The Wintour Chatter

When Anna Wintour had her first interview for a position at Vogue, Grace Mirabella, who was then the editor, asked what her dream job was. “Yours,” Wintour said. She started at the magazine in 1983 as a creative director. At the time, she reportedly believed that an editor should have a term limit of five years. Four decades after becoming the editor in chief, Wintour is, in a sense, waking up. Late last week, she announced that she would be stepping away from the editorship of American Vogue. The news broke amid the Bezos wedding and Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, among other things, and immediately made ripples. Someone who was present for Wintour’s announcement told the Daily Mail that it felt like “God stepping down from being God.”

“She is not ‘stepping down’ (as many headlines have mistakenly said), but instead shifting focus to her two global roles,” a representative from Condé Nast, Vogue’s corporate parent, wanted to make clear. Those are: chief content officer and global editorial director. “She will still be at shows, doing Met and Vogue World, etc. I imagine she will also be traveling to other markets more frequently now that she will have a bit more time to do so.” Nor is Wintour looking for a replacement. She is instead seeking a “head of editorial content” who will serve under her as a direct report. Across the company, she has oversight over almost every magazine: Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, and GQ among them. (The sole exception is The New Yorker.) “Ding dong the queen is…???” William Norwich—the novelist, fashion editor, and gossip columnist, who worked with Wintour for two spans at Vogue—emailed me. (His first book, Learning to Drive, from 1996, was inspired by his time at a New York driving school with Wintour. “Of course, she passed and got her license, and I failed,” he said.)