Anna Season
A chat with Anna Wintour biographer Amy Odell, plus highlights from Paris Fashion Week.
In this issue:
A look at Anna Wintour’s impact on fashion and what Vogue—and fashion—will be like without her.
Thoughts on Paris fashion shows, including McQueen, Balmain, Nina Ricci and more.
Remembering style icon Iris Apfel, who died this week at 102.
Twice a year, the fashion tribe gathers in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, to attend ready-to-wear fashion shows and showroom presentations for the next season’s offerings. In the business, we refer to it as Fashion Month. But, increasingly, it feels like Anna Season.
Anna Wintour, the Vogue Global Editorial Director and Condé Nast Chief Content Officer, is the only internationally known and recognizable glossy editor in the front row of shows, usually seated next to the fashion brand’s CEO and the most famous celebrity guest. She is the only editor escorted by brand representatives backstage for meet-and-greet with the designers, before she swiftly exits out the back to a waiting car.
Last week, Anna held a press conference in Paris to announce the latest edition of Vogue World, an annual fashion extravaganza that she organizes in an international capital. This year’s edition will be staged on the Place Vendôme on June 23. Tonight, in the thick of Paris Fashion Week, she is co-hosting a fundraiser for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in a private home on the Left Bank. Tickets start at $500, and run to $10,000 apiece. She did the same for Hillary Clinton during Paris Fashion Week in 2016.
“Anna is a celebrity. She’s treated in the media like a Kardashian.”
To better understand Anna’s dominance over Fashion Month, and our culture as a whole, I rang
, author of the New York Times bestseller, Anna: The Biography, published by Gallery Books, and the popular Substack newsletter, .Let’s talk about Anna Season.
The main thing that the industry does is put on Fashion Weeks. Even though that might be dated, it’s still how the business works. Anna is the leader of the fashion industry, therefore she has influence over Fashion Weeks and scheduling. Fashion Week is shorter now in each city—London is only five days now, and Milan is six—because she wanted them shorter. She’s efficient with her time—that’s how she manages to do all the things that she does.
How does she keep up with everything?
She doesn’t sleep a lot—about six hours a night. She doesn’t drink. Rarely did.
She must attend hundreds of fashion shows a year. Do you think she ever tires of the exercise?
Totally. People talk about that—how she’s frequently bored. The playwright David Hare is one of her friends, and he said when he goes to the theater with her, and she starts crossing and uncrossing her legs, he knows she’s getting bored and she’s ready to go. I wonder if she does that at Fashion Week.
And if she’s not in her front row seat, it’s a big deal. Like last fall, when she left New York Fashion Week early to go to London to oversee the set-up of Vogue World.
Oh my God, people in New York were so upset.
Her power extends beyond running the creative side of Condé Nast, doesn’t it?
A lot happens behind the scenes that the public is not privy to. Like, when there is a designer opening, or any big job, she helps them find the right person to hire. Hollywood seeks her input, too. Bradley Cooper asked for her opinion on the script for A Star is Born. Hugh Jackman wanted her input on The Greatest Showman—she gave him feedback on who he should cast and all sorts of things. Serena Williams has sought out Anna’s advice on her wedding attire.
Are there any other editors now that have that kind of sway?
No. Anna is a celebrity. She’s treated in the media like a Kardashian.
And there’s no sign of her slowing down, much less retiring. She’s like Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to be the longest serving British monarch of all time.
When I was reporting the book, people did compare her to Queen Elizabeth. You know, Jeff Bezos ran Amazon for 27 years. Anna’s been running Vogue for 36.
Though it’s not quite as long as Edna Woolman Chase, American Vogue’s editor from 1914 to 1952—38 years, and two world wars. No doubt Anna wants to break that record, like Elizabeth II broke Queen Victoria’s. What’s Anna’s secret to longevity at Vogue and Condé Nast?
One important Condé Nast figure told me: ‘She bobbed and weaved through all the difficult times that the company has had.’ Fashion intimidates a lot of people. I wonder if that was the case for many of Condé Nast corporate executives. Like: ‘This is a big, intimidating industry, and here’s this woman who can navigate us through it.’
Could anyone ever have the same influence that she has had?
I don’t think it’s possible to have that sort of stature anymore, because magazines are not the heartbeat of culture anymore. They’re chasing the stories and the trends that are all coming from social media. Condé Nast tried to take an influencer, Margaret Zhang, and turn her into an editor—at Vogue China—and now she’s leaving. As magazines die, I predict that a collective of influencers or content creators will come together once a quarter or once a half, and make a magazine, then disband, and that’s that. I feel that’s the only sustainable model now.
Like what Katie Grand is doing with The Perfect Magazine. There’s a semi-annual physical edition, edited by Bryan “Bryanboy” Yambao; a digital platform; and a creative agency offering consulting services.
Exactly. And Vogue may become like an airline title.
Meaning there’ll be mergers and closures and bankruptcies—a stream-lining of the industry?
Yes, and you’ll be left with a handful of leading brands, like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and maybe Vogue.
