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- [00:02]
Natalie Robomed
On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [00:32]
Campsite Media
Campsite Media.
- [00:36]
Natalie Robomed
So if you've been online in the past week, you've probably noticed that Anna Wintour is stepping down as the editor in chief of Vogue. For 37 years, she's been the person who's decided who and what is fashion. Like an empress, her brown bob is known to all sorts of so are her sunglasses. Her friends are super fancy. Think Bradley Cooper and Donatella Versace. And now she won't be exactly gone. She will continue on as Vogue's global editorial director and Chief Content officer for Conde Nast. But she won't be making the day to day decisions of what goes in Vogue or be in charge of the fashion credits, which is what in the no fashion people call the clothes that are featured in the editorial photo spreads in Vogue. Why did she do it? Well, she is 73 years old, so maybe she's tired of all the rigmarole. Or maybe she feels like she's gone as far as she can. She'll probably still be running the big MEK Gala party, which means Bella Hadid and Zendaya and other celebrities will continue fawning over her no matter what. So ahead of the July 4th holiday, we're rerunning our episode on Anna Wintour, which I recorded with Amy Odell, who wrote the definitive biography of Anna Wintour from Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media. This is infamous. I'm Natalie Robomed. So here's a question. Who is the most important woman in fashion, maybe even a media? I bet a lot of you know.
- [02:15]
Amy Odell
And for those who don't, it's the.
- [02:17]
Natalie Robomed
Person who allegedly kept her sunglasses on while laying off much of Conde Nast's staff. Anna Wintour.
- [02:24]
Amy Odell
Her name is Anna Wintour, a name.
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That strikes terror in some, loathing in.
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Others, and transforms yet others into obsequious toadies.
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Whether or not you know her by name, chances are Anna Wintour has influenced what you put on your body.
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Natalie Robomed
When you hear Anna Wintour, you probably.
- [02:42]
Amy Odell
Think Vogue, that bob, the sunglasses, and.
- [02:46]
Natalie Robomed
Of course, the devil wears Prada.
- [02:49]
Unknown
Is there some reason that my coffee isn't here? Has she died or something?
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Amy Odell
In the movie, Meryl Streep plays a.
- [02:56]
Natalie Robomed
Thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour and.
- [02:59]
Amy Odell
Anne Hathaway plays her new bedraggled second assistant.
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Unknown
That sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean.
- [03:08]
Amy Odell
But the real Anna Wintour is perhaps even more interesting than fiction.
- [03:13]
Look, can I just address the elephant in the room?
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You're wearing your dark glasses.
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Unknown
They're incredibly useful because you avoid people knowing what you're thinking about.
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Natalie Robomed
She served as editor in chief of Vogue for 36 years, and now she's the global content officer of Conde Nast.
- [03:31]
Amy Odell
The media powerhouse that publishes the likes.
- [03:33]
Natalie Robomed
Of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and gq, among others.
- [03:37]
Amy Odell
What time did you wake up this morning?
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Unknown
5 o'.
- [03:39]
Amy Odell
Clock. What do you usually have with breakfast?
- [03:41]
Unknown
Starbucks.
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Amy Odell
How long have you been in this office for?
- [03:44]
Unknown
Forever.
- [03:46]
Amy Odell
Ana is so powerful that fashion houses consult her before appointing a new head designer. But over the last four decades, Ana has expanded her power to other realms.
- [03:56]
Natalie Robomed
Becoming one of the most influential Democratic.
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Amy Odell
Fundraisers and a behind the scenes player in Hollywood.
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Unknown
I read in the New York Times this week that I'm an ice queen, I'm the sun king, I'm an alien fleeing from District 9, and I'm a dominatrix. So I reckon that makes me a lukewarm royalty with a whip from outer space. What do you think?
- [04:24]
Amy Odell
Good gig.
- [04:25]
Natalie Robomed
This episode, I'm talking to back row writer and Anna Wintour biographer Amy o' Dell about how Wintour's career tells a story of fashion and feminism over the last 40 years. Plus, she gives us the scoop on Anna Wintour's finsta, the time she was considered for an ambassadorship. What Anna really thought of the Devil Wears Prada.
- [04:48]
Amy Odell
Amy, welcome to Infamous.
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Natalie Robomed
Can you introduce yourself?
