In 2005, two years after
The Devil Wears Prada, Oppenheimer's
Front Row: The Cool Life and Hot Times of Vogue's Editor in Chief was published. It painted a similar portrait of the real woman. According to Oppenheimer, Wintour not only declined his requests for an interview but discouraged others from talking to him.
Personality
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"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." A former assistant said, "You definitely did not ride the elevator with her." Unwritten rule imposed by Wintour at the
Vogue offices forbid junior staffers from initiating conversation with her; an editor who greeted her on the elevator was reprimanded by one of Wintour's assistants (She calls that an exaggeration)). A visiting reporter saw a junior staffer appear visibly panicked when she realized she would have to ride the elevator with Wintour. Once a junior editor saw her trip in the hallway, walked past without offering assistance, and was later told she "did
absolutely the right thing."
Even friends admit to some trepidation in her presence. "Anna happens to be a friend of mine", says Barbara Amiel, "a fact which is of absolutely no help in coping with the cold panic that grips me whenever we meet." "I know when to stop pushing her", says Coddington. "She doesn't know when to stop pushing me".
She has often been described as a perfectionist who routinely makes impossible, arbitrary demands of subordinates: "kitchen scissors at work", in the words of one commentator. She once made a junior staffer look through a photographer's trash to find a picture he had refused to give her. In a deleted scene from
The September Issue she complains about the "horrible white plastic buckets" of ice behind the bars at the CFDA's 7th on Sale AIDS benefit and moves them out of sight. "The notion that Anna would want something done 'now' and not 'shortly' is accurate", Amiel says of
The Devil Wears Prada. "Anna wants what she wants right away." A longtime assistant says, "She throws you in the water and you'll either sink or swim."
Her attitude led Peter Braunstein, the former
Women's Wear Daily media reporter later convicted of sexually assaulting a coworker, to plan her murder. After receiving only one ticket to the 2002
Vogue Fashion Awards, which he perceived as a snub, he became so angry that
WWD fired him. At his 2007 trial, prosecutors introduced as evidence a journal he kept as a computer file in which he stated his intention to kill her. "She just never talked to peons like us", he complained.
On one occasion she has 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 it incurred on behalf of a former employee injured on the job who did not have the necessary insurance coverage.
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", someone described as a "Wintour watcher" told the
New York Observer. "The consensus is that she's so much more mellow and easier to work for because she's probably getting laid."
Pro-fur stance
She has often been the target of animal rights organizations 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 organizations. Undeterred, she continues to use fur in photo spreads, saying there's always a way to wear it. "Nobody was wearing fur until she put it on the cover in the early 1990s", says Neiman Marcus Group CEO Burton Tansky. "She ignited the entire industry."
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.
Others outside of the animal-rights community have raised the fur issue. Braunstein wrote in his manifesto that she would go to a hell guarded by large rats, where it would be so warm she wouldn't need to wear fur. Pamela Anderson, in an early 2008 interview, said Wintour was the living person she most despised "because she bullies young designers and models to use and wear fur."
Elitism
Another common criticism of Wintour's editorship focuses on
Vogue's 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
WWD publisher Patrick McCarthy. "She wouldn't have dressed Babe Paley. Nor would Babe Paley have let her." By persuading designers to loan 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 wasn't selling well, by telling designers that if they continued to avoid glamour their looks would not be photographed for
Vogue. All complied.[[File:Anna Wintour 2.jpg|thumb|225px|right|Wintour (photographed by Ed Kavishe of Fashion Wire Press) often insists on being seated apart from other fashion editors at shows.|alt=A seated woman wearing a white dress, holding a coffee cup and sunglasses, looking at the camera. The surrounding seats are empty.]]Another
Vogue writer has complained that 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."
