess, but she wouldn't have a stewardess in the magazine so we had to go and look for a high-flying businesswoman who'd had cancer."
Her remarks about obesity have caused controversy on more than one occasion. In 2005, Wintour was heavily criticised by the New York chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance after Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley said on The Oprah Winfrey Show, at one point, Wintour demanded he lose weight. "Most of the Vogue girls are so thin, tremendously thin", he said, "because Miss Anna don't like fat people." In 2009, residents of Minneapolis took umbrage after she told 60 Minutes she could "only kindly describe most of the people I saw as little houses." They noted their city had been named the third fittest in the nation that year by Men's Fitness while New York had been named the fifth fattest.
Complaints about her role as fashion éminence grise are dismissed by those familiar with how she actually exercises it. "She's honest. She tells you what she thinks. Yes is yes and no is no", according to designer Karl Lagerfeld. "She's not too pushy", agrees François-Henri Pinault, chief executive officer of Kering, Gucci's parent company. "She lets you know it's not a problem if you can't do something she wants." Defenders also point out she continued supporting Gucci despite her strong belief Kering should not have let Tom Ford go. Designers such as Alice Roi and Isabel Toledo have flourished without indulging Wintour or Vogue. Her willingness to throw her weight around has helped keep Vogue independent despite its heavy reliance on advertising dollars. Wintour was the only fashion editor who refused to follow an Armani ultimatum to feature more of its clothes in the magazine's editorial pages, although she has also admitted if she has to choose between two dresses, one by an advertiser and the other not, she will choose the former every time. "Commercial is not a dirty word to me."
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Dating & Relationship Status
Anna Wintour was married to David Shaffer from 1984 until their divorce in 1999. She has two children, Charles and Katherine. Since her divorce, Wintour has maintained a private life, focusing primarily on her career and family.
Her father, Charles Wintour, who was editor of the London-based Evening Standard from 1959 to 1976, consulted with her on how to make the newspaper relevant to the youth of the era. She became interested in fashion as a teenager and her career in fashion journalism began at two British magazines. Later, she moved to the United States, with stints at New York and House & Garden. She returned to London and was the editor of British Vogue between 1985 and 1987. A year later, she assumed control of the franchise's magazine in New York, reviving what many saw as a stagnating publication. Her use of the magazine to shape the fashion industry has been the subject of debate within it. Animal rights activists have attacked her for promoting fur, while other critics have charged her with using the magazine to promote elitist and unattainable views of femininity and beauty.
Her parents were married in 1940 and divorced in 1979. Wintour was named after her maternal grandmother, Anna Baker (née Gilkyson), a merchant's daughter from Pennsylvania. Audrey Slaughter, a magazine editor who founded publications including Honey and Petticoat, was her stepmother.
Wintour's grandfather was Major-General Fitzgerald Wintour, a British military officer and descendant of George Grenville, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Through her paternal grandmother, Alice Jane Blanche Foster, Wintour is a great-great-great-granddaughter of the late-18th-century novelist Lady Elizabeth Foster, who was later the Duchess of Devonshire, and her first husband, the Irish politician John Thomas Foster. Her great-great-great-great-grandfather was Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, who served as the Anglican Bishop of Derry. Sir Augustus Vere Foster, 4th Baronet, the last Baronet of that name, was a granduncle of Wintour's. She is a niece of Cordelia James, Baroness James of Rusholme, the daughter of Fitzgerald Wintour.
Wintour attended North London Collegiate School, where she frequently rebelled against the dress code by taking up the hemlines of her skirts. At the age of 14, she began wearing her hair in a bob. She developed an interest in fashion as a regular viewer of Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go!, and from reading Seventeen, which her grandmother sent from the United States. "Growing up in London in the '60s, you'd have to have had Irving Penn's sack over your head not to know something extraordinary was happening in fashion", she recalled. Her father regularly consulted her when he was considering ideas for increasing readership in the youth market.