- [04:51]
Amy Odell
I'm Amy o'. Dell. I'm a fashion and culture journalist and I'm the author of the biography. She is the most fascinating figure in fashion and one of the most fascinating figures in culture. One of the most successful and significant business leaders of the last maybe 60 years. So when my publisher came to me asking if I wanted to do a biography about her, I thought that was a brilliant, brilliant idea.
- [05:20]
I think I didn't realize before reading your book that Anna Wintour's influence spans not just fashion, but culture, Hollywood politics. And I think I hadn't really known just how powerful and how influential she was, which we'll get to in a second. But I think the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I feel as though fashion is in a crisis. We're in this era of climate crisis, but fast fashion has never been more popular. I think Covid really emphasized how irrelevant these sort of like spring summer fashion show calendars are. Yet we're all still in this constant era of consumption. And my TikTok is just constantly filled with micro trends. But then print media and Vogue has never felt less relevant. So it just feels like a giant muddle to all make sense of.
- [06:14]
I feel the same way. I write about fashion twice a week in my substack newsletter@amyodoll.substack.com and those are the issues that I try to wrestle with there. Consumers are really concerned about climate change, about the impact fashion has on global warming, or the impact fashion has on garment workers. This came up over and over again reporting the Anna book. People in fashion just support each other. It's a very small industry. They're all kind of friends and there's not a lot of critique or, you know, I think often deep reflection on how the industry really impacts the world or how it could have a more positive impact on the world. And I think you could also look to Anna as to why the industry is the way that it is. Because in order for her to make Vogue the really successful business that it has been, she had to really champion the industry and make Vogue the leader of the industry. There's so much going on behind the scenes with Anna that we don't see and that she doesn't talk about publicly. Like there's probably no major fashion designer appointment at any brand that doesn't have some input from her.
- [07:22]
That was something I was really struck by, that she basically runs this business in some ways by pairing designers with fashion houses. I mean, can you talk about some of these instances where Anna has served as a kingmaker?
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So I interviewed the Parenza schooler designers for the book. So there's a famous story of how one of them encountered her on a flight, tapped her on the shoulder. She was sitting in first class and they were in coach because he was like just getting started or was at Parsons and figured, well, I'll just take my shot and go talk to Anna Wintour. And she doesn't respond on the plane. She's got her shades on. She later says that she wasn't ignoring him, she was sleeping. But he slips her an air sickness bag that he's written a note on and she's impressed by this and she sends him to Michael Kors. He interns at Michael Kors and their career takes off.
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And I think what struck me, too, is that her realm expands far beyond fashion to other facets of culture, including Hollywood. You have this anecdote about Hugh Jackman arranging a meeting with Anna and another editor to talk about the greatest showman and kind of potential other casting for it. Can you tell that story very quickly?
- [08:34]
Yes. So Hugh Jackman summoned Anna and senior members of her editorial team at Vogue to just talk through this movie and get their ideas on who to cast and stuff like that. And Mark Colgate remembered spitting out the name Adele, who, like, obviously, she wasn't cast. But it's rather extraordinary, right, that here is this very successful Hollywood figure who is putting together a movie, and the opinion he wants is Anna Wintour's. I did not realize going into the book that that kind of stuff really was happening all the time, and I am sure it's still happening today. But this is really how Anna created the Vogue brand. She really has made it an access brand where they get access to celebrities that so few outlets get.
- [09:25]
Well, you talked about how it, you know, this is just sort of how these magazines worked. And one thing I was struck by was the credits in terms of, like, the designer credits. Could you just explain those to people who might not know what those are? They seem to work as a kind of payola, although I'm sure these people would not want to phrase it that way.
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I think over time, as it became harder and harder to run a media business, the line between editorial and advertising has dissolved. A lot more credits are when you're looking at a fashion editorial in vogue or on vogue.com, saying which designers made the stuff that they're featuring. So you might be looking at, let's say, a Natalie Portman cover, and she's wearing a gown. And the gown, you open the magazine and you see the credits are Dior, because Natalie Portman has a contract with Dior. She's the face of Dior. Anna and her team would have needed to have a sense of which designers were getting the most credits, and the designers that were spending the most money to advertise in Vogue should theoretically get the most credits. So when you're looking through Vogue, you probably will notice a correlation between the advertisers and the credits.
