The Prop
"They help me see and they help me not see," Anna Wintour told the BBC's Katie Razzall in December 2024, sitting in a darkened London exhibition hall surrounded by three vast projection screens, her Chanel sunglasses firmly in place despite the near-absence of natural light. "They help me be seen and not be seen. They are a prop, I would say."
A prop. The word does a great deal of work. Props are tools of theater — deliberate choices made by performers who understand that the gap between who you are and who you appear to be is not a flaw but a strategy. For nearly four decades, Anna Wintour wielded the gap itself as an instrument of power: the signature bob, sharp enough you might cut yourself on it; the dark lenses that transformed every human interaction into a one-way mirror; the clipped, British-inflected sentences that gave nothing away while demanding everything in return. She built an empire not on transparency but on its opposite — a cultivated inscrutability so total that even the people who worked beside her for decades could not agree on whether she was an introvert or an extrovert, ruthless or merely very demanding. "I couldn't get a consensus," admitted Amy Odell, who interviewed more than 250 sources for
Anna: The Biography. The biography was written, as these things often are, without the subject's participation. Wintour declined multiple interview requests. But she seemed to give her blessing — quietly, elliptically, in the way she gave most blessings — for those in her inner circle to cooperate. The next best thing to an A.W.O.K.
That acronym — "Anna Wintour Okay" — was the internal stamp at Vogue that meant a layout, a photograph, a comma had received her approval. Nothing moved without it. Nothing, for thirty-seven years, moved without her.
By the Numbers
The Wintour Empire
37Years as editor-in-chief of American Vogue (1988–2025)
28Global Vogue editions under her editorial direction
$125M+Raised for the Met's Costume Institute as benefit chair
$31MRecord gross at the 2025 Met Gala
50M+American Vogue social media followers
$75,000Price of a single Met Gala ticket by 2025
2Damehood and Presidential Medal of Freedom (2017, 2025)
Fleet Street in the Blood
The house on Phillimore Gardens in Kensington was, by the standards of 1960s London, loud with the sound of the news. Charles Vere Wintour — known to the trade as "Chilly Charlie" — edited the Evening Standard from 1959 to 1980, and he ran it with the cold, exacting authority of a man who had come through a Victorian upbringing and a decorated war. "He came from quite a Victorian upbringing," his daughter would recall. "I'm not sure his mother ever spoke to him." He was private, inscrutable, and constitutionally incapable of vacations. The family was perpetually being dragged home from holidays — "as we would say in the U.K.," Wintour later clarified with dry precision — because some news was happening. In those days, you couldn't do email or Zooms. You had to be there. He had to be in the newsroom.
The house was full of journalists and politicians and interesting people, and the children absorbed the lesson that mattered most: the world bends toward those who show up, who decide, who refuse to be elsewhere when the story breaks. Two of Charles Wintour's five children would enter media — Anna at Vogue, her younger brother Patrick as diplomatic editor at The Guardian. Even their stepmother, Audrey Slaughter, was a pioneering magazine editor. Journalism was not a career in this family. It was weather.
Anna, born November 3, 1949, was a tomboy with no early interest in clothing. But London in the 1960s was not a city that permitted indifference to style. Miniskirts, the pill, Beatlemania — "Growing up in London in the Sixties," she would later say, "you'd have to be walking around with Irving Penn's sack over your head not to know something extraordinary was happening in fashion." She got the bob at fifteen and has changed it very little since. She frequented the same clubs as members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She was, by all accounts, magnetic and maddeningly self-assured.
Then came the school form. The career objectives box. A trivial administrative prompt that would, in retrospect, function as prophecy. "I can't remember what form it was I had to fill out," Wintour told David Remnick in September 2025. "Maybe it was an admissions thing. At the bottom it said 'career objectives' and I said 'What shall I do? How shall I fill this out?' And he said, 'Well, you write that you want to be editor of Vogue, of course.'" She was about thirteen. She wrote it in, and then she felt confident. The destination was named. The ladder had yet to be built.
The Education of a Multitasker
She dropped out of North London Collegiate in 1966 — impatient, unsentimental about academics, already orienting herself toward the only world that interested her. A job at Biba, the iconic London boutique. A training program at Harrods. Then, in 1970, a position as a fashion assistant at Harper's & Queen, the magazine where her real education began.
