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“Nobody at Vogue moves at a glacial pace.” Anna Wintour speaks with David Remnick about how the magazine she’s helmed for decades is about to change. Plus:
Illustration by Diego Mallo
Anna Wintour Embraces a New Era at Vogue
The longtime editor and executive talks about appointing her successor, the arc of her career, and what she thought of “The Devil Wears Prada.”
By David Remnick
On the morning after Labor Day, Anna Wintour, who has been the editor-in-chief of American Vogue for the past thirty-seven years, gathered her staff and, with a sense of occasion and pride, handed over the job to a sharp, funny, and independent-minded protégé named Chloe Malle. Not that Wintour was retiring: she remains the editorial director of all the Vogue editions throughout the world—there are twenty-eight of them—and the chief content officer of Condé Nast, which owns both Vogue and The New Yorker. At a time when most people cannot name the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper any more reliably than they can name the king of Belgium, Wintour has iconic status well beyond the realms of fashion or journalism. At Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, when the camera cuts to her between points, viewers know who she is. No chyron needed.
A few hours after meeting with the Vogue staff, Anna kept an appointment to be interviewed for The New Yorker Radio Hour at our common workplace: One World Trade Center. As she entered the studio, she said dryly, “Here I am, a lamb to the slaughter.” Yeah, right.
Years ago, I asked one of Anna’s deputies why Anna commanded such respect, why she was such a good editor. “It’s because she knows what she wants,” the deputy said. As I came to know Anna better—the real person, not the celluloid caricature—I learned that this meant not that she thought she knew everything but that she had a clear sense of what her publication should be. And while she relied daily on her colleagues for advice and argument, and cultivated an array of creative photographers, writers, and stylists, she led with clarity and imagination. If one decision or another went sidewise, she took stock and recalibrated. There was always tomorrow.
Read or listen to the interview »
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As the show enters its sixteenth season, it would seem that there’s nothing left to bake.Illustration by Thomas Bryson-King
Inside the World of “The Great British Bake Off”
The latest season of the cooking series begins streaming in the U.S. today. When Ruby Tandoh applied to be on the show, in 2013, the audition process required a session with a psychotherapist. She remembers crying profusely, “constitutionally incapable of playing it cool.” Things got even more dramatic after that. Read or listen to the story »
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How Bad Is It?
The Department of Defense has effectively been renamed the Department of War, according to an executive order to be issued today by the President. (An official change would require congressional action. When alerted to that fact by a reporter, last week, Trump responded, “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that.” Today, Republicans in both chambers introduced legislation backing the change.)
Is the U.S. Armed Forces shifting toward a more offensive, preëmptive posture? The move could be seen as affirming Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s repeated emphasis on “warfighting” readiness among the troops. Or it might be a lot simpler. “It just sounded better,” Trump said, earlier this week. Back in January, the President marked his return to the White House by issuing a series of name changes, introducing the Gulf of America and ordering that Denali once again be called Mount McKinley. These were not just silly geographical whims, Jessica Winter pointed out at the time. “To give a thing a name is to make it real and even to decide on its meaning,” she writes. “It’s a godlike and patriarchal power, and, of course, a creative one.” Trump, as “our most influential shaper of reality,” understands this power in a way that his opposition fails to grasp.