- [10:37]
So, as in, if there's a giant ad for ysl, for example, you might then just, just by chance happen to see YSL in the fashion crowd.
- [10:46]
I would be shocked if you didn't. Yeah, yeah.
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So. So I read Vogue obsessively, like, as a teen, as A young person. I just feel like it fed me more, but that would never have occurred to me as a young person. But as you're saying it, I'm like.
- [10:59]
Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. The one time where I could find that she was maybe actually in some trouble was when she. She wasn't perceived as featuring enough of her advertiser credits. The late Cy Newhouse, who ran Conde Nasta and was her boss, sat her down and said, I suggest you follow the money. She did not even respond. She didn't say anything. She just did it.
- [11:24]
So I sort of have this idea that Anna Wintour and her career can tell us the history of fashion and the fashion industry over the last 40 years. She grew up in England, the daughter of the editor in chief of a very important newspaper. And then she came of age as a teenager in 60s London, which was a really important and changing time for fashion for women with the arrival of the miniskirt. And that's when she got the bob.
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Yeah, the bob.
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Which distinguishes.
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Which distinguishes her now. But a number of people pointed out to me every girl in London had that haircut at the time.
- [12:00]
And she just hung onto it.
- [12:02]
She kept it.
- [12:04]
And then, at least the way that I understand it, like, leveraged several relationships, not just romantic, with powerful men, and came to American Vogue in 1988. One of the things that she changed with her first Vogue cover was putting.
- [12:18]
Natalie Robomed
Full bodies on the COVID not just.
- [12:20]
Amy Odell
Close ups of faces. Can you talk about that first cover?
- [12:23]
Yeah, I just want to go back to something you said. You said she leveraged relationships with powerful men. I think it's important also to understand that she had a lot of privilege in her life and she came from money. She had a trust fund. She started her career in magazines in London in the late 60s and early 70s. And that pace did not suit her. It was way too slow. And she wanted to go to New York, where everything was faster and the fashion industry was bigger and more vibrant and the media industry was bigger and more vibrant. And she landed at Harper's Bazaar. But she was able to do that because her mother was. Was American. So she had a passport that would allow her to come and work here. She had money because she had this trust fund and she was able to buy designer clothes and come to Harper's Bazaar. And everyone was like, oh my God, who is this creature wearing Missoni every day and looking so spectacular. And I think that's all really important to understand in her early success. That's not to take away from her talent. But fashion is an image based business and she was walking the walk, so to speak. But going back to your question about her first cover featuring Michaela Burke, the Israeli model, that cover was really important because the editor in chief who preceded Anna Wintour had been doing the same style of COVID All these very tightly cropped headshots of models with big 80s earrings and like the blush and maybe like a poofy bang. And Anna pulled it back. The focus was more on the fashion and less on, like the face. The first cover she did featured Christian Lacroix and she's wearing Guess jeans and her hair is down and wavy and undone. She looks like she's not really wearing a lot of makeup and she's outside, she's not in a studio.
- [14:09]
Unknown
I just said, well, let's just try this, right? And off we went. To me, it just said, this is something new, this is something different. And I remember the printers called us up because they thought we'd made a mistake just wanting to check that that actually was the COVID There was a.
- [14:27]
Amy Odell
Huge departure aesthetically, but it was also pretty savvy because I think it opened up the magazine to be able to give those cover credits to important advertisers.
- [14:36]
And I think that that mixing of high with low, like that, that Christian Lacroix top would have been so incredibly expensive, right?
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Like. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm sure it was price upon request. Yeah.
- [14:48]
That mixing of high with low, which is something we sort of take for granted in styling these days. I think you make the point that that was pretty new when she was doing it.
- [14:55]
Yeah, that was new. The other thing that I think that fashion and celebrity are so intertwined nowadays and people take that for granted and they don't, they don't see why it would never be that way. Supermodels used to be the faces of fashion, and Anna really likes models and she always wanted to have supermodels. But I think she could see that celebrities were where the culture was going. That's where the interest was. She had an example of this when she put Madonna on the COVID in May 1989.
- [15:26]
Unknown
I remember getting quite a bit of criticism for my first Madonna cover and that, you know, she's not Vogue, she'll never sell. And, you know, it was, it was a little bit risky. And, you know, it was up something extraordinary, like 40% on the newsstands.
