HASWith her impeccable square and her sunglasses, Anna Wintour stands straight in her heeled boots. The popess of fashion, editor-in-chief of the American edition of the magazine vogue for more than thirty years, rarely leaves its oval sunglasses. Including when, in 2018, she takes her place next to Elizabeth II during the London fashion week. Some screamed at the irreverence, but a specialist in royal etiquette assured that wearing this accessory was not a crime of lèse-majesté.
At 72, this tough boss nicknamed “Nuclear Wintour” (pun based on “nuclear winter”“nuclear winter” in English) follows a straight path which led it to be crowned, in 2017, “world’s most powerful woman in media and entertainment” by magazine Forbes. Born in London in 1949, but resolutely New Yorker, this journalist’s daughter was once expelled from her college for challenging the regulatory uniform by shortening her skirt.
She was already wearing the same hairstyle, but not yet those sunglasses whose omnipresence she explains with a transparency barely tinged with cynicism. “They are really useful to me. I can sit at a show and if I’m bored nobody will notice. They have become, really, an armour”she explained, in 2009, to the American television news magazine “60 Minutes”. “You prevent people from knowing what you think”, she said, ten years later, on CNN. For glamour, it will be necessary to iron.
austere demeanor
Her trick: pretend to move forward hidden and let others build your legend. The austere posture of Dame Wintour fits too well with the profile of Miranda Priestly, the heroine of Devil wears Prada, written by Lauren Weisberger, one of his former assistants. But even though she often ends her sentences with a ” that’s all “ definitive, like the character of the novel, Anna Wintour assures us that she does not recognize herself in this fiction which did so much for her notoriety. Simple coquetry. To a journalist who asked her what was the most false rumor concerning her, she replied: “They are all true. »
Behind her tinted glasses, the artistic director of the Condé Nast empire does not always see very clearly. She had to make amends after the broadcast, in 2011, of a particularly complacent report devoted to the wife of the Syrian dictator, Asma Al-Assad, celebrated as “Desert Rose”. More recently, Anna Wintour has been widely criticized for the publication in “one” of vogue of a photo considered too casual of the American vice-president, Kamala Harris, in sneakers and tight pants. “We have heard and understood the reactions”, she reacted, visibly exasperated, by way of a press release. She would have said that live behind her glasses, you would have felt her less annoyed.
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