"I think my father really decided for me that I should work in fashion", she recalled in The September Issue. He arranged for his daughter's first job, at the influential Biba boutique, when she was 15. The next year, she left North London Collegiate and began a training program at Harrods. At her parents' behest, she also took fashion classes at a nearby school. Soon she gave them up, saying, "You either know fashion or you don't." An older boyfriend, Richard Neville, gave her her first experience of magazine production at his popular and controversial Oz.
In 1970, when Harper's Bazaar UK merged with Queen to become Harper's & Queen, Wintour was hired as one of its first editorial assistants, beginning her career in fashion journalism. She told her co-workers that she wanted to edit Vogue. While there, she discovered model Annabel Hodin, a former North London classmate. Her connections helped her secure locations for innovative shoots by Helmut Newton, Jim Lee and other trend-setting photographers. One recreated the works of Renoir and Manet using models in go-go boots. After chronic disagreements with her rival, Min Hogg, she quit and moved to New York with her boyfriend, freelance journalist Jon Bradshaw.
In her new home, she became a junior fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar in New York City in 1975. Wintour's innovative shoots led editor Tony Mazzola to fire her after nine months. She was reportedly introduced to Bob Marley by one of Bradshaw's friends, and disappeared with him for a week; in a 2017 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, she said she had never actually met the reggae legend, but certainly would have "hooked up" with him if she had. A few months later, Bradshaw helped her get her first position as a fashion editor, at Viva, a women's adult magazine started by Kathy Keeton, then the wife of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. She has rarely discussed working there, due to that connection. This was the first job at which she was able to hire a personal assistant, which began her reputation as a demanding and difficult boss.
In late 1978, Guccione shut down the unprofitable magazine. Wintour decided to take some time off from work. She broke up with Bradshaw and began a relationship with French record producer Michel Esteban, for two years dividing her time with him between Paris and New York. She returned to work in 1980, succeeding Elsa Klensch as fashion editor for a new women's magazine named Savvy. It sought to appeal to career-conscious professional women who spent their own money, the readers Wintour would later target at Vogue.
She went to work at Vogue when Alex Liberman, who was then the editorial director for Condé Nast and publisher of Vogue, talked to Wintour about a position there in 1983. She eventually accepted after a bidding war that doubled her salary, becoming the magazine's first creative director, a position with vaguely defined responsibilities. Her changes to the magazine were often made without Mirabella's knowledge, causing friction among the staff. She began dating child psychiatrist David Shaffer, an older acquaintance from London. They married in 1984.
In 2009, Wintour began making more media appearances. On a 60 Minutes profile, she said she would not retire. "To me, this is a really interesting time to be in this position and I think it would be in a way irresponsible not to put my best foot forward and lead us into a different time." A documentary film, The September Issue, by The War Room producer R.J. Cutler, about the production of the September 2007 issue, was released in September. It focused on the sometimes-difficult relationship between Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington. Wintour appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote it, defending the relevance of fashion in a tough economy. The American Society of Magazine Editors elected her to its Hall of Fame in 2010.
Wintour began dating well-connected older men during her teens. She was briefly involved with novelist Piers Paul Read when she was 15 and he was 24. In her later teens, she dated gossip columnist Nigel Dempster and the two became a fixture on the London club circuit.
According to biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, her ubiquitous sunglasses are actually corrective lenses, since she has deteriorating vision as her father did. A former colleague he interviewed recalls trying on her Wayfarers in her absence and getting dizzy. "I think at this point they've become, you know, really armour", Wintour herself told 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer, explaining that they allow her to keep her reactions to a show private. As she rebounded from the end of her marriage and the turnover in the magazine's editorial staff, a fellow editor and friend noted that "she's not hiding behind her glasses anymore. Now she's having fun again."
