The end of Anna Wintour’s 37-year run as editor in chief of Vogue was a lot less dramatic than its beginning. Back in 1988, magazines ruled fashion, anointing people and decreeing trends, and it was a cloistered world of high drama and higher expense accounts. When Ms. Wintour was chosen to replace the legendary editor, Grace Mirabella, it was a scandal — Ms. Mirabella learned she was fired from her husband, who called after he saw it on the evening news.
But when Ms. Wintour announced on June 26 that she was relinquishing the role, it felt more like a corporate governance move than a revolution that will shake the entire industry she has ruled over for decades now. For one thing, she retains her job as Vogue’s global editorial director, and will stay on as chief content officer for Condé Nast. It was less her retiring than the retiring of a once-imperial, no longer so powerful title: editor in chief.
Ms. Wintour will appoint a head of editorial content in her stead. That definitely sounds a lot less glamorous. What well-connected, well-brought-up young person, as Ms. Wintour was — her father was a respected editor of The London Evening Standard — dreams of being head of editorial content someday?
But this was many decades before everything once rarefied got flattened into digital imagery suitable to view on your phone and became just “content.” When Ms. Wintour started out, she was styling outfits, selecting photographers and flying off to help create impossibly gorgeous fantasies for the magazine’s pages. Now low-level Vogue jobs include “community manager,” which demands the “ability to generate multiple revenue streams driven from content.” And “commerce marketing editor,” the “ideal candidate” being one who “enjoys analyzing traffic and conversion results as much as they do creating content.”
The idea that a job at Vogue — even as an assistant with duties that have included printing fliers for Ms. Wintour’s missing dog and fetching her Starbucks lattes — was one “any girl would kill for” has faded during her reign. Now, Condé Nast’s former 4 Times Square headquarters is home to TikTok. The Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria still stands, but without the magic of the days when young editors might bump into exotic fashion legends like Grace Coddington at the salad bar.
Yes, there are still front rows to sit in, parties to attend. But the day to day of the job is overseeing a tangle of revenue and content streams. These include social media channels, a podcast, YouTube, a website and a print magazine. The staff, once a menagerie of international nepo babies, is now largely unionized. The glory of dominating the newsstand with a carefully photographed and chosen subject has been replaced by views, followers and amorphous online “impressions.” The idea that an Anna Wintour can dictate taste — who and what are “in” or “out” — remember the scene in “The Devil Wears Prada” where the character she inspired, Miranda Priestly, lectures her assistant saying, “It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”
That seems wildly dated. Thanks to massive interest in the Met Gala, a physical manifestation of who and what clothes are and aren’t “Vogue,” Ms. Wintour has retained her gate-keeping prowess somewhat, but it’s unclear her successor will have (or will want to have) that same power.
Ms. Wintour and her trademark bob already feel like a relic. But Anna Wintour was always more than her job. She became famous herself, with friends ranging from Colman Domingo and Bradley Cooper to Donatella Versace and Miuccia Prada. She was never some algorithm trying to give us more of what it thinks we want, or something driven by A.I. She was a person who judged and decided based on her own haughty sense of what was the best.
Whoever takes her place will not shape culture or tastes the same way her Vogue did. It’s a version of Vogue that many will not miss, one that was slow to move on from prizing thinness and whiteness and a Eurocentric ideal of beauty according to Ms. Wintour’s exacting vision for many years.
If Ms. Wintour were starting her career today, with a famous last name, a healthy financial cushion and a designer wardrobe, it’s easy to imagine her dreaming of starting a company, like Phoebe Gates. Maybe it would be a tech startup, or a beauty brand, or a sunglasses line. Maybe she’d become a podcaster and TikTok influencer. She surely wouldn’t be in her bedroom pouring over slide shows of products to buy on Vogue.com, dreaming of driving conversions.
There’s a sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada” in development at Disney, which will reportedly depict Ms. Priestly managing her magazine’s decline in the digital era. To be honest, that doesn’t sound like much fun. Ms. Wintour edited the story her own way.
Amy Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter as well as “Anna: The Biography” and a forthcoming biography of Gwyneth Paltrow.
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