The conditions were Spartan. No money, no staff, no teams. You had to cover the market, go on shoots, write the captions, lay it out, go to events, go to the shows. "The original sort of multitasker," she called it, with the faintest note of pride. This was London fashion journalism in the early 1970s — artisanal, improvisational, nothing like the siloed American system she would later encounter, with its shoe editors and underwear editors and fabric editors, each guarding a narrow fief.
Five years at Harper's & Queen gave her the fluency she would later deploy like a weapon: the ability to see the whole magazine, not just a department. But five years was also long enough to hear the same question over and over — "Are you the daughter of Charles Wintour?" — and by the late seventies, she had had enough. She left for New York in 1975, taking a job as a junior fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar.
It did not last. She was fired by the editor-in-chief, who told her she was "too European." The shoot that finally drove him over the edge, she later recounted, was photographing the Paris collections on girls with Rastafarian dreadlocks — "a concept that must have been ahead of its time." She was obstinate, she wouldn't take direction, she ignored her editor's need for credits. In his eyes, she was neither commercial nor professional.
"But I think everyone should be fired once," she told Remnick, decades later, with the serene confidence of someone who has never been fired since. "It helps you get everything into proportion."
She picked herself up. She moved through a series of jobs she preferred not to recall — including a stint at Viva, a fashion magazine funded by a pornography publisher, where she had total creative freedom and zero prestige. She used the disreputable platform to develop her aesthetic without interference, studying European fashion magazines while working at a magazine sold behind counters. Sometimes the worst address is the best classroom.
Then New York magazine, under editor Ed Kosner — "a wonderful editor," she said, who "gave me free reign." It was the early 1980s, and New York was a city where artists, fashion designers, and interior decorators competed fiercely for celebrity status. Wintour exploited this. She broke away from the catalogue formula of fashion journalism, convinced decorators and artists to be photographed next to gorgeous girls. Nobody at the magazine understood what she was doing, which meant nobody could stop her.
And from there, she caught the eye of the man who would make her.
Alexander Liberman and the Condé Nast Machine
Alexander Liberman — Condé Nast's editorial director, a Russian-born polymath who had worked with Matisse and fled Paris ahead of the Nazis — was the gatekeeper to the most powerful magazine jobs in the world. He was, in Wintour's telling, "a wonderful figure, my mentor and my boss for many years." He was also the man who, surveying her work at New York magazine, invited her into the Condé Nast orbit: first as creative director of American Vogue in 1983, then as editor-in-chief of British Vogue in 1985.
Liberman had a habit of telling stories about the old days — how the editors would go to Jones Beach in the afternoons because there wasn't that much to do. "Can you imagine that, David?" Wintour asked Remnick, genuinely incredulous. She could not. She was not a Jones Beach person.
At British Vogue, she lasted just over a year, long enough to make sweeping changes and enemies in equal measure. Gossip about her abounded in London. Rival editors told stories about her willfulness, her ignorance of Britain, her alleged profligacy. Private Eye, the satirical magazine, devoted its nastiest column to her contract details: 80,000 pounds a year, rental of a house, a car with full-time chauffeur, a nanny for her infant son Charles, plus two return airfares a month on Concorde to visit her husband David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia. The September 1986 issue was late for the first time in twenty-five years, and the gossips crowed.
But circulation went up. British Vogue increased its readership under her, and the Condé Nast brass noticed. In 1987, she was moved to House & Garden — which she controversially relaunched as HG — a posting many believed was a staging ground for the job she had wanted since she was thirteen.
Ten months later, in 1988, she replaced Grace Mirabella as editor-in-chief of American Vogue. It was one of the stormiest transitions in fashion magazine history.
Mass with Class
The move came three years after the American launch of the French magazine Elle, which had been consistently threatening to reduce Vogue's circulation and advertising revenue. The challenge was existential in the way that challenges to legacy brands always are: not a single catastrophic blow but a steady erosion of relevance, a creeping sense that the world had moved and the magazine had not.
Wintour's first cover made a declaration. A street shot — the Israeli model Michaela Bercu in a bejeweled Christian Lacroix jacket, paired with faded jeans. It was a rupture. No studio. No heavy makeup. No couture-only purity. The cover announced, with the force of a manifesto, that Vogue under Wintour would be something different: aspirational but not airless, glamorous but grounded in the way women actually dressed.