Wintour is often described as emotionally distant by those who have come to know her well, even her close friends. "At some stage in her career, Anna Wintour stopped being Anna Wintour and became 'Anna Wintour,' at which point, like wings of a stately home, she closed off large sections of her personality to the public", wrote The Guardian. "I think she enjoys not being completely approachable. Just her office is very intimidating. You have to walk about a mile into the office before you get to her desk and I'm sure it's intentional", Coddington says. "I don't find her to be accessible to people she doesn't need to be accessible to", agrees Vogue publisher Tom Florio. She has said she admired her father Charles, known as "Chilly Charlie" for being "inscrutable". Former coworkers told Oppenheimer of a similar aloofness on her part. But she is also known for volatile outbursts of displeasure, and the widely used "Nuclear Wintour" sobriquet is a result of both. She dislikes it enough to have asked The New York Times not to use it. "There are times I get quite angry", she admitted in The September Issue.
In the 2000s, her relationship with Bryan was credited with softening her personality at work. "Even when she's in a bad mood, she has a different posture [...] is that she's so much more mellow and easier to work for", someone described as a "Wintour watcher" told The New York Observer in 2000.
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| Husband | David Shaffer (m. 1984-1999) Shelby Bryan (m. 2004-2020) |
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Net Worth and Salary
As of recent estimates, Anna Wintour's net worth is approximately $50 million, primarily earned through her high-profile positions at Vogue and Condé Nast. Her salary is not publicly disclosed, but it is undoubtedly substantial given her influential role in the global fashion industry.
Betts was one of several longtime editors to leave Vogue around the new millennium. A year later, Sykes, another putative successor, left to concentrate on her best-selling novels set in the city's upper classes and a screenplay. A number of other editors also left to assume the top jobs at other publications. While some of their replacements did not last, a new group of core editors formed. The September 2004 issue was 832 pages, the largest issue of a monthly magazine ever published at that time, since exceeded by the September 2007 issue Cutler's documentary covered. Wintour oversaw the introduction of three spinoffs: Teen Vogue, Vogue Living and Men's Vogue. Teen Vogue has published more ad pages and earned more advertiser revenue than either Elle Girl and Cosmo Girl, and the 164 ad pages in the début issue of Men's Vogue were the most for a first issue in Condé Nast history. AdAge named her "Editor of the Year" for this brand expansion.
Her salary was reported to be $2 million a year in 2005. In addition, she receives several perks, such as a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz S-Class (both in New York and abroad), a $200,000 shopping allowance, and the Coco Chanel Suite at the Hotel Ritz Paris while attending European fashion shows. Condé Nast president Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr. had the company make her an interest-free $1.6 million loan to purchase her townhouse in Greenwich Village.
On one occasion she had to pay for her treatment of employees. In 2004, a court ruled that she and Shaffer were to pay $104,403, and Wintour herself an additional $32,639, to settle a lawsuit brought against them by the New York State Workers' Compensation Board. They had failed to pay the $140,000 judgement against them by a former employee of theirs (not the magazine) injured on the job, who did not have the necessary insurance coverage.
Career, Business, and Investments
Wintour's career spans multiple roles:
- Early Career: She began her journey at Harper's Bazaar and later became the fashion editor at New York magazine.
- Vogue and Condé Nast: Rising to Creative Director of Vogue America in 1983, she then became Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue in 1986. In 1988, she took over as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue U.S., transforming it into a global fashion powerhouse. In 2013, she was appointed Artistic Director of Condé Nast, and in 2020, she became the Global Chief Content Officer.
- Investments and Ventures: While specific investments are not detailed, her influence extends to various fashion ventures and collaborations through her role at Condé Nast.
The following year, she became fashion editor of New York. There, the fashion spreads and photo shoots she had been putting together for years finally began attracting attention. Editor Edward Kosner sometimes bent very strict rules for her and let her work on other sections of the magazine. She learned through her work on a cover involving Rachel Ward how effectively celebrity covers sold copies. "Anna saw the celebrity thing coming before everyone else did", Grace Coddington said three decades later. A former colleague arranged for an interview with Vogue editor Grace Mirabella that ended when Wintour told Mirabella she wanted her job.