It seems like you have great admiration for Anna.
I do. She’s a good business person, and she’s not thought of that way because she’s an editor. She’s very good at cultivating relationships. She ran Vogue very successfully for a long time. A very long time. And, in the business world, she hasn’t gotten her due.
Style Notes:
Style icon Iris Apfel died this week at 102. I spent Paris Fashion Week with her in early 2016, and wrote about her adventures for the New York Times. It was a hoot!
New McQueen creative director, 35-year-old Irishman Seán McGirr, tanked at his debut on Saturday night. Everyone is piling up on him. Poor chap. Hard to fill the shoes of a once-in-a-life-time, angst-driven creative titan you’ve never met. Especially one who poured his soul into everything he ever did, while you have executives howling at you to make something that will sell sell sell. As I write in my book Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, McQueen never cared about selling clothes. That’s why his designs were so genius. When I worked on the book, I was told by McQueen’s best friends that he wanted the company to close after his death. Maybe it should have. But like Hollywood, luxury fashion is too addicted to the branding/franchise business model, and keeps a company going far too long after it has topped out creatively, until all we are left with is bland, logo-covered merch.
I attended the Balmain show for clients—versus the one for press and influencers—and what a joy it was! Unlike my confreres in the media, who by the end of Anna Season are suffering from a serious bout of MEGO (you know—My Eyes Glaze Over), consider the whole folderol a slog, and run out to their waiting cars the second the designer takes a bow, the clients love being at the shows. They dress in their favorite pieces by the brand (and a lot of sparkle); they clearly don’t mind if someone else has the same look on—a fashion sisterhood, you could say; and they clap, and cheer, and linger afterward to talk with each other about which pieces they adored and what they want to buy.
At the Balmain show, I was seated next to a Texan who had flown to Paris for two days just for the show. Her favorites were the long, asymmetrical skirts made with reams of fabric gathered on the hip, and the grape prints—an homage by Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing to his hometown, the French wine capital of Bordeaux. Eventually, security politely shepherded the clients out to their cars—the media show was next—and off they sped to Restaurant Mimosa in the Hôtel de la Marine for an afterparty with champagne, very strong Margaritas, and luxury sliders. So much more festive than hanging with my overworked media brethren.
Taupe, taupe, taupe. If you look bad in taupe, you are out of luck come fall. Taupe has been the dominant color in Paris during the Fall-Winter 2024 women’s wear shows—in voluminous cashmere, ample 1980s-style tailoring with linebacker shoulders, like what Azzedine Alaïa and Claude Montana, who died last month, used to do, and trench coats. So so so many trenches.
Sometimes, taupe was mated with beige, mocha, chocolate, or black. Occasionally, the muted murk was brightened up slightly with a dash of almond green, dusty rose, or powder blue. We may be a couple of years out of the Covid-19 epidemic, but fashion is still giving us cocoon-like clothes in tones so safe and inoffensive that you wonder if anyone in the design studios has a strong opinion on anything.
That said, on some runways, transparency was back in force. Either you’re wrapped up in a soft taupe blanket, or you’re walking down the street in your lace lingerie. There’s no in between.
One of my favorite transparent looks so far this season was by Harris Reed, the British-American designer who took over the long-lost-at-sea brand Nina Ricci in 2022: a black chiffon blouse cinched with a mock-crocodile corset belt, and paired with a long black pants. Not the sort of ensemble you’d actually ever see beyond a fashion runway in these ultra-conservative times, but beautiful nonetheless.
Reed said the collection was inspired by 1962 photograph by Richard Avedon of model Suzy Parker in a Nina Ricci tweed dress with a fur-lined hood: “I wanted to explore this effortless glamour, what I would like to see women wearing on the streets of Paris today.”
The result was exactly as you’d imagine: a retro-modern look solidly rooted in the 1960s and 1970s, such as sharply cut tuxedos in black velvet, satin, and faux croc; flowing sleeveless gowns with plunging necklines; and a plum princess coat, chopped off just below the hip, and topped off with a matching veiled pillbox hat. The overall effect was early Yves Saint Laurent, which means, in our era, Tom Ford.
When I first started covering fashion in the late 1980s, former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella—who was unexpectedly replaced by Anna in 1988—said there were two sorts of fashion: the minimalism of Armani and the maximalism of Versace. I’d stay today there are three: the minimalism (or Quiet Luxury) of Armani, The Row, et al; the maximalism of Dolce & Gabbana and Balmain; and the sexiness of Gucci by Tom Ford in the 1990s, Yves Saint Laurent by Tom Ford in the early 2000s, and the Tom Ford brand after that. Mercifully, that sexiness is back at Gucci (designed by newly appointed creative director Sabato De Sarno) and Tom Ford (now led by Ford’s former assistant, Peter Hawkings), and, unexpectedly, at Nina Ricci. I suspect Reed will not be at Ricci very long, and that Kering and LVMH are already circling. He is definitely one to watch.
Loved reading this conversation between you and Amy Odell.