ANNA--say it English zahlinks, Anner-- WINTOUR
Vitals
Date of Birth
11/03/1949 (58 years old)
Place of Birth
London, England
Neighborhood
Greenwich Village
Other Residences
Mastic, NY
Vitals
Date of Birth
11/03/1949 (58 years old)
Place of Birth
London, England
Neighborhood
Greenwich Village
Other Residences
Mastic, NY
Who
The most powerful name in the world of fashion, Wintour has been the editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988.
Backstory
The famously icy editrix has been clear about her priorities ever since she dropped out of a privileged London girls' school at 16 over an argument about uniform hemlines. The daughter of "Chilly Charlie" Wintour, former editor of the Evening Standard (and credited with bequeathing to "Nuclear Wintour" her cold demeanor and steely ambition), Wintour started her editorial career in 1970 at the British magazine Harper's & Queen. By the mid-70s she'd decamped to New York, where she worked at Harper's Bazaar, the Bob Guccione-owned Viva, and a new fashion mag called Savvy before landing at New York, where she spent three years as fashion editor. After a brief stint at American Vogue, Wintour returned to London and took over as editor of British Vogue in 1986.
Anna returned to New York soon enough. In 1987, she assumed the top job at Condé Nast's House & Garden. But it was just a stepping stone: As she'd told her friends for years, the only job she really wanted was editing Vogue. A year later she got her wish when Condé Nast chief Si Newhouse pushed out Grace Mirabella and replaced her with Wintour. The transition happened in dramatic fashion: Poor Grace didn't know she'd been usurped until Liz Smith announced it on television—and Smith infuriated Wintour by suggesting that she'd slept with Newhouse to land the job.
Of note
Wintour is the reigning queen of the fashion industry, capable of anointing stars and destroying careers. Over the past 20 years, she's helped launch the careers of countless designers (Zac Posen, John Galliano, Narciso Rodriguez, Tory Burch, Thom Browne, and Marc Jacobs, just to name a few), and now as always an inclusion in Vogue remains the golden ticket to fashion stardom.
She's also used her status at the top of the fashion heap to fashion herself into a powerbroker. Many CEOs in the industry turn to her for input on their collections and wouldn't dream of making a big move—like taking on a new creative director, for example—without consulting "Anna." She convinced LVMH to hire Marc Jacobs as creative director, convinced Christian Dior to hire John Galliano, and instigated the deal between Thom Browne and Brooks Brothers. But she'll also use her influence to attend to more pedestrian matters. When a young (and cash-strapped) Marc Jacobs wanted to use the ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a fashion show, Anna called Donald Trump, who owned the Plaza at the time, and made it happen. Of course, her influence extends well beyond fashion. There's the Costume Institute gala, which she organizes every May and is the closest thing to the Oscars the East coast's got. There are the countless socialites whom she's minted by placing them front and center in the magazine—women like Marina Rust Connor, Lauren duPont, Lauren Santo Domingo, and Lisa Airan, who link up with Vogue in a perfectly symbiotic relationship: The publicity-seeking fashion plates adore the attention (and free clothes), they promote the designers who advertise, and Anna gets great photos to publish.
But the way Wintour chooses to wield her influence doesn't always go down well with her peers. Vogue's invariably favorable coverage of Georgina Chapman's label Marchesa—which was borne out of Wintour's relationship to Chapman's husband, Harvey Weinstein—earned her a stinging rebuke by the Times' Cathy Horyn in 2007. And there are few designers (such as Isabel Toledo and Alice Roi) who have managed to bypass the Vogue machine and still succeed. Yet Wintour's influence has only been on the rise as she's busily expanded the franchise. There have been a series of Vogue-related off-shoots, including Teen Vogue, Men's Vogue, and Vogue Living, which have their own editors (Amy Astley, Jay Fielden, and Hamish Bowles, respectively), all of whom report to Wintour.
Keeping score
Wintour reportedly collects $2 million a year as the editor of Vogue. Her salary doesn't begin to account for the perks that come with the job: three full-time assistants, a six-figure clothing allowance, a full-time car and driver, and a stylist who shows up at her home every morning to blow out her hair, to name just a few.
The look
Known for her eternal brown bob, Chanel sunglasses, and 100-pound frame—she was once described as "a fabulously glamorous insect"—Anna's signature look is legendary. It hasn't changed much over the years. She says she got her first bob cut at the age of 15 and has never been happy styling it any other way.