In 1985, Wintour attained her first editorship, taking over the UK edition of Vogue after Beatrix Miller retired. Once in charge, she replaced many of the staff and exerted far more control over the magazine than any previous editor had, earning the nickname "Nuclear Wintour" in the process. Those editors who were retained began to refer to the period as "The Wintour of Our Discontent". Her changes moved the magazine from its traditional eccentricity to a direction more in line with the American magazine. Wintour's ideal reader was the same woman Savvy had tried to reach. "There's a new kind of woman out there", she told the Evening Standard. "She's interested in business and money. She doesn't have time to shop anymore. She wants to know what and why and where and how."
In 1987, Wintour returned to New York City to take over House & Garden. Its circulation had long lagged behind rival Architectural Digest, and Condé Nast hoped she could improve it. Again, she made radical changes to staff and look, canceling $2 million worth of photo spreads and articles in her first week. She put so much fashion in photo spreads that it became known as "House & Garment", and enough celebrities that it was referred to as "Vanity Chair" within the industry. These changes worsened the magazine's problems. When the title was shortened to just HG, many longtime subscribers thought they were getting a new magazine and put it aside for the real thing to arrive. Most of those subscriptions were eventually canceled and, while some fashion advertisers came over, most of the magazine's traditional advertisers pulled out. Ten months later, she became editor of U.S. Vogue. Industry insiders worried that under Mirabella, the magazine was losing ground to the recently-introduced American edition of Elle. Prior to her appointment as editor of Vogue, Eve Pollard had offered Wintour the position of editor-in-chief at Elle.
Under her editorship, the magazine renewed its focus on fashion and returned to the prominence it had held under Vreeland. Vogue held its position as market leader against three contenders: Elle; Harper's Bazaar, which had lured away Liz Tilberis, Wintour's most prominent deputy, and Mirabella, a magazine Rupert Murdoch created for Wintour's fired predecessor. Her most serious competitor was within the company: Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair and later The New Yorker.
In 2013, Condé Nast announced she would be taking on the position of artistic director for the company's magazines while remaining at Vogue. She assumed some of the responsibilities of Si Newhouse, the company's longtime chairman, who, in his mid-80s at the time, was retreating from his role at Condé Nast to oversee managing Advance Publications, its parent company. A company spokesman told The New York Times the position was created to keep Wintour. She described it as "an extension of what I am doing, but on a broader scale."
In 2020, Condé Nast promoted Wintour to the role of worldwide chief content officer, as part of a company restructuring. In addition, she will be working as global editorial director of Vogue.
Through the years, she has come to be regarded as one of the most powerful people in fashion, setting trends and anointing new designers. Industry publicists often hear "Do you want me to go to Anna with this?" when they have differences with her subordinates. The Guardian has called her the "unofficial mayoress" of New York City. She has encouraged fashion houses such as Christian Dior to hire younger, fresher designers such as John Galliano. Her influence extends outside fashion. She persuaded Donald Trump to let Marc Jacobs use a ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a show when Jacobs and his partner were short of cash. In 2006, she persuaded Brooks Brothers to hire the relatively unknown Thom Browne. A protégée at Vogue, Plum Sykes, became a successful novelist, drawing her settings from New York's fashionable élite.
Because of her position, Wintour's wardrobe is often closely scrutinised and imitated. Earlier in her career, she mixed fashionable t-shirts and vests with designer jeans. When she started at Vogue as creative director, she switched to Chanel suits with miniskirts. She continued to wear them during both pregnancies, opening the skirts slightly in back and keeping her jacket on to cover up. Wintour was listed as "one of the 50 best-dressed over 50s" by The Guardian in March 2013. Aside from sporting Chanel suits with midiskirts, she has also been seen wearing kitten heels & printed midi-dresses.
That opinion of the film has not yet led her to forgive Weisberger. When it was reported that the novelist's editor told her to start her third novel over, Wintour's spokesman suggested she "should get a job as someone else's assistant."
Peter Braunstein, a former Women's Wear Daily media reporter convicted of sexually assaulting a coworker, allegedly planned to kill Wintour because of perceived slights. After receiving only one ticket to the 2002 Vogue Fashion Awards, which he perceived as a snub, his anger cost him his job.
