Glossed Over

Wintour Wednesdays, Thursday Edition: "Fashion, That's All She Thought About"

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!

Well, if there’s one lesson to be gleaned from Anna Wintour’s climb to the top of the corporate ladder, it’s that it never pays to stay in a job where you’re not appreciated,

Says former Harpers & Queen fashion editor Min Hogg:

“She had a degree of ambition that must eat away at her heart all the time. Fashion was her absolute world, and she did know more about it than me, so she just didn’t know how to deal with having someone like me over her. Fashion, that’s all she thought about, and she didn’t like anyone who didn’t—in other words, me.”

After a dramatic clash during the shows in Paris, Anna left the magazine—and the country. In New York, she took a junior fashion editor position at Bazaar. Enduring numerous disputes with the editorial director and rumors of her affairs with the photographers she hired for Bazaar’s shoots, Anna was let go after about nine months on staff. This is how she explained it:

“It was for the couture,” she said, “and the editor in chief had a breakdown because I had used models with dreadlocks. You know, it wasn’t a blonde American look!”

Well, she’s certainly mastered the blonde American thing now, hasn’t she?

Next week: Anna does time at Penthouse’s sister publication Viva.

Wintour Wednesdays: "I Didn't Think She Had That Human Element"

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!

In January 1970, Wintour became a fashion assistant at Harper’s & Queen, where she quickly demonstrated her innate ability to run a leading magazine.

She had incredible ambition:

“There were other girls who were more talented, who had amazing taste and were chic, but didn’t have that incredible drive that Anna had—like a businessman who is really successful, who only looks in one direction and goes for it. Anna had that—this total conviction that she was aiming for the top job.”

Empathy for those less fortunate than she was:

Because she couldn’t afford private care, [co-worker Jillie] Murphy was treated in one of Britain’s National Health hospitals, the kind of public institution someone of Anna’s social standing would never have seen the inside of. “She was curious, not only to see how I was, but to see what a National Health hospital was like,” says Murphy. “I’ll never forget. She said, ‘It’s like real life.’ I didn’t think she had that human element.”

Formidable skill relating to co-workers:

“Anna couldn’t express her thoughts about fashion,” adds [editor and art director Willie] Landels. “We had a subeditor who said to me, ‘That fucking Anna Wintour! She’s given me this folder and I don’t know what to write because she doesn’t tell me anything.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be unkind about Anna. One day she will be our boss.’”

And a way of inspiring others to be their best:

..,the other girl was “sweet,” but that Anna “absolutely” beat her down and literally drove her out of the magazine. [Literally, eh?—Ed.] Anna didn’t fear competition from her but rather was disgusted by her weakness, which brought out the bully in her.

Next week: Anna climbs the Harper’s & Queen ladder, despite her lack of a first name ending in -ie and her way of being “incredibly spoiled, very flirtatious and slightly naughty, and enormously secretive.”

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?

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.”

Wintour Wednesdays: "She Doesn't Really Like Women"

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 book’s prologue immediately tackles a burning question: exactly how far removed from reality was The Devil Wears Prada? Turns out, not very much. Author Oppenheimer opens with a glance at a woman on her way to a job interview with Vogue, wearing the Wintour-mandated high heels and bare legs in the dead of winter.

It’s known among the fashion world cognoscenti that Anna is prone to hire based on dress and looks, let alone spike stories if someone is not photogenic enough for her. “If we’re talking about fashion editors, on the whole it’s important to me that they have a sense of style,” she’s intoned. And on the editorial side... “after a few months they will end up looking like Vogue. It just rubs off that way.” As a Vogue editor who knows and abides by Anna’s rules notes, “People who work here have to look a certain way. If somebody hasn’t changed their appearance within six months…something isn’t going right.”

While Wintour appears to be inflexible about her appearance standards, she’s certainly malleable when it comes to intimidation! The interviewing candidate explains:

 “Anna was very, very cool and contradicted everything I said. She would ask me questions and I would answer in the most intelligent way I could, and then she would contradict me. For instance, she said, ‘What would you do in the music section?’ I said something about ‘going very upscale.’ And she said, ‘We’re a populist magazine.’ [Ha!—Ed.] She asked me what I’d do with another section, and I told her I thought that deserved a populist view. She said, ‘We’re an upscale magazine.’ She just didn’t want me to win.”

Of course, our candidate could reassure herself—it wasn’t personal. According to her:

“The thing is, she doesn’t really like women, which is certainly curious for the editor of the world’s most influential fashion magazine for women.”

Curious, sure, but woefully evident in the pages of Vogue.

Next week: Anna’s childhood forays into fashion include modifying her school uniform (ooh, rebellious) and eschewing athletics lest strenuous exercise render her legs misshapen.

Working Girl Wednesdays: A Retrospective

At last, we’ve wrapped up our journey to the world of working women in 1964. Sure, Sex and the Office was rather ridiculous, but it was also delivered a healthy dose of perspective. Aren’t you glad to live in an era where sexual harassment laws exist and women don’t have to justify working outside the home?