Namedrop
Si Newhouse is her boss. (Like Graydon Carter and David Remnick, she reports directly to the top.) Eddie Hayes has been her lawyer. Kate Betts was a protégée until she defected. Plum Sykes was a Vogue darling before she left to become a novelist. Paul Wilmot was once her head of PR. Brian McNally, brother of Keith McNally, was one of her first roommates when she moved to New York. Patrick McCarthy is her colleague, friend, and occasional rival. Sherrell Aston is her plastic surgeon. Jeffrey Bilhuber decorated her home. Sean Driscoll caterers some of her events, as does Serena Bass. Miho Kosuda often handles her floral arrangements. Adam Moss gave her daughter a summer internship. Just a few of the people she doesn't particularly care for: David Monn, Bonnie Fuller, James Huniford.
On the job
From her very spacious office on the 12th floor of the Condé Nast building, Wintour oversees a team of editors who do her bidding, cajole designers and deliver the occasional threat on her behalf. Grace Coddington serves as creative director and oversees the look of the magazine on a month-to-month basis. André Leon Talley, who has worked with Wintour since the very beginning, is one of her most trusted deputies; Sally Singer oversees features and fashion news. On the publishing side, Wintour works with Tom Florio, the brother of the late Steve Florio, the former CEO of Condé Nast and a longtime Wintour pal.
In person
While she's a horrifically intimidating boss—"one of the most frightening women in the world," according to Candace Bushnell—tales of her behavior on the job have been exaggerated over the years. Yes, her icy demeanor instills fear in everyone who comes within a ten-foot radius. Yes, she has a nasty temper and will crush you if you cross her. Sure, she's fired people for any number of silly reasons, and has said she'd never hire a fat person no matter how good an editor she was. And, no, stinking up the offices with a big Chinese lunch order will not earn you any points. You can, however, ride the elevator with her, although don't expect her to utter a syllable to you if you dare engage her in conversation. And you can in fact look directly at her without fear of laser beams shooting out of her eyes and striking you down.
Drama
Wintour's penchant for fur has made her PETA's No. 1 enemy. (She says she's been physically attacked so often "I've lost count.") She's had a dead raccoon dropped on her lunch plate at the Four Seasons, bloody paw prints painted on her townhouse, and a variety of different pies thrown in her face or tossed in her direction. An activist outside a Dolce & Gabbana show several years ago hit her with a "flour bomb"; in 2005, at the Chloé show at the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, a woman ran up and dumped bloody animal remains on her. Not surprisingly, when Anna shows up at an event these days, you'll find at least one well-dressed man from the Condé Nast security department standing by her side.
Wintour has occasionally retaliated: She once had a waiter deliver a plate of rare meat to protestors waiting for her outside a Vogue party at Balthazar. But the feud has created bigger headaches than the occasional stained gown. In October 2004, her former nanny was awarded $2.2 million in a settlement over the inhalation of toxic fumes. She claimed she'd been harmed by the chemicals which were used to remove the red paint that had been splattered on Wintour's front steps.
For the record
Plenty of tawdry bits about Anna's life can be found in Jerry Oppenheimer's unauthorized bio, Front Row, which was published in 2005. Grace Mirabella also dished about Wintour in her 1995 book, In and Out of Vogue. Of course, you can always read Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada for a more fictional account; the thinly-veiled story is based on the 10 months she spent as Wintour's assistant. Or you could just see the movie starring Meryl Streep (as Wintour) and Anne Hathaway (as Weisberger).
Personal
After flings with a number of men, including Brit comedian Eric Idle and—if Jerry Oppenheimer is to be believed—Bob Marley and her boss Si Newhouse, Wintour settled down with David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist, in 1984. The marriage produced two kids: Charlie Shaffer and Bee Shaffer, who's a Columbia student and social fixture.
Wintour and Shaffer's marriage crumbled in the late '90s when her affair with Texas telecom exec Shelby Bryan became public. (They met in November of 1997 when they were seated next to each other at a New York City Ballet gala.) At the time the affair was disclosed, Shelby was married, too—to Katherine Bryan, the mother of George Gurley. Both couples divorced shortly after the affair was publicly revealed, and Anna and Shelby have been together ever since. Wintour's de facto step-daughter is Alexis Bryan, a Vogue staple and now the executive fashion editor at Vanity Fair.
Habitat
Wintour lives in a townhouse on Sullivan Street that she purchased for $1.4 million in 1992. The four-story home has access to a private garden. She also has a Long Island estate, accessible only by a dirt road, near Mastic, NY. Although the home was originally built in 1850, Wintour had it completely redone and brought in designer Jeffrey Bilhuber to decorate.
Family ties
Wintour's brother, Patrick, is the political editor for The Guardian and The Observer in London. Her sister, Nora, is a human rights activist. Her brother, Jim Wintour, is a political official in England. A fourth brother, Gerald, died in a biking accident at the age of 14.