- [15:40]
Amy Odell
That sold really, really, really well. And I think that was an early indication of like, hey, maybe instead of putting Cindy Crawford on the COVID twice a year, put some Celebrities on the covers. And then that became her strategy and she fine tuned it even more so that she was really only putting movie stars on the COVID Like there was a period of time where Vogue wouldn't even really put television stars on the covers. It was just movie stars. And they've diversified in recent years. Obviously now you see a lot more music stars, for instance.
- [16:08]
It's really interesting to me because part of the shift of putting celebrities on the COVID has led to the further intertwining between fashion and celebrity, where actors are now being asked on the red carpet like, what are you wearing? And I also think it really paved the way for celebrities to be the endorsers. It's now a default that Ms. Dior is going to be ex actress or whatever.
- [16:31]
Yeah.
- [16:31]
And that the new face of whatever brand is going to be an actress. And I think because of that, we got so used to celebrities endorsing products that it then made sense for them to start their own companies. So kind of in a galaxy brain way like Anna paved the way for celebrities like Rihanna to start Fenty and Kim Kardashian to start skims and become billionaires.
- [16:56]
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
- [17:06]
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- [18:09]
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- [19:12]
Amy Odell
This is infamous from Campside Media.
- [19:17]
Natalie Robomed
So Anna Wintour melded fashion with celebrity, establishing the landscape we now see today. But her soft power isn't limited to white dresses. It goes all the way to the White House.
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Amy Odell
Something else I didn't realize was actually just how important a role she plays in politics and what a big kind of Democratic fundraiser she is.
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She's one of the top. Yeah, she's one of the top Democratic bundlers.
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In fact, she was close to getting an ambassadorship under Obama.
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It's hard to say close, but she was considered. And someone from the Obama camp did talk to her about it. But then for various reasons, it never came to fruition.
- [19:57]
The other part I found fascinating is there was a story about how after Bill Clinton got inaugurated, Anna sent a note to Hillary Clinton.
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She sent a note to Hillary Clinton offering Vogue's help picking out her clothes, and she accepted it. I think one of the most famous covers Anna Wintour did was with Hillary Clinton in the late 90s after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
- [20:19]
The idea of being first lady and then Anna Wintour being like, we can help you dress if you want, is.
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Just like, I mean, you can imagine being in that position and fashion is really not your thing, yet everyone's talking about what you're wearing. You can understand why. Why?
- [20:37]
Oh, you would say yes.
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Why? You would say yes? Sure.
- [20:40]
Yeah, I would say yes. And I would be so scared about those meetings. So. So let's talk a little bit about Anna as a personal brand or an icon. She sort of built a personal brand before that was a thing.
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Oh, yeah.
- [20:56]
Talking about. So there's the haircut, the bob that we already mentioned, and then the sunglasses. What is the point of those sunglasses?
- [21:04]
The sunglasses are prescription. And she says that they, they allow her to hide what she's thinking and stuff like that. And that Might be true, but they're actually prescription, and people who've tried them on say they're quite strong. One of her friends also told me that she misplaces them all the time. But her father had a. Had an eye condition called macular degeneration. And if I'm not mistaken, that's a hereditary condition. I'm not an eye doctor. It is possible that she is trying to also protect her eyes, but my understanding is that she prefers the look of sunglasses to regular glasses.
- [21:38]
And so she just wears them everywhere inside, even at night.
- [21:41]
I heard stories about her. You know, someone who shared a car with her at night said she wore her sunglasses the whole car ride. I guess I did hear stories about her having meetings inside the Con Ams office wearing. Wearing her sunglasses, but she doesn't always have time.
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I guess that's just the image that I have in my head from her being photographed is just this very thin woman with this bob and these bangs and those giant oversized sunglasses like that.
- [22:05]
Yes. She's so well turned out. I mean, I say this in a positive way. Like she's like AI. Like. It's just remarkable how she puts herself together every single day. She has hair and makeup come to her place every morning, her townhouse every morning.
- [22:17]
But that is insane.
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It's not a. It is crazy, but she's. She gets it done really fast.
- [22:23]
Talk me through her day.