She has "lost count" of the times she has been physically attacked by activists. In Paris in October 2005, she was hit with a tofu pie while waiting to get into the Chloé show. On another occasion, an activist dumped a dead raccoon on her plate at a restaurant; she told the waiter to remove it. She and Vogue publisher Ron Galotti once retaliated for a protest outside the Condé Nast offices during the company's annual Christmas party by sending down a plate of roast beef.
Her defenders have called criticism sexist. "Powerful women in the media always get inspected more thoroughly than their male counterparts", said The New York Times in a piece about Wintour shortly after The Devil Wears Prada release. When Wintour took over at Vogue, gossip columnist Liz Smith reported rumours she had gotten the job through an affair with Si Newhouse. A reportedly furious Wintour made her anger the subject of one of her first staff meetings; she still complained about the allegation when accepting a media award in 2002.
Social Network
Anna Wintour maintains a professional presence on social media platforms, primarily through her association with Vogue. However, she is not known for a personal social media presence. Her influence is felt more through her editorial work and public appearances at fashion events.
After making sweeping changes in staff, Wintour changed the style of the cover pictures. Mirabella had preferred tight head shots of well-known models in studios; Wintour's covers showed more of the body and were taken outside, like those Diana Vreeland had done years earlier. She used less well-known models, and mixed inexpensive clothes with high fashion: the first issue she was in charge of, November 1988, featured a Peter Lindbergh photograph of 19-year-old Michaela Bercu in a $50 pair of faded jeans and a bejeweled T-shirt by Christian Lacroix worth $10,000. It was the first time a Vogue cover model had worn jeans; when the printer saw it they called the magazine's offices, thinking it was the wrong image.
Her control over the text is less certain. Her staff claim she reads everything written for publication, but former editor Richard Story has claimed she rarely, if ever, reads any of Vogue's arts coverage or book reviews. Earlier in her career, she often left writing of the text that accompanied her layouts to others; former coworkers claim she has minimal skills in that area. Today, she writes little for the magazine save the monthly editor's letter. She reportedly has three full-time assistants but sometimes surprises callers by answering the phone herself.
Wintour was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. However, 2008 was a particularly difficult year for Vogue, partially as a result of the Great Recession, but also related to several controversies. The April issue's cover image of LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen brought criticism for its evocation of racial stereotypes. The next month, a lavish Karl Lagerfeld gown she wore to the Met's Costume Institute Gala was called "the worst fashion faux pas of 2008". In the fall, Vogue Living was suspended indefinitely, and Men's Vogue cut back to two issues a year as an outsert or supplement to the women's magazine. At the end of the year, December's cover highlighted a disparaging comment Jennifer Aniston made about Angelina Jolie, to the former's displeasure; media observers began speculating that Wintour had lost her touch. In 2008, rumours arose that she would retire, and be replaced by French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. An editor at Russian GQ reportedly introduced Russian Vogue editor Aliona Doletskaya as the next editor of American Vogue. Condé Nast responded by taking out a two-page ad in The New York Times defending Wintour's record. In that same publication, Cathy Horyn later wrote that while Wintour had not lost her touch, the magazine had become "stale and predictable", as a reader had recently complained. "To read Vogue in recent years is to wonder about the peculiar fascination for the 'villa in Tuscany' story", Horyn added. The magazine also dealt awkwardly with the recession, she commented.
But since then, "Wintour isn't just redeemed. She's openly admired, Arctic chill and all." The grievances reflected in the novel and film "[seem] like an increasingly petty complaint when held up against a readership that remains well into the seven figures and the undisputed edge in ad sales that comes with it. Wintour is seemingly the only person on earth who knows how to run a steady print operation in 2016 ... At 10 years old, Miranda Priestley is iconic but ever-so-slightly out of date. Anna Wintour is still the boss..."
Wintour serves as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she has organised benefits that have raised $50 million for the museum's Costume Institute. She began the CFDA/Vogue Fund in order to encourage, support and mentor unknown fashion designers. She has also raised over $10 million for AIDS charities since 1990, by organising various high-profile benefits.