Soundbite
"She wanted to work for Interview but we didn't hire her. Maybe we should have… but I don't think she knows how to dress, she's actually a terrible dresser," wrote Andy Warhol wrote in his diary in 1981.
The most powerful name in the world of fashion, Wintour has been the editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988.
Backstory
The famously icy editrix has been clear about her priorities ever since she dropped out of a privileged London girls' school at 16 over an argument about uniform hemlines. The daughter of "Chilly Charlie" Wintour, former editor of the Evening Standard (and credited with bequeathing to "Nuclear Wintour" her cold demeanor and steely ambition), Wintour started her editorial career in 1970 at the British magazine Harper's & Queen. By the mid-70s she'd decamped to New York, where she worked at Harper's Bazaar, the Bob Guccione-owned Viva, and a new fashion mag called Savvy before landing at New York, where she spent three years as fashion editor. After a brief stint at American Vogue, Wintour returned to London and took over as editor of British Vogue in 1986.
Anna returned to New York soon enough. In 1987, she assumed the top job at Condé Nast's House & Garden. But it was just a stepping stone: As she'd told her friends for years, the only job she really wanted was editing Vogue. A year later she got her wish when Condé Nast chief Si Newhouse pushed out Grace Mirabella and replaced her with Wintour. The transition happened in dramatic fashion: Poor Grace didn't know she'd been usurped until Liz Smith announced it on television—and Smith infuriated Wintour by suggesting that she'd slept with Newhouse to land the job.
Of note
Wintour is the reigning queen of the fashion industry, capable of anointing stars and destroying careers. Over the past 20 years, she's helped launch the careers of countless designers (Zac Posen, John Galliano, Narciso Rodriguez, Tory Burch, Thom Browne, and Marc Jacobs, just to name a few), and now as always an inclusion in Vogue remains the golden ticket to fashion stardom.
She's also used her status at the top of the fashion heap to fashion herself into a powerbroker. Many CEOs in the industry turn to her for input on their collections and wouldn't dream of making a big move—like taking on a new creative director, for example—without consulting "Anna." She convinced LVMH to hire Marc Jacobs as creative director, convinced Christian Dior to hire John Galliano, and instigated the deal between Thom Browne and Brooks Brothers. But she'll also use her influence to attend to more pedestrian matters. When a young (and cash-strapped) Marc Jacobs wanted to use the ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a fashion show, Anna called Donald Trump, who owned the Plaza at the time, and made it happen. Of course, her influence extends well beyond fashion. There's the Costume Institute gala, which she organizes every May and is the closest thing to the Oscars the East coast's got. There are the countless socialites whom she's minted by placing them front and center in the magazine—women like Marina Rust Connor, Lauren duPont, Lauren Santo Domingo, and Lisa Airan, who link up with Vogue in a perfectly symbiotic relationship: The publicity-seeking fashion plates adore the attention (and free clothes), they promote the designers who advertise, and Anna gets great photos to publish.
But the way Wintour chooses to wield her influence doesn't always go down well with her peers. Vogue's invariably favorable coverage of Georgina Chapman's label Marchesa—which was borne out of Wintour's relationship to Chapman's husband, Harvey Weinstein—earned her a stinging rebuke by the Times' Cathy Horyn in 2007. And there are few designers (such as Isabel Toledo and Alice Roi) who have managed to bypass the Vogue machine and still succeed. Yet Wintour's influence has only been on the rise as she's busily expanded the franchise. There have been a series of Vogue-related off-shoots, including Teen Vogue, Men's Vogue, and Vogue Living, which have their own editors (Amy Astley, Jay Fielden, and Hamish Bowles, respectively), all of whom report to Wintour.
Keeping score
Wintour reportedly collects $2 million a year as the editor of Vogue. Her salary doesn't begin to account for the perks that come with the job: three full-time assistants, a six-figure clothing allowance, a full-time car and driver, and a stylist who shows up at her home every morning to blow out her hair, to name just a few.
The look
Known for her eternal brown bob, Chanel sunglasses, and 100-pound frame—she was once described as "a fabulously glamorous insect"—Anna's signature look is legendary. It hasn't changed much over the years. She says she got her first bob cut at the age of 15 and has never been happy styling it any other way.
Namedrop
Si Newhouse is her boss. (Like Graydon Carter and David Remnick, she reports directly to the top.) Eddie Hayes has been her lawyer. Kate Betts was a protégée until she defected. Plum Sykes was a Vogue darling before she left to become a novelist. Paul Wilmot was once her head of PR. Brian McNally, brother of Keith McNally, was one of her first roommates when she moved to New York. Patrick McCarthy is her colleague, friend, and occasional rival. Sherrell Aston is her plastic surgeon. Jeffrey Bilhuber decorated her home. Sean Driscoll caterers some of her events, as does Serena Bass. Miho Kosuda often handles her floral arrangements. Adam Moss gave her daughter a summer internship. Just a few of the people she doesn't particularly care for: David Monn, Bonnie Fuller, James Huniford.