- [22:24]
Yeah, she gets up, I think, between 4 and 5am and she says that she reads the paper. She looks at social media. She does have a finsta.
- [22:32]
Oh, my God.
- [22:34]
I'm not gonna say what the name of the account is, but she has a finsta. And she looks at.
- [22:39]
I want to know what that is so badly.
- [22:41]
She looks at social media, the newspapers, et cetera. She exercises. She gets her hair and makeup done. She's chauffeured to work. I think she gives her assistants a heads up that she's coming where my reporting ended around the very beginning of the pandemic. She had two or three assistants, but she'll give her assistance a heads up. They'll get her a blueberry muffin and a whole milk latte from Starbucks sitting on her desk. When she walks in, she just starts talking. People said it's like a stream of consciousness of things that need to get done. And her assistants are ready with like an open email draft or something so they can type everything that she's saying.
- [23:24]
Unknown
Tell Simone I'm not going to prove that girl that she sent me for the Brazilian layout. I asked for Clean, athletic, smiling. She sent me dirty, tired and paunchy an RSVP yes to the Michael Kors party. I want the driver to drop me off at 9:30 and pick me up at 9:45 sharp. Then call Natalie at Gloria's Foods and tell her no for the 40th time. No, I don't want taquas. I want torts filled with warm rhubarb compote. And then call my ex husband and remind him that parent teacher conference is at Daltner tonight. And then call my.
- [23:49]
Amy Odell
And then from there she's kind of like in meetings a lot of the day, running around like she manages not just Vogue, but all of Conde Nast really at this point. So she could be meeting with other magazines, meeting with her team at Vogue. When she wants something, she wants it done right away. A lot of people had stories about her asking them to do stuff and then they get back to their desk and she'd be asking them if it's done yet. And she would say too. Like she would get annoyed with kind of the Hollywood machine if she wanted something done. She would call Hollywood agents herself if she needed to get something done. Or she would pick up the phone and call like Rupert Murdoch or Harvey Weinstein. And she would always say like, I don't understand why they have their assistants do everything. It's so much faster to just like do everything yourself. I think often she has lunch at her desk because she has so much going on and people are fascinated by what she eats. She was getting for a long time a steak and caprese salad without the tomatoes for lunch. And she would eat a few bites and then that would be. And then I think she may have changed her lunch after that to a fruit and cheese plate. And then after work she often goes to see a movie or she goes to the theater, she really loves the theater. Or she'll go to maybe like a fashion event or she'll have an event at her home and then she goes to bed and does it all over again.
- [25:03]
There's so many things in that that just feel like both a titan of a time gone by and just absolutely. A Devil Wears Pradder, which we have to talk about in a second. But you said that people are obsessed with what she eats. I found myself interested in that because to me, Anna Wintour epitomizes the thinness that is idolized within the fashion industry. But I sort of feel like she missed the body inclusivity movement in, in any meaningful way.
- [25:31]
Yeah, I think that's right. I Mean for all, all the things she was a head on or she shaped in culture. People who worked closely with her did express to me not just surprise, but maybe shock that she really missed the whole moment around inclusivity. For so long, she, she worked to keep the images that you saw in Vogue just be very thin people. Oprah lost. She had Oprah lose weight to be on the COVID Was it £20? I forgot the exact number of pounds. Yeah, she had Oprah lose.
- [26:05]
She gave Oprah a Vogue makeover that included losing 20 pounds.
- [26:09]
Yeah, but then there are other, you know, the Vogue makeover, it wasn't just Oprah. It was like Courtney Love, the Spice Girls, they would kind of call it like getting. Yeah, getting vogafied. It wasn't always just about, you know, losing weight. It was also about kind of stripping down the things that people wore or the way people style themselves that made them them in the culture and making them reflect Vogue. And attitudes towards that have completely changed totally. I mean, if you think of like the shows like what not to Wear, which were so, so popular and then people were like, well, hey, they're just kind of taking away everyone's personalities and making everyone look the same. I think that Anna was really behind on that. I think that she missed that and she's, she had to play catch up.
- [26:56]
She seems rather fat phobic to me. Like, there's so many instances in your book of people being worried that she wouldn't hire somebody because they're 25 pounds overweight and X, Y and Z. That just, that's just like the, the stereotype of fashion that you want to not be true, but unfortunately seems to be, at least in her world.