Here’s a brief review of the many lessons Helen Gurley Brown imparted. Hey, you never know when you’ll have a chance to time travel!

• How to love a boss—even if that boss is (gasp!) female! (The advice on how to, ahem, love a boss comes later.)

• Why showing generous amounts of cleavage is a savvy negotiation strategy

• The best way to manage a 16-step makeup regimen—for work

• Why “a retarded beginning” is, in fact, a good thing

• Flattery will get you everywhere

• Guaranteed conversational techniques to land a job without ever discussing your career

• Lunch breaks are so complex they require three whole chapters encompassing food, sex, and even more sex

• Drinking alcohol at work is completely justifiable

• Bilking your company when you travel for business is easy!

• Advanced techniques for convincing men to pay your way

• There’s no excuse for rebuffing a co-worker’s advances

• Apparently, the women of the early 1960s enjoyed a beating

• Five words: “Him heap big man inside”

• How to launch a career as a real working girl

• Why women should thank their husbands for letting them hold a job

• How to pick Jewish people out of a crowd

Next week, Working Girl Wednesdays will morph into…Wintour Wednesdays. I’ll be dishing the juicy details of Anna Wintour’s life, courtesy of Jerry Oppenheimer’s biography Front Row—Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue’s Editor in Chief.

Not surprisingly, Wintour’s childhood concerns haven’t changed much. For instance, at age ten, Wintour was told she was a gifted runner who could eventually be an Olympic-level competitor. Her response: “How frightful! What on earth will happen to my legs?”

Next week: is it possible Anna Wintour has never eaten a full meal in the presence of another human being?

Working Girl Wednesdays: "An Abiding Love for Girls Who Work and All the Men Who Protect Them"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

Alas, we’ve reached the final chapter of Sex and the Office. Dubbed “The Perils of Little Helen,” it covers the personal experiences that allowed HGB to become an expert on all things work-related. For instance, she once received this bit of advice:

Mr. Paul Ziffren was also smart (he later became head of the Democratic Party in California), and he taught me several very smart things. If you want somebody to think you’re lying, for instance, just tell the truth, he said. They’ll say, “Where were you last night?” You answer, “I was so drunk I had to sleep in the back of my car.” They will then say, “Come on now, where were you really?”

Working as a secretary also taught her to deal with, er, difficult people:

Mr. Winston (which was almost his name) hated Communists, Catholics, ostentation, Roosevelt (even though the man had graciously obliged him by dying), noise of any kind before lunchtime, and Jews. He hated all these things pretty vehemently, but most of all he hated Jews. It was really kind of pathetic, because the poor darling had, incredibly, constructed a motion picture studio with many sound stages right in the heart of Hollywood, not realizing until it was built that the entertainment business was larded with his least favorite people.

…My one big problem in making good was in learning to hate Jews. I couldn’t tell who was Jewish. Mother never told me I was different. In Little Rock where I grew up everybody was too busy with lynchings and all that to get around to Jews… My roommate Barbara, who was half-Jewish, tried to help… “See my eyes,” Barbara would say. “Jewish eyes are sort of big and brown and terribly sad.”… We decided we needed outsiders to practice on, and wherever we went, Barbara would scout Jews and I would study them.

I explained to Mr. W… “My god,” he said. “My God! My own secretary in a hotbed of them! This is what comes from not having you investigated…I just never dreamed the agency would send me a…a…a Jew-lover!”

Because of my first-rate gossip perhaps, or maybe because I was mouse-quiet, Mr. W. decided to save me from the ovens.

The ovens! Ha! Because getting fired is totally comparable to the Holocaust!

Here’s yet another man you’d never want to work for:

Mr. Gross, as it turned out, didn’t put people in jars and snuff out their lights. He shell-shocked them. Though I hadn’t noticed a single gun around the place during my interview, whenever a group of us went to call on Mr. Gross we never knew whether we would be fired on by a short-barrel Luger or a Smith & Wesson revolver. “Got a new gun,” Mr. Gross would announce in the middle of a spring shade presentation. Then he would point it straight at the account executive’s head and fire. We just had to trust that he would continue to use blanks.

And finally, I reached the “About the Author” page, which includes this crucial autobiographical detail:

She is five feet four and a half inches tall, has brown hair and brown eyes, a sultry voice, a twenty-two-inch waist, an abiding love for and faith in single girls, girls who work and all the men who protect them.

Next week: a look back at the wisdom of Sex and the Office and an introduction to our next book. Is there a magazine-related book you’d like to see excerpted here? Let me know in the comments!

Working Girl Wednesdays: "The Nymphomaniac Who Owns a Liquor Store"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

This week’s chapter is entitled “Getting Into the Act—and Out,” covering the mechanics of starting an office affair and, inevitably, extricating oneself from it. If you aren’t a “child worker” (too young to be interested in co-workers) or an “abstainer” (self-explanatory), here are some of HGB’s tips for landing the dream guy in the corner office.

First, keep your expectations in check.

