On Thursday, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour sent shock waves through the media world when the style icon announced that she was stepping away from the role after more than three decades running the fashion bible – with an iron fist.
“Power for her was what it was all about. Power’s Anna’s aphrodisiac,” a magazine staffer told author Jerry Oppenheimer for his 2005 book “Front Row: Anna Wintour,” a tell-all on what it was like being in Wintour’s orbit.
Winter, 73, famously inspired Meryl Streep’s ice queen lead in the “Devil Wears Prada,” and those who’ve worked with her say the portrayal was accurate. In “Anna: The Biography,” author Amy Odell writes of Wintour requiring her three assistants to do everything from handling her pets to organizing her clothes.
One former editor who worked under Wintour recalled the expectation that she would be in heels, not flats, when the boss was on the floor.
She also remembered that it was understood that Wintour only let the prettiest assistants work the Met Gala.
Merle Ginsberg, a longtime fashion writer and former editor for Women’s Wear Daily, W Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar, among others, recalled first meeting Wintour during an interview for a senior editor job at Vogue back in the 90s, when she was working at W.
A friend at Vogue had helped get her the interview, and gave Ginsberg strict advice on what to wear, telling her she should don “a matching dress and coat – with no stockings, Anna hates stockings – and Manolos.”
Ginsbreg followed her instructions, but the interview didn’t go well.
“[I] was really shaking when I went up there. I recall her desk was far away from where I was sitting – like ‘Devil Wears Prada.’ First question: ‘Why should I hire you if Patrick McCarthy at W will hate Me?’” Ginsberg recalled. “She never looked me in the eye.”
Then, Wintour asked her to pitch some stories. Ginsberg started to offer up ideas, but they weren’t received well.
“She stopped me [and said], ‘Vogue is a supermarket magazine, these ideas are far too exalted,” Ginsberg said. Not surprisingly, she didn’t get the job, and, she said, Wintour told her then-boss McCarthy that she’d applied.
“[I] could not believe that,” Ginsburg added.
A former staffer at Lucky magazine, which shuttered in 2015, recalled an entirely different but similarly cold interaction with Wintour.
After a meeting at Lucky, Wintour walked off, forgetting to take her wallet.
“Someone yelled out that she had left it,” the source told The Post. “Anna stopped and held her hand out behind her without turning around. One of my coworkers ran to put it in her hand, and Anna just kept walking,”
Over the years, a lore developed around Wintour and her peculiarities. She reportedly has a hairdresser come to her home to blow out her perfect bob every morning at 6 a.m. She has a penchant for leaving her sunglasses on. She hates the color black and loves fellow Brits, such as good friend Sienna Miller and restaurateur Keith McNally.
In Oppenheimer’s “Front Row,” Laurie Schechter — who started as Wintour’s assistant at Vogue and became style editor — describes her former boss as “very mercurial,” noting “She’s a lot like fashion — short skirts this season, long skirts next. She can be a bit like that with people, too.”
Schechter claims she lost out on some top magazine jobs because of Wintour’s advice.
“Anna knew about my capabilities, and if you’re a potential threat to her, competition to her, she’s not going to help you do a better job at competing with her,” Schecter, who eventually left Conde Nast, told Oppenheimer in his book.
The author also writes of Wintour’s “horrific treatment” of creative staff fashion editors Liz Tilberis and Grace Coddington. during her time as the Editor-in-Chief at British Vogue.
“[They] believed Anna was out to get them,” Oppenheimer writes in his book. “Anna constantly demanded that Coddington take reshoots, sometimes three times before Anna signed off. When Coddington was forced to turn in a Polaroid to Anna before the actual shoot took place, Anna would only brusquely respond, ‘Like it,’ or ‘don’t like it.’ And if the latter, everything had to be reshot.”
While Coddington had decades of experience, Oppenheimer notes that Wintour treated her “like a lowly intern and even scolded her if she was at lunch and a few minutes late returning to the office.”
Wintour has a taste for blood — not just when it comes to office politics.
In a viral TikTok video, celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian described how she would come into the Lambs Club for lunch every day and have a cappuccino; a “very rare,” heavily salted hamburger patty, sans bun; and a small pot of ultra-buttery Robuchon mashed potatoes.
“She would obliterate the entire thing in 15 minutes,” Zakarian says in the post.
Other restaurant folk have less fond recollections of her.
In his book “Your Table Is Ready,” Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, the former maître d’ at a number of top NYC restaurants, writes that Wintour was “absolutely horrid,” and would “march in with no reservation and demand a table,” at Raoul’s in Soho. She would then order a steak “very rare” and requested it be served immediately.
“God forbid it was the least bit overcooked. She’d look at the server as though he’d just served her rat and have it sent back and redone,” he writes. “You’d think the raw meat would make her less sanguine.”
In 2022, he recalled to The Post that Wintour once showed up a Raoul’s and insisted on sitting in the back room, even though they were closing that section for the night.
“We had to keep a waiter there and give her her own waiter. Boy, was that waitress pissed,” Cecchi-Azzolinat said. “Boy, was that waitress pissed.”
The Post has reached out to Wintour and Conde Nast for comment.
For those who could deal with Anna’s demands, the rewards could be great.
“I knew a few of her assistants. I have to say, she gave them all promotions if they worked hard,” Ginsberg said.
While Wintour is shifting her focus, she’s in no way retiring. She will remain on as Conde Nast’s global chief content officer and Vogue’s global editorial director. The magazine will hire a head of editorial content who will report to her.
Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The Daily Beast, told The Post that she anticipates Wintour will be quite involved in Vogue’s pages.
“Being queen of the glamosphere never stopped Anna working harder than anyone I know,” she said. “She earned every bit of her success and I suspect as the overall Conde content director she will never fully cede her dominion over Vogue.”
