Amy Odell

'Fascinating' Sunday Times 'Deeply sourced and rich with anecdotes' The Times 'Like a nonfiction version of The Devil Wears Prada' Elizabeth Day 'Odell's extensive reporting dredges up a wealth of delightful details' New York Times This definitive biography of Anna Wintour chronicles the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would, with singular and legendary focus, become the most powerful woman in media. As a child, Anna Wintour was a tomboy with no apparent interest in clothing but, seduced by the miniskirts and bob haircuts of swinging 1960s London, she grew into a fashion-obsessed teenager. Her father, the influential editor of the Evening Standard, loomed large in her life, and once he decided she should become editor in chief of Vogue, she never looked back. Impatient to start her career, she left high school and got a job at a fashionable boutique in London - an experience that would be the first of many defeats. Undeterred, she found work in the competitive world of magazines, eventually moving to New York. Before long, Anna's journey to Vogue became a battle to ascend, no matter who or what stood in her way. Once she was crowned editor in chief - in one of the stormiest transitions in fashion magazine history - she continued the fight to retain her enviable position, ultimately rising to dominate all of Condé Nast. Based on extensive interviews with Anna Wintour's closest friends and collaborators, including some of the biggest names in fashion, journalist Amy Odell has crafted the most revealing portrait of Wintour ever published. Weaving Anna's personal story into a larger narrative about the hierarchical dynamics of the fashion industry and the complex world of Condé Nast, Anna charts the relentless ambition of the woman who would become an icon.

The Biography

Anna

Sebastian Stockmarr

In a joint interview almost twenty years later, Charles teased his daughter about that day. "Having spent two hours wondering what you wore to a demo, I heard her patter down the steps, turn, and run up again.

I opened the door and she said: 'Daddy, am I for or against Cambodia?' I think things have changed.

But it would have been hard to let Anna go. Her fashion pages were valuable real estate against which to place ads, and also gave the magazine currency in the world of New York media. Editors at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar looked at Viva just to see what Anna was doing. Anna was also protected by the same person as Keeton-Bob Guccione.

At that point, Vivienne Lasky was also living in New York, and she once asked Anna how she could stand working for Guccione, whether he was as gross as some people said. "She thought he was sort of interesting," Lasky remembered. Said Bob Jr., "Anna was not squeamish about it. That wouldn't be politically savvy."

Anna's earliest Vogue colleagues use words like "cordial" and "professional" and "polite" to describe her first days at the magazine under Mirabella. Though her stint as creative director has been characterized as a reign of terror, not everyone who was there saw it that way. First of all, she was hardly reigning and therefore could hardly terrorize. Vogue had been running solidly under Mirabella and Liberman for nearly a dozen years by the time she showed up to work at 350 Madison Avenue. Mirabella's staff was loyal to Mirabella, both because they liked her and because it would be unwise not to be. Second, Anna exacted her influence with subtlety and manners.

All of this was in line with Anna's determination to place fashion within the context of culture, in order to push fashion onto a higher plane of significance, the same way she sought to elevate herself. "Developing a creative eye or developing taste, I think that's something that you have within you from a very early age but it is also something that you can develop through exposure to culture, to the arts, through reading, visiting museums, looking at what's going on in the world around you," she said.

"Creative exposure, cultural exposure, I think [it] is so important to spend as much time on that as you possibly can."

Anna wasn't necessarily a tech-oriented person at that point. (Joe Dolce, a features editor, sent an email to the entire staff on his first day in 1994 to introduce himself, only to receive a fax from Anna from Europe that said, "Joe, this is Vogue. We don't email. It's so impersonal.") Still, from the beginning of the 

"When can Vogue go online?" she'd ask. "It's starting to get embarrassing that 

 is not online. Why aren't we online?" But Feeney knew that she would be unhappy with the technology. "The images will look like the dog's dinner," she said. "You'll be embarrassed by anything we can do."

In fashion, Anna was queen. But at work, she was merely a subject in the Kingdom of Si Newhouse. And what an incredible place that kingdom was. In the nineties, it was lush. Employees luxuriated in Big Apple town cars and business class airplane tickets and fivestar hotel rooms and $29 hamburgers. The vast majority couldn't afford this stuff on their own, making them serfs with corporate credit cards.

Initially, Anna and Galotti seemed to align. The September 1994 issue of Vogue was an homage to glamour, meant to obliterate the grunge trend — the same one that had helped submarine Doppelt's Mademoiselle.

"The granny slip dress with sneakers is too difficult," Anna told the New York Times. "And no makeup and dirty hair is not what the Leonard Lauders of the world want to see," referring to the president of Estée Lauder, one of her key advertisers.

"From a purely business standpoint, the waif thing affected us across the board," Galotti added. "Retailers weren't moving product, designers were trying to identify themselves with grunge, the waif look and absence of color and shape, and there's not a lot you can sell people. If you can't sell it, you can't advertise it."

But according to Grace Coddington, Anna mainly wanted to kill grunge simply because she didn't like it.

"I had just been on a trip to Minnesota where I can only kindly describe most of the people that I saw as little houses." She continued, "I just felt like there's such an epidemic of obesity in the United States. And for some reason everyone focuses on anorexia. ... We need to spend money, time, and education on teaching people to eat, exercise, and take care of themselves in a healthier way."

Anna quotes

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