A grown woman should be womanly, warm and wooing, though with finesse. Prostitutes and call girls do get married (and for Pete’s sake nobody is suggesting you be one) while many child-women do not. Prostitutes are used to being with men, are comfortable with men and know how to make men happy. And they don’t demand that all men have exactly the right credentials.

Next, HGB suggests you be open to suitors who aren’t your type.

I’m not saying be nice to small men because it’s philanthropy day…I’m saying you might come across something good. Do pick out an especially nice five-foot-five or under man and say to yourself, “Him heap big man inside…me bring him coffee, him open doors for me, carry heavy files for me, drag chairs across floor for me. Pretty soon him feel nine feet tall. Me have nice man in my life.”

If dropping hankies in his office isn’t your style (remember, I’m not making this up), at least you can put yourself in the proper mindset to land a man:

Don’t fret that you are not the cool, practical beauty who can bring off these liaisons with more equanimity. Give a man a girl who enjoys sex for sex’s sake, without guilt feelings or possessive qualities, and who doesn’t care what he does between-times so long as he sees her every other Thursday, and she’ll quickly become a puzzle to him and a problem to herself. In our society that girl would have to be considered a kook. Her being a completely “sensible” biological creature would be no more desirable to him or “good” for her than her being that mythical ideal girl—the nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store. At least that’s how things stand with us twentieth century ladies right now.

I’ve never been so glad to live in the 21st century!

Next week: Twenty pages of instruction to launch your career as a call girl! Oh, this is going to be good.

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Women Like Bruises, Even Non-Cuckoo Women"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

Today’s chapter, “Three Little Bedtime Stories,” lets three different acolytes of Sex and the Office tell their sordid tales—in their own words!

From a woman who had a four-year dalliance with a married coworker who lived on the opposite coast:

If a man in your company is single, of course, you find out everything you can about him if you have to hire Pinkerton. If he’s married, you don’t go quite so all out. Perhaps Steve decided to ask me out because I had made some improvements since we first met. My psychoanalysis was all finished, I dressed and looked better at thirty-six than I had in my twenties, and I had a good female body.

From a 24-year-old secretary who had an “arrangement” with her boss:

People to whom this sort of thing never happens are usually horrified by the idea. It just isn’t that horrible if you like the man. It’s sexy to try on lingerie knowing that someone you like very much is going to see you in it. Maybe it’s even a little sexier knowing that somebody is going to pay for the lingerie…I’m sure he liked the fact that I was his quiet, sweet, efficient, demure little secretary at work and the rest of the time an adored and expensive courtesan.

And from a woman who took up with her company’s efficiency consultant:

He beat me—only across the buttocks—with perhaps ten more strokes, not terribly hard. It wasn’t wildly painful, but it did hurt. Then he stopped and made love to me, and that was great…The welts on my backside healed—after turning blue-black, then purple, then green, then yellow-chartreuse. I used to look at them fascinated. They were pretty exotic. Women like bruises, I think, even non-cuckoo women. I’ve known two girls who came to the office with black eyes (I don’t know what from), and I always got the feeling they were a little proud. Maybe bruises make a woman feel feminine and helpless. [Emphasis mine, for reasons that should be obvious]

Next week: a chapter that, at first glance, seems totally inscrutable. So here’s an exemplar sentence chosen totally at random: “Suppose you do like men, you are not a child-woman.”

Working Girl Wednesdays: "She's Not Really That Insulted by His Desire for Her"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

Ready to spend eight hours a day seducing your co-workers? In Chapter 13, “The Office Affair,” Helen Gurley Brown argues that interoffice romance is the natural order of things.

Would girls in offices stay more cold-cream pure if men didn’t tempt them? My friend Charlotte, a wow of a pretty working girl, says, “I don’t believe for one moment that girls in offices are poor little grasshoppers who are preyed on by those mean old praying mantises. A girl can say no. Just plain no.”

…Girls who are bewildered and shocked by a man’s physical interest in them seem to me a little phony too. Girls happen to have a powerful, built-in allure for men. It’s there and God gave it to us. To pretend to be outraged and petulant because a man wants us “that way” is like having the Maltese Falcon buried upstairs in a dresser drawer and acting surprised because Sam Spade and a bunch of hoodlums are milling around outside the door.

Whether a girl says yes or no to a man in the office, it’s my opinion she’s not really that insulted by his desire for her. Unless he is a real monster with one beady eye in the middle of his forehead and long green hair all over his back, I think she will remember most propositions not unkindly. Somebody wanted her. Somebody flipped.

Well, not everybody gives in to these apparently genetic urges:

One girl I know stops short of having an affair—not until she’s married, no siree—but has a trusty office friend who every few weeks squeezes the daylights out of her. Old Mike covers over to her apartment, they have a chicken sandwich, they tussle, she fights like a Zulu and nothing happens. But the physical struggle “gets a lot of it out of my system,” she says. I haven’t talked to this girl in months but I do keep tabs on the strangulations and ax murders in her city. Old Mike could lose his temper.

Next week, three true tales of daring women who had dalliances with co-workers!