Last week, Anna Wintour announced to her staff that she’d be stepping back from American Vogue and hiring a head of editorial content to replace her. As I wrote in a recent guest essay for the New York Times:
[W]hen Ms. Wintour announced on June 26 that she was relinquishing the role, it felt more like a corporate governance move than a revolution that will shake the entire industry she has ruled over for decades now. For one thing, she retains her job as Vogue’s global editorial director, and will stay on as chief content officer for Condé Nast. It was less her retiring than the retiring of a once-imperial, no longer so powerful title: editor in chief.
A rep hammered home this point in Columbia Journalism Review, stating, “She is not ‘stepping down’ (as many headlines have mistakenly said), but instead shifting focus to her two global roles… She will still be at shows, doing Met and Vogue World, etc. I imagine she will also be traveling to other markets more frequently now that she will have a bit more time to do so.”
Anna has been a rare celebrity editor in chief — an iconic pop culture figure — whose star power boosted Vogue’s relevancy in the era of content. How many other editors have had the likes of Meryl Streep play them in a movie that’s still widely memed and beloved nearly 20 years after its premiere? We don’t know a whole lot about exactly why Anna’s making this decision now or what’s coming for Vogue. But as her biographer, I can offer informed speculation and some hard answers to big questions that have come my way or that I’ve seen floating around.
Why is Anna doing this now?
Anna is nothing if not strategic. Devoting a Met Gala to Black creative talent and giving an interview to the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan about her activism — in which she owned up to past mistakes — seemed like legacy-shaping moves. The way in which the story of her stepping back broke also seemed planned. She told her staff in a Thursday meeting, allowing the news to go wide from there, though the press only had a day and a half to obsess over it before the weekend. Additionally, we’re butting up against the July 4 holiday in the U.S., which is when a lot of big news tends to break since so many people are checked out.
Anna herself took over American Vogue around this time in 1988 (her predecessor, Grace Mirabella, found out about it from her husband, who had seen it on the news). The announcement that Edward Enninful would leave British Vogue came on the first Friday of June in 2023.
Anna does not talk a lot about herself or her thinking. She makes decisions and moves on, looking forward rather than dwelling on the past or fretting over another path she could have taken. I suspect she has told very few people about why she arrived at this decision now. However, she is 75 years old, and no one — even someone with Anna’s energy and work ethic and passion — can do any job forever!
Is she leaving over the Lauren Sánchez wedding cover story?
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