Newspapers and gossip columnists claimed that Wintour's affair with investor Shelby Bryan ended her marriage to Shaffer. She declined to comment. A former colleague quoted in the Observer said that Bryan "mellowed her" and that she "smiles now and has been seen to laugh".
Lauren Weisberger, a former Wintour assistant who left Vogue for Departures along with Richard Story, wrote The Devil Wears Prada after a writing workshop he suggested she take. It was eagerly anticipated for its supposed insider portrait of Wintour prior to its publication. Wintour told The New York Times, "I always enjoy a great piece of fiction. I haven't decided whether I am going to read it or not." While it has been suggested that the fashion magazine setting and Miranda Priestly character were based on Vogue and Wintour, Weisberger claims she drew not only from her own experiences but those of her friends as well. Wintour herself makes a cameo appearance near the end of the book, where it is said she and Miranda dislike each other.
Kate Betts, who had been fired by Harper's after two years during which staffers said she tried too hard to emulate Wintour, reviewed it harshly in The New York Times Book Review: "Having worked at Vogue myself for eight years and having been mentored by Anna Wintour, I have to say Weisberger could have learned a few things in the year she sold her soul to the devil of fashion for $32,500. She had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly."
"I think she has been very rude to a lot of people in the past, on her way up – very terse", a friend told The Observer. "She doesn't do small talk. She is never going to be friends with her assistant." Junior staff at Vogue are said to understand, through unwritten rules, that they should not initiate interactions with her; it has been said that they are discouraged from riding an elevator with her, and if they do, should not speak to her, though Wintour has called this an exaggeration. In a 1999 profile, journalist Kevin Gray observed that one staffer appeared "panic stricken" when she realised she would have to be in the elevator with Wintour. Gray also reports that another employee told him that she once saw Wintour trip in a hallway, walked past her without offering assistance, and was later told she "did the right thing."
She has often been the target of animal rights organisations like PETA, who are angered by her use of fur in Vogue, her pro-fur editorials and her refusal to run paid advertisements from animal rights organisations. Undeterred, she continues to use fur in photo spreads, saying there is always a way to wear it. "Nobody was wearing fur until she put it on the cover in the early 1990s", says Vogue co-worker Tom Florio. "She ignited the entire industry."
Giorgio Armani, who at the time was co-chairing a Met exhibition on superheroes' costumes with Wintour, drew some attention for his personal remarks. "Maybe what she thinks is a beautiful dress, I wouldn't think was a beautiful dress", he said. While he claimed he could not understand why people disliked her, saying he himself was indifferent, he expressed hope she had not made a comment once attributed to her that "the Armani era is over". He accused her of preferring French and American fashion over Italian. Geoffrey Beene, who stopped inviting Wintour to shows after she stopped writing about him, called her "a boss lady in four-wheel drive who ignores or abandons those who do not fuel her tank. As an editor, she has turned class into mass, taste into waste."
In response to criticisms like Beene's, she has defended the democratisation of what were once exclusive luxury brands. "It means more people are going to get better fashion", she told Dana Thomas. "And the more people who can have fashion, the better."
Education
Anna Wintour attended the North London Collegiate School. She did not pursue higher education in the traditional sense but learned through her early career in fashion journalism. Her hands-on experience and innate talent have been central to her success.
Wintour married child psychiatrist David Shaffer in 1984, and they had a son named Charles (born 1985) and a daughter named Katherine (born 1987) before divorcing in 1999. Charles is a graduate of the University of Oxford and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Katherine wrote occasional columns for The Daily Telegraph in 2006 and graduated from Columbia University in 2009, and is a New York-based producer with Ambassador Theatre Group. Katherine married Italian filmmaker Francesco Carrozzini, son of Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, in 2018.
Priestly has some positive qualities. Andrea Sachs, the novel's main character, notes that she makes all the magazine's key editorial decisions by herself and that she has genuine class and style.
Conclusion
Anna Wintour's career is a testament to her dedication to the fashion industry. Her leadership at Vogue and beyond has cemented her status as one of the most influential figures in media and fashion. Her net worth reflects her success, and her ongoing influence continues to shape the global fashion landscape.