"Mass with class — that's my mantra," she explained. The phrase is deceptively simple. It encodes a commercial philosophy that would govern her entire tenure: the democratization of aspiration. Vogue would no longer speak exclusively to women who could buy couture. It would speak to the women listening to Madonna.
And Madonna herself would be on the cover. In May 1989, just a year into Wintour's tenure, she made what Amy Odell later called "an edgy" decision to feature the pop star — controversial, divisive, a figure whom the old Vogue establishment viewed as vulgar. Wintour liked to tell the story of a straitlaced gentleman she sat next to on a plane, who asked what she did. When she told him, he said, "Vogue means to me Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, never Madonna." And that, Wintour said, made her think: time to change.
Mass with class — that's my mantra.
The celebrity cover became her signature innovation. Before Wintour, Vogue covers featured models almost exclusively. Under her direction, prominent women — Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton — replaced the anonymous beauties. This was not merely an aesthetic shift. It was a business strategy of extraordinary consequence: celebrities sold magazines to people who didn't normally buy fashion magazines, broadening the audience while deepening the cultural authority of the brand. The model ceased to be the message. The message became the person wearing the clothes.
The Kingmaker's Court
Power in fashion operates on a principle that Anna Wintour understood intuitively: it accrues not to those who design but to those who decide what is seen. A designer can make a beautiful dress. An editor can make a designer.
She was instrumental in bolstering the careers of the 1990s generation of supermodels. She secured financial backing for John Galliano's fledgling eponymous Paris fashion house — a move that helped in his elevation, in 1997, to designer-in-chief at
Christian Dior. Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs also benefited from Wintour's patronage. In 2007, after an introduction by Wintour, the menswear designer Thom Browne successfully launched his collection into ninety Brooks Brothers stores. The mechanism was always the same: a recommendation here, a phone call there, a quiet word with the right person at the right conglomerate. She advised the CEOs of Kering and LVMH on designer appointments. She chaired regular breakfasts with the executives of Neiman Marcus to discuss the season's most important trends.
"I kind of call her the chairman or president of the fashion industry," said Bob Sauerberg, then CEO of Condé Nast. "She plays a role and advises everybody, including us. Yes, she's our creative head, but she's also a terrific business person."
In 2003, she and the Council of Fashion Designers of America jointly inaugurated the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, offering financial support and business mentoring to "the next generation" of American fashion designers. The fund was not charity. It was infrastructure — a pipeline of new talent that would keep the industry, and Vogue's position within it, replenished.
The relationship was symbiotic but asymmetric. Designers needed her more than she needed any one of them. A single Vogue cover could launch a career; a sustained absence from its pages could end one. She operated, in the language of network theory, as a hub — the node through which all other connections had to pass. And she guarded that position with the attention to detail of someone who understood that power is maintained not through grand gestures but through the accumulation of small, daily decisions about who gets access, who gets seen, who gets the call back.
The First Monday in May
The Met Gala began in 1948 as a midnight supper organized by Eleanor Lambert — the fashion publicist who had also launched New York Fashion Week — and Dorothy Shaver, president of Lord & Taylor. Tickets cost $50. Guests were fashion industry insiders and Manhattan's society set. Entertainment included skits, raffles, and a pageant during which models wore historical costumes from the Costume Institute's collection. It was, in the taxonomy of New York parties, genteel.
Diana Vreeland — the legendary Vogue editor-in-chief from 1963 to 1971 — transformed it after becoming the Costume Institute's special consultant in 1972. She moved the event to the Met itself, matched the party's theme to the exhibition's, introduced opulent decor, and pumped theme-related perfume into the galleries. Vreeland's guest list expanded to include Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, and Cher. Under her stewardship, the gala became a glamorous, exclusive affair. But it remained, essentially, a party for the fashion world.
Wintour became chair in 1995 and understood immediately what the event could become if its guest list were redrawn. She opened the doors to actors, athletes, politicians, musicians, social media influencers — anyone whose presence would generate the one thing more valuable than ticket revenue: attention. She personally approved every guest. She oversaw every detail. She instituted rules: no selfies once inside, no social media except during the red carpet, no guests under eighteen. She hired famous performers — Florence and the Machine, Kanye West, Lenny Kravitz, Lizzo. Four celebrities were selected each year to serve as co-hosts alongside her.
