Wintour Wednesdays: "She Was Fashionably Emaciated"

Welcome to Wintour Wednesdays, our peek inside the unauthorized biography Front Row—Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue’s Editor in Chief by Jerry Oppenheimer. Is Wintour’s glacial demeanor affected or genuine? How did she develop her affinity for fashion? And how many decades has she had that haircut, anyway? Let’s find out!

The opening chapters delve into Wintour’s childhood. (I’ll spare you the details about her parents’ college years.) Still, a handful of anecdotes foreshadow the current content of Vogue. Not that her adolescent choices should necessarily be held against her—if that’s how the world worked, I’d be permanently ostracized from polite society on account of a purple satin dress from eleventh grade—but in these instances, plus ça change…

For instance, there is early evidence of her antipathy toward aging:

Anna scoffed at [her teachers], whispered about them, joked that they were so doddering she was absolutely certain their men had been killed in the Boer War. Anna had already developed a thing about age and would later use it as both a creative tool and a weapon when she became a fashion editor.

Delightful! Plus, teenage Anna had already learned to suffer for fashion:

At fourteen, stick-thin Anna watched her diet obsessively, mostly by not eating. Her school lunch usually consisted of a Granny Smith apple. [Her friend Vivienne] Lasky’s mother, a former model, was worried about Anna’s health and thought she was too bony, though Anna felt she was fashionably emaciated… “Anna only ate if it was something special,” says Lasky. “She always has had terrific self-control.” [boldface mine]

Next week: Wintour gets her professional start! Why fashion? “Anna hated badly dressed people.”

Comments

[sara]

I have terrific self-control too, I never buy Vogue!
Andre Leon Talley does however amuse me.

[Jessica M.]

I love the picture chosen for this series. She only ate if it was something special? That's so funny!
My friend once picked up a dieting/lifestyle book from maybe 60 years ago at a book sale and used to read out loud from it for entertainment. There was an excerpt in there from a woman who said that whenever she felt really hungry, she would just take a run outside and "sit in a field and think." I wonder if A.W. ever had to stoop to such tactics.