On the job
From her very spacious office on the 12th floor of the Condé Nast building, Wintour oversees a team of editors who do her bidding, cajole designers and deliver the occasional threat on her behalf. Grace Coddington serves as creative director and oversees the look of the magazine on a month-to-month basis. André Leon Talley, who has worked with Wintour since the very beginning, is one of her most trusted deputies; Sally Singer oversees features and fashion news. On the publishing side, Wintour works with Tom Florio, the brother of the late Steve Florio, the former CEO of Condé Nast and a longtime Wintour pal.
In person
While she's a horrifically intimidating boss—"one of the most frightening women in the world," according to Candace Bushnell—tales of her behavior on the job have been exaggerated over the years. Yes, her icy demeanor instills fear in everyone who comes within a ten-foot radius. Yes, she has a nasty temper and will crush you if you cross her. Sure, she's fired people for any number of silly reasons, and has said she'd never hire a fat person no matter how good an editor she was. And, no, stinking up the offices with a big Chinese lunch order will not earn you any points. You can, however, ride the elevator with her, although don't expect her to utter a syllable to you if you dare engage her in conversation. And you can in fact look directly at her without fear of laser beams shooting out of her eyes and striking you down.
Drama
Wintour's penchant for fur has made her PETA's No. 1 enemy. (She says she's been physically attacked so often "I've lost count.") She's had a dead raccoon dropped on her lunch plate at the Four Seasons, bloody paw prints painted on her townhouse, and a variety of different pies thrown in her face or tossed in her direction. An activist outside a Dolce & Gabbana show several years ago hit her with a "flour bomb"; in 2005, at the Chloé show at the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, a woman ran up and dumped bloody animal remains on her. Not surprisingly, when Anna shows up at an event these days, you'll find at least one well-dressed man from the Condé Nast security department standing by her side.
Wintour has occasionally retaliated: She once had a waiter deliver a plate of rare meat to protestors waiting for her outside a Vogue party at Balthazar. But the feud has created bigger headaches than the occasional stained gown. In October 2004, her former nanny was awarded $2.2 million in a settlement over the inhalation of toxic fumes. She claimed she'd been harmed by the chemicals which were used to remove the red paint that had been splattered on Wintour's front steps.
For the record
Plenty of tawdry bits about Anna's life can be found in Jerry Oppenheimer's unauthorized bio, Front Row, which was published in 2005. Grace Mirabella also dished about Wintour in her 1995 book, In and Out of Vogue. Of course, you can always read Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada for a more fictional account; the thinly-veiled story is based on the 10 months she spent as Wintour's assistant. Or you could just see the movie starring Meryl Streep (as Wintour) and Anne Hathaway (as Weisberger).
Personal
After flings with a number of men, including Brit comedian Eric Idle and—if Jerry Oppenheimer is to be believed—Bob Marley and her boss Si Newhouse, Wintour settled down with David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist, in 1984. The marriage produced two kids: Charlie Shaffer and Bee Shaffer, who's a Columbia student and social fixture.
Wintour and Shaffer's marriage crumbled in the late '90s when her affair with Texas telecom exec Shelby Bryan became public. (They met in November of 1997 when they were seated next to each other at a New York City Ballet gala.) At the time the affair was disclosed, Shelby was married, too—to Katherine Bryan, the mother of George Gurley. Both couples divorced shortly after the affair was publicly revealed, and Anna and Shelby have been together ever since. Wintour's de facto step-daughter is Alexis Bryan, a Vogue staple and now the executive fashion editor at Vanity Fair.
Habitat
Wintour lives in a townhouse on Sullivan Street that she purchased for $1.4 million in 1992. The four-story home has access to a private garden. She also has a Long Island estate, accessible only by a dirt road, near Mastic, NY. Although the home was originally built in 1850, Wintour had it completely redone and brought in designer Jeffrey Bilhuber to decorate.
Family ties
Wintour's brother, Patrick, is the political editor for The Guardian and The Observer in London. Her sister, Nora, is a human rights activist. Her brother, Jim Wintour, is a political official in England. A fourth brother, Gerald, died in a biking accident at the age of 14.
Soundbite
"She wanted to work for Interview but we didn't hire her. Maybe we should have… but I don't think she knows how to dress, she's actually a terrible dresser," wrote Andy Warhol wrote in his diary in 1981.
source: city file
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