- [27:16]
It's not that she wouldn't hire people who she deemed to be too big, but she had to be, I guess, warned. I, I had at least one example in the book of someone warning her, like, I have a candidate for your job. That's really great. Please give her a chance. But she did expect people who worked at Vogue to embody Vogue. And that's how you get people working there who have so much privilege and who are, you know, a rather homogenous group of people working there.
- [27:44]
I mean, that's the whole plot of the Devil Wears Prada.
- [27:47]
Yeah.
- [27:48]
You know, this is. This assistant starts who doesn't fit in with the way these people look. And then she kind of undergoes a change. So let's talk about the Devil Wears Prada, which was written by a former assistant who wasn't very good. Tell me, tell Me that story and Anna's reaction to hearing about it.
- [28:06]
Yeah. So Anna had an assistant. The person I, person I spoke to about this, who's to hire. Anna's assistants called them girls of privilege. So she had an assistant who was a girl of privilege, whose father was a diplomat, and she wanted to take off several weeks from work, which I think most executives would not be like, okay, sure, just leave for several weeks. So Anna decides to replace this particular assistant. And it's kind of an odd time of year to hire. I think it was like around the holidays. So in walks Lauren Weisberger, who had gone to Cornel, a good resume and they ended up hiring her. And she really wanted to be a writer. And the editors at Vogue did not think her writing was that great. And one of them suggested that she get writing classes. So she did, she went, she got writing classes. And I guess the advice she got was write what you know, what she knew was being Anna Winter's assistant. So she started writing up what became the Devil Wears Prada. Her writing teacher sent the material to an agent who called and said, if she wants to sell this, I can sell it today. She sold it for $250,000. Pretty good for a first time novelist. That's particularly at that time. Yeah. So then when Anna found out that the book was coming out, her reaction was, I can't even remember who that girl is. Such was the impression Lauren Weisberger apparently made on Anna Wintour. I do think there was the feeling in the office at the time that it was coming out that like, oh my God, this is such a betrayal. But I was told that Anna really wasn't bothered by it. And I believe that because I think that if you spend your time getting bothered by stuff like that, you cannot accomplish in a day what Anna Wintour does.
- [29:53]
Campsite Media
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- [32:24]
This is Infamous from Campside Media.
- [32:29]
Natalie Robomed
So Anna Wintour has fashioned Vogue into an aspirational bastion of wealth and fame. But what happens when celebrities become rich business people and rich business people become celebrities?
- [32:43]
Amy Odell
That's why we have Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez on the COVID.
- [32:48]
To be fair Rich inside editorial. Yeah, that was, that was an interesting.
- [32:53]
Oh, they weren't on the COVID I'm sorry.
- [32:54]
No, they didn't. Maybe in the future. Maybe in the future.
- [32:58]
Stand corrected. I was just so shook by those images.
- [33:01]
What did you think of it?
- [33:03]
Oh my God. I mean to me it like epitomized the like AI retouched ness that Vogue images are going towards.
- [33:12]
So part of the reason everything is so retouched is just so that Anna approves it. You can see it a bit in the September issue, which is the 2009 Vogue documentary by RJ Cutler. You can see Anna saying like pull that stomach in. Anna strives for perfection, which means not.
- [33:28]
A single wrinkle, and everybody just looks like a smooth alien.
- [33:33]
Yes. They retouched. Yes. Someone told me about how they retouched a baby's neck. The fat around a baby's neck. I don't know if that was proactive retouching or Anna had seen it and requested that it be retouched.
- [33:44]
Just to talk about Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez again, to me, it makes complete sense. Sense that they would be in Vogue just because it. It gets people talking. It's the same as putting Kim and Kanye on the COVID when she did that in 2014. Like, it's going to upset some people because they're just so over the top and gauche in some ways.
- [34:06]
I think it's more like two. It's just what they represent, which is like the third richest man in the world. Absolutely. You know, having. Planning this elaborate wedding, and she's in Vogue wearing super expensive stuff, talking about their super expensive life. And that would have been a story that would have gone off without a hitch in the 90s. And I read a lot of these stories. There's so many stories about socialites and who have, like, great sailboats and. Or like, Melania Trump, she was on the COVID of Vogue, pegged to her wedding to Donald Trump. That story, she gets on a private plane and she goes to Paris to acquire her wedding trousseau, which is like a trunk of clothes that she's gonna wear for her wedding. And it's all like, couture, this extraordinary, super luxurious experience. I mean, at the time it was fine, but, like, you do that today, and it's kind of like, what the hell?