Wintour has been accused of setting herself apart even from peers. "I do not think fiction could surpass the reality", a British fashion magazine editor says of
The Devil Wears Prada. "[A]rt in this instance is only a poor imitation of life." Wintour, the editor says, routinely requests to be seated out of sight of competing editors at shows. "We spend our working lives telling people which it-bag to carry but Anna is so above the rest of us she does not even have a handbag."
Her successful request that key shows at the 2008 Milan Fashion Week be rescheduled for earlier in the week so that she and other U.S.-based editors could have time to return home before the Paris shows led to complaints. Other editors said they had to rush through the earlier shows, and lesser-known designers who had to show later were denied an important audience. Dolce & Gabbana said that Italian fashion was getting short shrift and that Milan was becoming a "circus without sense."
Giorgio Armani, who at the time was co-chairing a Met exhibition on superheroes' costumes with Wintour, drew some attention for his cutting personal remarks. "Maybe what she thinks is a beautiful dress, I wouldn't think was a beautiful dress", he said. While he claimed he couldn't understand why people disliked her, saying he himself was indifferent, he expressed hope that she hadn't 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".
Her remarks about obesity have caused controversy on more than one occasion. In 2005, Wintour was heavily criticized 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 that, 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 that 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.
Responses
Defenses of Wintour have often come from others. Amanda Fortini at
Slate said she was comfortable with Wintour's elitism since that was intrinsic to fashion:
Most of us read Vogue not with the intention of buying the wildly expensive clothes, but because doing so educates our eye and hones our taste, similar to the way eating gourmet food refines the palate. This is a pleasure enabled by Wintour's ruthless aesthetic, her refusal to participate in the democratizing tendency of most of her competitors. To deny her that privilege is to deny her readers the privilege of fantasy in the form of beautifully photographed Paris couture.
Emma Brockes sees this in Wintour herself: "[Her] unwavering ability to look as if she lives within the pages of her magazine has a sort of honesty to it, proof that, whatever one thinks about it, the lifestyle peddled by Vogue is at least physically possible."
Some friends see her purported coldness as just traditional British reserve, or shyness. Brockes says it may be mutual, "partly a reflection of how awkward people are with her, particularly women, who get preemptively chippy when faced with the prospect of meeting Fashion Incarnate." Wintour describes herself as shy, and Harry Connick Jr., who escorted her and Bee to shows in 2007, agrees. When Morley Safer asked her about complaints about her personality, she said
I have so many people here, Morley, that have worked with me for 15, 20 years, and, you know, if I'm such a bitch, they must really be a glutton for punishment because they're still here ... If one comes across sometimes as being cold or brusque, it's simply because I'm striving for the best
She has made similar statements in defense of her reported refusal to hire fat people. "It's important to me that the people that are working here, particularly in the fashion department", she says, "will present themselves in a way that makes sense to the outside world that they work at
Vogue"
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's release. When she took over at
Vogue, gossip columnist Liz Smith reported rumors that 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 it when accepting a media award in 2002.
She has been called a feminist whose changes to
Vogue have reflected, acknowledged and reinforced advances in the status of women. Reviewing Oppenheimer's book in
The Washington Monthly, managing editor Christina Larson notes that
Vogue, unlike many other women's magazines,
...doesn't play to its readership's sense of inadequacy ... Instead, it reminds women to take satisfaction, parading all manner of fineries (clothes, furniture, travel destinations) that a successful woman might buy, or at least admire. While it surely exists to sell ads ... it does so primarily by exploiting ambition, not insecurity.
Wintour, unlike Vreeland, "...shifted
Vogue's focus from the cult of beauty to the cult of the creation of beauty". To her, the focus on celebrities is a welcome development as it means that women are making the cover of
Vogue at least in part for what they have accomplished, not just how they look.
Complaints about her role as fashion
eminence 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 Karl Lagerfeld. "She's not too pushy" agrees François-Henri Pinault, chief executive officer of PPR, 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 that she continued supporting Gucci despite her strong belief PPR 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 that 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".
In response to criticisms like Beene's, she has defended the democratization 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".