The results were staggering. Ticket prices rose from $50 in 1948 to $75,000 by 2025, and $350,000 for a table. The 2024 gala raised nearly $26 million. The 2025 gala broke that record, grossing $31 million. Over the course of her stewardship, Wintour raised approximately $125 million for the Costume Institute — enough, in 2014, for the Metropolitan Museum to rename the entire space the Anna Wintour Costume Center. "Anna Wintour's extraordinary advocacy and fundraising have made this state-of-the-art space a reality," said Met Chairman Daniel Brodsky. "She has the rare ability to rally diverse groups across a wide range of industries."
The gala became, in the words that inevitably accrued, "the Oscars of the East Coast." But that description missed something essential. The Oscars are a ceremony that honors work already done. The Met Gala, under Wintour, became a ceremony that
created the cultural moment it purported to celebrate. The red carpet
was the show.
Rihanna's 16-foot embroidered cape by Guo Pei in 2015, Billy Porter arriving on a litter carried by six shirtless attendants in 2019,
Lady Gaga making four outfit changes as she walked up the steps — these were not fashion choices but performances, and Wintour was both the director and the producer.
It's a fundraiser first and foremost. But it has become a moment that starts a conversation about fashion and culture, and the time we're in.
"The only thing about the Met that I wish hadn't happened is that it's turned into a costume party," designer Tom Ford said. "That used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn't have to look like the 18th century, you didn't have to dress like a hamburger." But Wintour loved the over-the-top looks. "It's that English part of her," one planner observed. "She loves a dress-up."
She also loved the control. Former Met Gala planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff described Wintour as "militant" during the party each year. "Where is everybody? It's time. Where are they? Can you tell me where they are?" The Vogue staff knew. Every guest had a prearranged arrival time. Her people knew what cars they'd arrive in, if they'd left the house, what they'd be wearing, and if they'd broken a zipper along the way that needed to be fixed.
At dinner, Wintour noticed every detail. When Kim Kardashian wore a custom latex Thierry Mugler dress in 2019, Wintour kept saying to Lisa Love, Vogue's West Coast director, "Can you please tell her to sit down?" Love had to explain that, actually, Kardashian physically could not sit.
The Partnership with Grace
Grace Coddington — born in 1941 on the Welsh island of Anglesey, a place so remote she had to order Vogue from the local store and it sometimes didn't arrive — launched her career as a model in London's swinging Sixties after winning a Vogue modelling competition at eighteen. Two years later, a horrific car accident cost her an eyelid and required two years of reconstructive surgery. Undeterred, she rebuilt her modelling career, became one of the most prominent models of the decade, and then — always looking forward — transitioned to fashion editing at British Vogue under editor-in-chief Beatrix Miller.
Wintour recruited Coddington as creative director when she took over American Vogue in 1988. "She was a huge celebrity in that world, an incredible beauty," Wintour said. "I was in awe of her." The partnership would last more than twenty-five years and produce some of the most celebrated fashion photography in the history of the medium.
Their working relationship was, by the evidence of R.J. Cutler's 2009 documentary The September Issue, a study in productive friction. Wintour, decisive and commercial; Coddington, romantic and artistically uncompromising. Wintour would cut a Coddington spread to make room for a celebrity; Coddington would push back, sometimes winning, often not, always persisting. "With her halo of flaming, untamed hair, her mobile features and her comfortable clothing," wrote NPR's Jeannette Catsoulis, Coddington was "a real human being in a sea of expressionless, immaculate drones."
The dynamic was not merely personal but structural: Wintour understood that creative excellence required someone whose sensibility differed from her own, whose instincts pulled toward beauty for its own sake rather than commercial calculation. Every great editor needs a Grace Coddington — someone whose loyalty is ultimately to the work, not the institution. Coddington stepped back from her full-time role in 2016, becoming creative director at large, but the imprint of her collaboration with Wintour remains etched into the visual DNA of American Vogue.
The Devil and the Caricature
In 2004, Lauren Weisberger — who had once worked as one of Wintour's assistants — published The Devil Wears Prada, a novel about the comic travails of a personal assistant to a tyrannical fashion magazine editor named Miranda Priestly. The character was widely believed to be a caricature of Wintour. The 2006 film adaptation, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, became a cultural phenomenon.
"Well, I went to the première wearing Prada," Wintour told Remnick in September 2025, "completely having no idea what the film was going to be about." The fashion industry, she recalled, was "very sweetly concerned" for her, worried it would paint her in a difficult, cartoonish light. But it was Meryl Streep. It had humor. It had wit. "And, in the end, I thought it was a fair shot."
The film did something curious to Wintour's public identity. It simultaneously reinforced the myth of the ice queen and made that myth entertaining, even aspirational. Miranda Priestly — with her whispered commands, her devastating efficiency, her ability to reduce a room to silence with a glance — became a figure of fascination for a culture that was beginning to celebrate, rather than pathologize, female ambition. The caricature became the brand.
Wintour, characteristically, declined to fight it. She absorbed it. She showed up to the première in Prada and let the image do its work. "People couldn't agree on many things about her," Odell wrote, "including whether she's an introvert or an extrovert, ruthless or just very demanding." The ambiguity was not a failure of perception. It was the product.
The Digital Reckoning
By 2017, Condé Nast had lost more than $120 million. Graydon Carter departed Vanity Fair after twenty-five years. Si Newhouse — the Medici-like benefactor who had bought the company in 1959 as a surprise anniversary present for his wife, who loved Vogue, paying $5 million for the entire portfolio — died at eighty-nine. Members of the old guard attending his memorial at Jazz at Lincoln Center couldn't help but notice they were also attending a funeral for the glory days of the company.
Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr. had been the patron saint of a particular vision of magazine publishing: lavish, unapologetic, indifferent to profitability. He spent half a million dollars on a single cover shoot of famous actresses. He poured $100 million into the launch of Portfolio, a business magazine, in 2007 — timing that, just before the Great Recession, helped seal its fate within two years. He never questioned whether the magazines should make money. He wanted them to make culture.
Wintour survived his death and the company's subsequent restructuring through a combination of institutional indispensability and strategic adaptation. In 2013, she was named artistic director of Condé Nast — a role the New York Times described as "an in-house consultant for troubled or dated magazines." In 2020, she was elevated to global chief content officer, overseeing all Condé Nast content except The New Yorker. She absorbed responsibility the way she absorbed the Devil Wears Prada caricature: without visible effort, without explanation.
"The print magazine is the runway show for Vogue," she told New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman in 2019, sitting in her twenty-fifth-floor office at One World Trade Center — the corporate, sterile neighborhood she hated, far from the Times Square headquarters that had offered the ability to pop out for afternoon Broadway matinees. She meant that the physical magazine was now the showpiece of Vogue the brand, which included a $100,000-a-year membership program, "Go Ask Anna" videos on YouTube, twenty-eight different Vogue.coms producing daily content around the world, and social media accounts with a collective reach she described as "immeasurable."
"Vogue is the biggest influencer of them all," she said.
The line is not boast but diagnosis. In a world where Instagram and TikTok had democratized the means of glamour production — where anyone with an iPhone could perform the status fantasies that Condé Nast had once monopolized — Wintour's insight was that the brand's value lay not in its ability to distribute images but in its ability to consecrate them. A TikTok creator could dress like a Vogue cover. Only Vogue could make the cover.
Reckoning and [Resilience](/mental-models/resilience)
In June 2020, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and a broader reckoning with racial diversity in media, Wintour sent an email to Vogue staffers that constituted, by her standards, an extraordinary admission. "I want to say this especially to the Black members of our team — I can only imagine what these days have been like," she wrote. "I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes."
The email arrived in the same week that Adam Rapoport, editor-in-chief of fellow Condé Nast title Bon Appétit, resigned amid allegations of discrimination against people of color. "Just a reminder that this isn't solely a BA problem," tweeted former Bon Appétit photographer Alex Lau. "This is a Condé Nast problem. Blame Roger Moore, blame Anna Wintour, blame all of the people in Condé corporate that you've never heard of."
The criticism was pointed and, in many ways, just. It took Wintour thirty years to hire a Black photographer to shoot the cover of
Vogue — and it was
Beyoncé who made that happen, selecting Tyler Mitchell for her September 2018 cover. The contradiction at the heart of Wintour's legacy is not subtle: the woman who democratized
Vogue's aesthetic, who put Madonna and Hillary Clinton on the cover, who insisted that fashion "doesn't exist in a vacuum," presided for decades over a publication whose internal culture did not reflect the diversity of the world it claimed to document.
She did not resign. She did not deflect blame. She absorbed the criticism as she absorbed everything else — silently, without public anguish, with a promise to do better that was, in its brevity, either admirably unsentimental or insufficiently contrite, depending on your reading. The sunglasses stayed on.
Succession
On the morning after Labor Day, September 2, 2025, Anna Wintour gathered her staff and, with a sense of occasion and pride, handed over the job.
The new head of editorial content — the title "editor-in-chief" was retired, a gesture whose symbolism was either humility or the final assertion that no one could truly replace her — was Chloe Malle. Thirty-nine years old. The daughter of actress Candice Bergen and the late French director Louis Malle. A Brown graduate. A mother of two young children. She had joined Vogue as social editor in 2011, moved to contributing editor in 2016, and became editor of Vogue.com in 2023. She co-hosted the Vogue podcast "The Run-Through." She was, by every measure, an insider — but the kind of insider Wintour valued: one who could see the institution from a slight angle.
"She understands a newsroom," Wintour said of Malle. "She understands immediacy. She understands culture. She understands completely that fashion doesn't exist in a vacuum, that it's a result of many different forces — whether it's something that might be happening in music, or a film, or politically — and wants to put it into a kind of context."
There was also a story about dogs. "The story that she thought of, called 'Dogue' — I mean, it went through the roof with our numbers. It was so much fun just to look at all those crazy dogs dressed up with earrings and beautiful collars. Celebrities from all over the world were sending their dogs." Wintour's delight in this anecdote — her evident pleasure at something that was simultaneously absurd and commercially successful — revealed more about her editorial philosophy than any mission statement.
Malle, for her part, was clear-eyed about the arrangement's strangeness. "The truth is that no one's going to replace Anna," she told the New York Times. Both women acknowledged the oddity: Wintour was not leaving her physical office. She retained two enormous jobs. The successor was down the hall. "I absolutely don't think she'll be trying to edit to please me," Wintour insisted. "She's very much her own person."
I am always more interested in looking forward than looking back. I do think sometimes we spend too much time on nostalgia.
When Remnick asked if she had ever thought about leaving — a year, a moment when she said, enough — her answer was unequivocal. "Actually, no, David, because I love what I do." She paused. She described her father's house, full of journalists, the excitement of it, the sense that you were always at the center of something that mattered. "I find that today just as exciting and just as interesting."
And when he asked about writing a memoir, her refusal was absolute. "Never. I don't think I'm that interesting." Remnick objected. She dismissed the objection. "The past is done, and I can't rewrite it."
The Runway Show at One World Trade
In her conversation with Remnick, Wintour described print as something "collectible" — a word that reframes the medium not as a communications channel but as an object, a thing you hold and keep. "It has to represent a news-breaking moment. You need a reason to put somebody on the cover. It has to feel more important, more substantial, and separate from the day-to-day." Print, she said, is Vogue's runway show. If you think about how many people actually go to a Louis Vuitton fashion show — between four and eight hundred people — but then it goes out to millions, instantly, on livestream. Print has that same responsibility.
It is a beautiful metaphor and also, perhaps, a rationalization. But it contains a genuine insight about the economics of attention in an age of infinite content: scarcity creates value, and the physical magazine, by virtue of its limitations — its cost, its lead time, its finite pages — becomes more precious precisely as its medium declines. Fewer issues, Malle signaled, centered around themes or cultural events rather than months. The collectible as business model.
There is something almost architectural about Wintour's career — the way each phase built on the previous one, each role absorbed into the next, the titles accumulating like floors in a tower until, at seventy-five, she occupied a position that had no precedent and no obvious successor: chief content officer of Condé Nast, global editorial director of twenty-eight Vogue editions, chair of the Met Gala, recipient of a Damehood and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, her name literally inscribed on the wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
On the morning of her announcement, she joked to the staff: "And it goes without saying that I plan to remain Vogue's tennis and theatre editor in perpetuity."
She wakes at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. She reads the papers — all the English papers and the Times. She walks through Washington Square Park, where she sees "a very interesting slice of life." She goes to the gym. She runs back. She goes to the office. And then the day starts.
Her grandfather ran for Harvard. She was always being encouraged to run, to go into serious training. "But I didn't take that path," she said. "It was the Sixties in London. So I took another path, many other paths."
The sunglasses stay on. The bob stays sharp. The day starts.