- [34:58]
I think the reaction to those images of Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Vogue is that it really speaks to this class divide that we're experiencing more and more now, where we're just divided into the haves and the have nots. And we see so much more luxury than ever before, whether it's just through Instagram, watching Kim Kardashian posting pics with these Louis Vuitton duffel bags in Aspen or wherever she is. But at the same time, there's more income inequality and more credit card debt and student loan debt than ever before. And it just makes me think, like, what is the role of fashion and of Vogue in such a divided world? That's a big question.
- [35:39]
Yeah, no, it is a big question, but it's a fascinating question. And I think another reason there was so much backlash to that Vogue story with Bezos and Lauren Sanchez is because there was just no effort to kind of get on the level of the average person. She's flying a helicopter. Like, she's riding a bike, right?
- [35:56]
Not thinking about the emissions from Bali.
- [35:58]
Yeah, just like flying a helicopter. Cause, like, oh, we have to take my Vogue pictures. So we're just gonna hop in this helicopter and fly across this chunk of Texas that my fiance owns.
- [36:08]
You wrote a sentence that was something along the lines of like. Yet for Anna and many others, fashion at its best represents optimism about the future. And I guess I was just thinking about this being like, how can you have optimism about the future in an era of climate crisis? You know, like, I don't know.
- [36:28]
That's hard. Well, this is the thing. This is why I think, you know, Vogue feels behind sometimes, especially now, because, like, what does optimism mean to someone like Anna, who grew up with money, grew up with everybody, privilege, really, and has kind of lived her life with. With every privilege and lives today, such an unusually glamorous life, you know, with a chauffeur and the expense budget that she has, as I reported in the book, like, she expensed H vac repairs to her home because she has parties there. And they were like, a lot, like a lot of money.
- [37:07]
Oh, my God, I wish I could do that.
- [37:09]
So, like, the life that she has, you know, where she can just expense everything. So I don't know, like, what is optimism to someone like that? Right.
- [37:16]
She doesn't need to have it. So let's talk about what's next for Anna, because she somehow managed to hang on to power and perhaps even increase her power in a dwindling industry. Media, in a lot of ways, is dying, and yet she's probably the most powerful woman in it. But it also seems really lonely, like she's fired all of her lieutenants or they've left Grace Coddington, Andre Leontale, Edward Enentful is leaving. But what's next for her? Like, where does she go from here?
- [37:54]
She is Anna Wintour, but she's still a mortal being. She's been there 35 years, but she is 74 years old. She can't do it forever.
- [38:07]
I mean, would you ever see her running a big brand? I. I think that was something that I was really struck by, is given this rise of online retail, like the fact that Vogue never vertically integrated Conde Nast, rather never vertically integrated into owning, like, Annette Deporter or another giant online retailer like Vogue doesn't need to pretend to be journalism. So why did they never do that? Like, Anna could have been an amazing CEO of Net A Forte or something.
- [38:36]
I would see her as an ambassador before I see her running something like Net a Porter. I'm not saying she couldn't do it, but I think that. I don't think it would be fun for her. I don't think it would be as interesting for her.
- [38:50]
Natalie Robomed
That's it for this week's Infamous. We'll find out soon who Anna Wintour has picked as her hand selected success successor, but people seem to say it'll be someone from inside Vogue because she wants someone she has personally trained. If you want to hear more from Amy O', Dell, check out her substack back row at amiodell.substack.com and she has a new biography coming out next month.
- [39:15]
Amy Odell
About Gwyneth Paltrow, which is also very juicy.
- [39:18]
Natalie Robomed
Have a great week everyone and we'll be back next week with a new episode episode of Infamous. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Natrobe.
- [39:32]
Amy Odell
That's N A T R O B.
- [39:34]
Natalie Robomed
E. And if you want to support Vanessa's work, you can buy her book Blurred Lines Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus.
- [39:44]
Amy Odell
See you next week.
- [39:47]
Natalie Robomed
Sam.