Background and career
Dame Anna Wintour (; born 3 November 1949) is a British-American media executive who served as editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1988 to 2025. Currently, Wintour serves as global chief content officer and artistic director at Condé Nast. Known for her trademark pageboy bob haircut and dark sunglasses, Wintour is regarded as one of the most powerful women in publishing, and has become an important figure in the fashion world, serving as the lead chairperson of the annual haute couture Met Gala global fashion spectacle in Manhattan since the 1990s. Wintour is praised for her skill in identifying emerging fashion trends, but has been criticised for her reportedly aloof and demanding personality. 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 took charge 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. A former personal assistant of Wintour, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the bestselling 2003 roman à clef The Devil Wears Prada, which was adapted into a 2006 film starring Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, believed to be based on Wintour. Wintour's editorship of Vogue was also featured in R. J. Cutler's 2009 documentary The September Issue.
Anna Wintour was born in Hampstead, London, to Charles Wintour (1917–1999), editor of the Evening Standard, and Eleanor "Nonie" Trego Baker (1917–1995). Her parents 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 paternal 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 had four siblings. Her older brother, Gerald, died in a traffic accident as a child. One of her younger brothers, Patrick, is also a journalist, currently diplomatic editor of The Guardian. Wintour attended North London Collegiate School, where she 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' insistence, she took fashion classes at a nearby school, but soon 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 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 shoots by Helmut Newton, Jim Lee and other fashion 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 New York City, she became a junior fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar in 1975. Wintour's shoots led editor Tony Mazzola to dismiss her after nine months. 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. In late 1978, Guccione shut down the unprofitable magazine, and Wintour decided to take some time off from work. Her relationship ended with Bradshaw and she began a relationship with French record producer Michel Esteban; for two years she divided 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. 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.
She later moved to work at Vogue when Alex Liberman, then the editorial director for Condé Nast and publisher of Vogue, talked to Wintour about a position there in 1983. She 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 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 previous editors, earning the nickname "Nuclear Wintour" in the process. Those editors who were retained called the period "The Wintour of Our Discontent". Her changes moved the magazine from its traditional eccentricity to a direction more in line with the American magazine. 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, cancelling $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 cancelled 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. After making 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, swapped in at the last minute since the skirt Bercu was originally to wear did not fit properly. In 2012, Wintour reflected on the cover:
