Even ex-President Sarkozy looks up to Anna as she accepts the Legion d’Honneur
In which
magazines go
faster, Vogue
goes global, photo
shoots get bigger,
celebrities rule,
and Anna receives
an unexpected
Christmas present.
I am often heard grumbling about Anna. For instance, whenever I come out of the Vogue art room having discovered my photos reduced by a spread or two. Or at the end of a fashion meeting in which one of my most cherished ideas is arbitrarily dropped. Or if I’m required to shoot a difficult celebrity I’m not especially fond of. Or if I’m disallowed from shooting a model I am justifiably fond of. These are all circumstances calculated to make my blood boil, and so woe to anyone—even Anna—who stands in my way as I clomp back along the corridors to the sanctuary of my office.
If Anna doesn’t like a set of fashion photographs, they’re gone. They disappear off the board where the layouts for the current issue of the magazine first appear. She doesn’t offer up any explanation. No reshoots. You have to come up with another idea. She doesn’t like pictures that look too retro, that contain too much black, or that appear too mannered in that arty Italian Vogue way. She likes to be involved in a photo session, is pleased to be made aware of the process, and is very happy when the photographer keeps her informed about what he has in mind, although most of them are far too scared to call her.
Funnily enough, I had no idea how cantankerous and argumentative I can seem until I saw myself in The September Issue. Small surprise that in the past, Anna has said I am the only person in fashion who can actually grind her down. As the nuns who wrote my school report when I was fourteen put it, “Grace has a very nice way of getting her own will.” The truth is, although we do have an occasional fundamental disagreement about fashion, I have enormous respect for Anna both as a person and as an editor. And while I am often approached in the street as a kind of heroine of the film about Vogue, to my mind the point of it was to show the creative push and pull of the way Anna and I work together.
I remember Anna from way, way back in the early 1970s, when she was a junior fashion editor at Harpers & Queen in London. We didn’t communicate much, if ever. She wore layer upon layer of oversize baggy knitwear by the Scottish designer Bill Gibb and many other layered knitwear pieces by the fashionable Italian label Missoni. I don’t remember her face so well because she seemed to be constantly hiding it behind layers of hair, too.
After she moved to America in 1976, I would run into her over the years, and she was always very nice to me, although still with that shy little habit of ducking down behind her fringe. Then one day in New York, I received a call from the child psychiatrist Dr. David Shaffer, an old London friend who had relocated to Greenwich Village with his family but had recently separated from his wife, Serena. He said to me, “I’d really like you to meet my new girlfriend.” I joined him at the Algonquin to find him with Anna, who by then was working as an editor at New York magazine and seemed far less shy.
“Liberman likes her very much and wants to give her this job with a new title—creative director of Vogue,” David said. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s great,” I said, because it seemed to me at this point in the early eighties that American Vogue had become, in contrast to British Vogue, very bland. They were a beige and boring crowd, and I thought Anna could really help.
As time went on, I began seeing Anna running around New York with her team of tastemakers, including the high-tech architect Alan Buchsbaum and the discerning interior design expert Jacques Dehornois. And that, I think, was exactly what Liberman wanted from her. She was out and about far more than he was and could supply the magazine with up-to-the-minute information about the latest photographers, cutting-edge design talent, and all that was percolating in the fast-moving worlds of art and fashion.
The photographer Arthur Elgort has another theory. He says, “Alex was always completely overwhelmed by her legs.” (Anna is a very flirty, girly person. Whenever she speaks to women, she does so with great assertiveness, but with men she’s very seductive, even if they’re one hundred percent gay.)
David once said to me, “The great thing about Anna is she doesn’t care whether people like her or not.” I’m not so sure if this is true, but she never seems to falter when criticized. I care whether anyone—from the mailman to the dry cleaner—likes me. Maybe that is my weakness. But not Anna’s.
She does, however, care very, very much about her children. If one of them comes on the phone, I’ve watched her melt, which is not something you very often see with Anna.
A protégee of the higher-ups at Condé Nast, Anna criss-crossed the Atlantic for a while, taking over as the editor of British Vogue, then being brought in to run House & Garden in a sort of holding pattern until she took the helm at American Vogue. There, her first cover was very different. It was everything Vogue hadn’t been until then. Shot by Peter Lindbergh, it showed the Israeli model Michaela Bercu, a big blond outdoorsy girl, roaring with laughter in front of a Parisian café wearing a hugely expensive couture jacket by Christian Lacroix and a distressed pair of low-slung blue jeans. (Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele was the fashion editor here.) The cover endorsed a democratic new high/low attitude to dressing, added some youthful but sophisticated raciness, and garnished it with a dash of confident energy and drive that implied getting somewhere fast. It was quintessential Anna. And the remarkable thing is that it ran. At the time, Richard Avedon had a hefty contract with Vogue and he was really pissed. “Oh, I can do that. It’s absolutely easy,” he said when he saw the picture. Yet this type of cover was the complete opposite of his subjective, tightly controlled photographs, and all his attempts to produce something looser and more spontaneous were doomed to failure.
Avedon and Anna never got along. In the beginning, he wanted to come in to be creative director. When that didn’t happen, he approached Harper’s Bazaar with the same proposition. I heard he even knew in which corner of the office his desk should be situated. But that didn’t happen either. From then on he never missed an opportunity to say something snide about Anna and her Vogue.
Circumstances were completely different around the photographer Irving Penn, who for decades had been the magazine’s most treasured possession. Anna respected him unequivocally and treated him unlike any other photographer used by Vogue; he was afforded a kind of freedom no one else got. Three days to do one picture? Fine. Mr. Penn didn’t want to shoot that dress? Fine, too. He was given carte blanche. Mr. Penn didn’t like the girl-next-door look? Mr. Penn thought it was terrible. And he found wearable clothes tacky. He was used to couture and to producing iconic fashion pictures.
A reticent, ascetic-looking man who liked to flesh out ideas for his photos in beautifully rendered abstract sketches, Penn always found reasons, when approached with a new project, not to do it. Only Mr. Liberman, and, after a time, Anna, could persuade him to take a photograph, but even then you still got the feeling that it was against his better judgment. Later, Phyllis Posnick, American Vogue’s executive editor, went on to become his editor of choice, working with him for nearly ten years. It was an amazing collaboration that led to some of Vogue’s most extraordinary images. Their professional relationship became like that of an old married couple.
When I first joined American Vogue, I did a substantial number of sessions with Penn because Anna had decided that I was the best person to look after him. I had just worked with him on his powerful photographs against a simple white background of the last collection at Calvin’s. In his little studio, the atmosphere was hushed, and everyone kept well back and totally still. Absolutely no music was allowed, nor could anyone—even in those days when everyone smoked—light up. Only the celebrity makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin seemed able to get away with making a sound, standing camply at Penn’s shoulder and murmuring approving little noises like “Mmmm,” until Penn would say, “Do shut up, Kevyn,” and continue to calibrate his lighting. Otherwise we all remained perfectly quiet. It was a wonderful experience, but the rapid pace set by Anna at the magazine meant that there were many other sessions for me to oversee and many trips to prepare. In the end I had to stop working with Penn because my long and involved picture stories were not his style, nor were the available clothes ever exceptional enough to suit him—although not many in modern times could come up to his exacting standards.
More and more over the years, especially in public after Anna became American Vogue’s editor in chief, I’ve come to see her as the possessor of an almost Margaret Thatcher–like, straight-faced control. One spring on her way into a Paris fashion show, for example, after being pelted with some gooey substance by the animal rights people who are always lying in wait, she disappeared backstage, rearranged herself, had her makeup redone, and was still one of the earlier arrivals to take her seat. And when the outrageous Alexander McQueen unveiled his new collection in New York one year, she kept her composure despite his show’s deliberately provocative finale. At the time, the fashion world was titillated by McQueen’s design for “bumsters”—trousers that barely reached the crotch in the front and hardly covered half the arse. One particularly mischievous model, Dan Macmillan (the great-grandson of a former British prime minister), was wearing them in the show’s finale, which found him directly facing Anna in her front-row seat. McQueen stepped onto the catwalk to take his bow, and the entire cast turned to bow back at him. At which point the boy was literally mooning Anna right in the face. And she, unruffled behind her dark glasses, simply stared back.
During each festive season ever since I have been at American Vogue, Anna has organized a Christmas lunch. Originally, it was just the two of us, and we would go to La Grenouille, a charming French restaurant on East Fifty-second street that I absolutely loved. Then, as the years rolled by, she began adding people: Vogue’s design director, Charles Churchward; fashion director Paul Cavaco, who was eventually succeeded by Tonne Goodman; and fashion market director Virginia Smith.
On this particular occasion Anna arranged for the lunch to be at the Four Seasons, which serves good food but is not what you might call a very pretty restaurant. It has the kind of seriously corporate atmosphere suggesting that global deals and huge financial transactions are being cooked up along with the food. We all piled into a Big Apple Town Car determined to get there first, although we knew that would never happen because Anna is always there before anyone, no matter what.
We then sat through a rather stiff lunch in a big booth surrounded by negotiating businessmen. Charlie was in his new Prada suit and tie, handkerchief billowing out of his breast pocket. Meanwhile, Paul was giving a humorous account of his daughter’s escapades, thank God, because he always managed to keep things lighthearted.
During the first and second courses, Anna made small talk, asking what everyone was doing over the Christmas break, then suggesting some of the latest shows to see and things to do. Finally, we got to the coffee. The waiter had just poured it when a girl, smartly dressed in black and carrying one of those fashionable black nylon Prada totes, walked over to the table. She was pretty noticeable because the restaurant was hushed and open-plan. “Excuse me. Are you Miss Wintour?” she asked politely. “Yes,” said Anna. With a flourish, the girl opened her bag, took out a dead raccoon, frozen solid, stiff as a board, and a little flattened, rather like roadkill, and whacked it down on the table, shouting, “Animal killer!” or whatever those anti-fur people say. The coffee cups jumped, splashing Charlie’s suit. The girl dashed away down the stairs. People raced over to ask if we were all right, while a waiter glided up with an extra-large table napkin in order to toss it discreetly over the dead animal. We all started to giggle nervously. “Well, that certainly broke the ice a bit,” said Anna with a smile, her sangfroid intact.
Fashion magazines have totally changed in my lifetime. If someone like Madonna is a huge success as the cover story of the November issue, next time around there must be someone or something bigger. In the end I think Anna gave up on my styling covers since I’m not good with famous people. We used to use the occasional model, but the sales difference was so marked between them and celebrities that it’s now one hundred percent pop and movie stars.
Fashion is just a part of what the magazine stands for today, which may be hard on old-timers like myself but is definitely the modern way. I’m grateful to have lived through the ten years or so I did at American Vogue when fashion was the most important element. Since then Anna has broadened our scope momentously. Vogue now incorporates the worlds of art, business, technology, travel, food, celebrity, and politics. (You have to remember that she comes from a journalistic family; her father was Charles Wintour, the revered editor of the London Evening Standard.) And this is all largely due to her vision.
Vogue’s involvement in the opening of the Costume Institute’s exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a prime example. Ever since she took on the organization of the annual ball to raise funds for the institute, Anna has worked tirelessly to make this New York’s night of nights. Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton at the museum do the actual curating, but Anna is the one concerned with every tiny detail devoted to ensuring the evening is a runaway success. And it always is. The lineup of limos is not to be believed.
There was a period early on when Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue alternated hosting the event, but somewhere in the mid-nineties the responsibility fell squarely onto Vogue’s shoulders, and it’s been that way ever since. How closely is Anna involved in the whole thing? Completely. She supervises everything from the flower arrangements to the table settings, the color scheme of the decor, and the seating arrangements for dinner. She even chooses from the swatches of material suggested for the tablecloths. Months are spent on the seating plan. Anna leaves nothing to chance and always works out who should sit next to whom, the names moved around and around on bits of paper, pink for girls and blue for boys.
There are endless food tastings and meetings about the after-dinner entertainment, which she always wants to be current—this past year it was Bruno Mars and the Italian opera singer Vittorio Grigolo. Before that was Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, Kanye West and Rihanna, and Lady Gaga, who came onstage terribly late, which played havoc with the planning and upset Anna very much. This year there was also a film made by her friend the director Baz Luhrmann, showing an imagined dialogue between Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli (played by the Australian actress Judy Davis), excerpts of which were shown throughout the exhibit.
I suppose if you are a big-name designer or an industry bigwig who has spent thousands of dollars for the privilege of a table, you might think you can invite whomever you want, but things don’t work like that. In my early days, if I hadn’t already been invited by someone, one of Anna’s assistants would ring the designers and say something along the lines of “Anna thinks it would be great if you had Grace at your table.” If that didn’t happen, as a last resort there was always “the extra Vogue table,” usually over by the door and en route to the powder room. I’ve certainly sat there in my time, but these days I’m positioned better and, happily, nowhere near the toilets.
For the party, Vogue dresses just about everyone. Of the clothes, bags, shoes, and jewelry that appear on the red carpet every year, I would say about ninety percent comes through the magazine. In the run-up to the evening, a constant stream of celebrities heads into the Vogue fashion closet for fittings, with our fashion market director, Virginia Smith, and our alterations man, Bill Bull, on call around the clock. And these days even the men pour in to be fitted for their tuxedos because Anna really wants the place and the people to look their best.
On the night, every junior and intern at Vogue is pressed into service to show people to their seats, take their coats, or help them on their way to the exhibit. These young women are asked weeks beforehand to choose their clothes from the racks provided—this season, to accompany the exhibit’s theme, they were all in several shades of shocking, since Schiaparelli was known for her love of pink—and then photographs are taken of them in their dresses and sent to Anna for approval.
Despite all this careful planning, there can be some unfortunate sartorial moments. Those same juniors, having been sent off to spend hours in the hair and makeup room, can emerge rouged, mascaraed, and tonged to within an inch of their lives, with their hair in sad, droopy ringlets and none of their freshness intact. Usually, at this point I walk by and tell them to wash it all off. And then there was the year when the majority of attending women decided it was far newer to wear tight and short instead of graceful and long, with the result that from the back it looked like a convention of hookers. Another time a beautiful girl turned up at the opening of the Liaisons Dangereuses exhibit in full period costume complete with white wig. She soon looked most uncomfortable—almost as much as those models and personalities who arrive wearing dresses with hugely annoying cumbersome trains.
In the end it is couples like Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady who come across the best, mainly because they keep things relatively simple. Naturally, it doesn’t hurt that they are both unbelievably good-looking.
The first sign of Vogue moving on from its traditional role of fashion magazine was, for me, when Anna thought up the idea of Seventh on Sale back in the nineties, an inspiration for shoppers to spend and spend, and the forerunner of today’s annual Fashion’s Night Out, which galvanized retail spending after the recession hit home in 2009. Now it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with China being the latest country drawn into Anna’s axis. She even went there to drum up support for the event. It’s fascinating to see Anna focus on China, and to witness a whole country waking up to the force she is. There is no doubt that Vogue is a global brand thanks largely to her efforts. Nevertheless, a little nostalgia for the days when fashion came first doesn’t do any harm.
In the early days Anna and I would sit down to discuss a shoot, work things out, think of things together. She would have an idea she wanted me to do, and I would ask, “How do you think I should approach that?” The Alice in Wonderland story with Annie Leibovitz, for instance, which ran one Christmas, started out as something completely different. Anna had just seen the award-winning musical version of Mary Poppins on the London stage, loved it, and returned to New York eager to base our seasonal special on that children’s story. But when I sat down, I thought, “Mary Poppins wears black throughout, which really isn’t going to work for Anna in the end,” and so I said, “What about Alice in Wonderland instead? It could be just as much fun, and I can then ask the designers to make up all the dresses in blue, like the illustrations in the book.” Anna thought about it overnight and the next morning said, “Yes. We’ll do Alice and cast all the designers as characters from the book,” which was the most brilliant idea. The resulting pictures, with their enchanting resemblance to John Tenniel’s drawings from the classic original, are some of my all-time favorites.
When I started shooting with Annie Leibovitz, my eye matured and we did great work. Anna signed her up to do portraits and fashion shots for Vogue after she’d spent years being tied exclusively to Vanity Fair. Some of the early pictures we did together, particularly a group shot of models wearing Comme des Garçons outfits, arranged to appear as if they were walking on water, are more than great.
Annie would do huge amounts of research to help construct each image, paying attention to every fine detail. However, the more confident she became about fashion—her great love is for vintage clothes or any item that looks beaten up, muddied, and destroyed—and the more she voiced her strong personal dislikes about the clothes I chose for the shoots, the more uncomfortable I became. We could get overheated, but then she would say, “You’re the one who really knows about fashion. You are the most incredible fashion editor in the world.” And everything would settle down into a fragile truce. Until the next time, that is.
Anna and Annie are the best of friends. Anna is always excited by the prospect of an Annie shoot. She loves the idea of a journalistic point of view, which is the way Annie handles celebrities. She is also aware of Annie’s volatile personality, but ultimately the pictures are always worth the battle.
It was Anna’s decision, the moment Hollywood talk turned to Zoolander, the comedy film in which Ben Stiller plays a knuckleheaded male model, that he should be taken to Paris and shot by Annie for a couture story (besides vintage, Annie absolutely loves shooting couture). I have to say, I hated the idea, not merely because I respect Paris couture for its purity and exquisite workmanship but because an advance screening of the film revealed it to be a crass and truly mind-numbing experience. I think it was decided upon, really, because Anna had a crush on Ben. (She gets these occasional crushes—Ben, Puff Daddy, Roger Federer.)
Annie wanted Ben wearing clothes resembling his costumes from the film, which were so incredibly vulgar and nasty that I had to put my foot down and say how much better he would look in a dark suit. Even then I had reservations about the whole project. So when it came to choosing the models, I secretly went for the tallest ones around, girls like Stella Tennant, Oluchi, and Jacquetta Wheeler, beanpoles who would effectively show up his short stature.
Annie then became obsessed with getting the tiny actor into a tiny pair of swimming trunks in order to spoof a Helmut Newton photograph. He refused. She tried again. He ever so reluctantly agreed to wear them. On the day the photograph was to be taken, as if by some mysterious act of God, he was given incorrect directions to the location. His chauffeur-driven car took him off for two hours the wrong way out of Paris, came all the way back, and set off again for two hours in the opposite direction. By the time he arrived in the correct place, his patience was tried, but somehow Annie cajoled him into doing the picture.
Overall, the end results, thanks to Anna’s justified insistence on Ben, were, I have to admit, quite hilarious. Annie’s wittiest decision was to reference key couture shoots of the past, even paying homage to the famous 1963 series by American photographer Melvin Sokolsky, who suspended his models in strange futuristic plastic bubbles over the Seine and above the cobbled streets of Paris. Ben Stiller’s frozen, panic-ridden expression, trapped inside his duplicate bubble, was priceless. He was a really good sport throughout for allowing us to mercilessly poke fun at him.
Puff Daddy with Kate Moss was another of Anna’s highly successful pairings. It was a couture story photographed by Annie in which we shot the famous rapper and the model being pursued dramatically all over Paris by paparazzi and film crews. As a highlight, we were to photograph them in a party situation at a restaurant surrounded by other models in couture along with all those responsible for the creations—John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, etc.—plus any others who could add to the fashionable scene. Annie’s idea was to stalk the party, popping up and shooting away as though she were a hardened paparazzo herself. Invitations were sent out that read something like “Anna Wintour and Puff Daddy invite you to a party.” The location was so tiny that the girls’ changing room ended up being the passage linking the kitchen to the main dining area. Panic was in the air, but that was only the half of it. Anna had told her friends not to worry about arriving by the front entrance, where the general public would be in mass hysterics over Puff Daddy, because it was much easier for them to slip in through the back. But we were dressing six models plus Kate Moss in that entrance.
Anna arrived with a film crew and Patrick O’Connell, Vogue’s self-effacing new press officer, and installed herself right in the middle of our tight little spot. “And what do you do?” Patrick asked me, trying to make harmless small talk in the middle of mayhem. “Look at the masthead,” I snapped, my already snippy mood even snippier. Waiters juggling trays of champagne flew around or genuflected before Anna, while more and more guests poured in. I remember thinking, “It’s insane that we are trying to make fashion photographs in this situation.”
Annie Leibovitz, who is not exactly the happy partyish type at the best of times, looked like thunder. All the designers had telephoned to ask how late they might arrive for their photograph, each one wanting to be the last. John Galliano, who was working out regularly in those days, wanted to pose topless. Kate was totally drunk, as was my assistant Tina Chai, who normally doesn’t drink at all but had been sent to drag Kate out of the Ritz and ended up joining her for a glass of the extra-potent “Kate” cocktail that Colin the barman had created especially for her in the Hemingway Bar.
The designer Oscar de la Renta arrived unexpectedly just as Annie was preparing to shoot the couturiers, and Anna insisted that he quickly join the group. Annie went apeshit. Because her pictures are so intricately worked out in advance, there was no space for him. I turned to my fellow Vogue editor Hamish Bowles for help. “Hamish, you’ve got to get Oscar out of the picture, because Annie’s going berserk,” I pleaded. “I am not going to go and remove Oscar,” sniffed Hamish, flouncing away. Meanwhile, in the group shot of couturiers, John Galliano was saying he would prefer to be photographed standing up rather than sitting down, to show off even more of his new body; Gaultier was looking a bit fat in his matelot T-shirt with its horizontal stripes because he had pulled it on over whatever he came in wearing; Karl was madly fanning himself and being super-grand, while the white powder he daily shakes into his ponytailed coiffure was sprinkled all over his dark jacket and looking like a severe case of dandruff; and Puff Daddy, who thought the whole thing was purely about him, wanted to be placed in the exact center of the photograph. Annie pointed out that if he was in the middle, he would disappear in the deep V where the pages of the magazine are bound together. But he was not inclined to grasp this technical talk and, despite Annie, planted himself front and center.
Finally, when I had taken all I could of this chaos, I started to walk away from the entire thing. On my way out, I said to Patrick, “You’d better get all these people out of the dressing room or I’m canceling the job and taking the next flight back to New York.” Unbelievably, he did. When I returned, the rear entrance was practically empty. Anna had vanished and even the models had gone, leaving the hair and makeup people, Julien d’Ys and Diane Kendal, standing there not knowing what to do.
On the day after 9/11, I walked into the empty Vogue offices and found Anna sitting there alone. “Where is everyone?” she asked. “We’ve got to get this city up and running again!” Gradually, people started arriving at work. Everyone was still dazed and horrified from the previous day, when we had all watched the events unroll on the television in Anna’s office. But before they had time to think, the staff was dispatched to find out who was giving blood, what Calvin Klein and Michael Kors were doing to help the situation, and who was helping to feed the exhausted rescuers down at Ground Zero. All the fashion ideas dreamed up for the magazine’s next issue were summarily dropped in order to accommodate staunchly pro-American stories.
It was the middle of fashion week. Anna wanted to instill a feeling of “the show must go on,” so she persuaded the young designers to get together and the more senior designers to show in their showrooms because, as she put it, “We can’t allow the terrorists to think they have won.” Finally, we did our fashion shoot, which had flags flying everywhere. In the photos, the supermodel Karolina Kurkova was shown waving one while standing on the roof of a skyscraper. And the background of the cover, which featured Britney Spears, was Photoshopped to contain the Stars and Stripes.
The bane of Anna’s life is The Devil Wears Prada. Even ex-President Sarkozy mentioned it semi-jokingly in his speech at the official Élysée Palace ceremony in Paris before awarding her the Légion d’Honneur in 2011. But it’s not a joke. After seeing a few clips, I never looked at the movie again. I thought it made our business look laughable. Even more so than Prêt-à-Porter, one of the worst movies Robert Altman ever made, which caused chaos one summer at the Paris collections when people like Sophia Loren and Julia Roberts were filmed playing characters from the fashion world attending the shows.
When I first heard that a former assistant of Anna’s had written the book, I thought, “How disgracefully disloyal” and “What a horrible thing to do.” Basically, she was making money out of making fun of Anna’s character.
I don’t remember the girl at all. Anna has quite a large turnover of assistants who sit in the office outside hers. They don’t mingle and are usually just a voice on the phone saying, “Can you come and see Anna?” or “Scheduling meeting,” so you don’t really have a conversation with them. However, when it came to the movie, as usual, Anna had the last word. She went off to the premier with her daughter, Bee. Both dressed head to toe in Prada, of course.
