Wintour Wednesdays: "Don't They Ever Look in the Mirror?"

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!

Wintour’s first job in fashion was as a shop girl at the trendy London chain Biba—a gig arranged by her influential father. What better job for someone so intensely aggrieved by crimes against fashion?

“Anna hated badly dressed people,” recalls [her friend Vivienne] Lasky. “We’d sit on Bond Street having tea at some trendy place and she’d comment on all the people. She was very judgmental. Everybody had to be perfect. She criticized their clothes. ‘How can people go out like that? Don’t they ever look in the mirror?’”

Shortly thereafter, on a trip to New York to explore potential fashion industry work, Wintour bunked with her mother’s cousin, who had once been Redbook’s fiction editor. Surely this was a meeting of the magazine minds? Not so much! Her relative recalls:

As it turned out, the magazine editor and the future magazine editor didn’t bond. “We had no connections over the fact of magazines,” she says. “Anna’s interest was solely fashion, and I was totally uninterested in fashion, so we really did not have a lot in common. I was interested in literature, writing, she was interested in clothing. It was fashion that eventually led Anna to magazines, not an interest in magazines.”

Wintour isn’t interested in writing? Well, that certainly explains Plum Sykes’ continued presence in Vogue.

Next week: Anna lands a job at Harper’s Bazaar, where a fellow editor soon discovers Wintour is “sometimes terrifying.” You think?

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