Vogue boss Anna Wintour on her public persona and being told ‘no’

Anna Wintour walks into our interview with her trademark dark glasses firmly on.

I’m meeting the woman who has been editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine since 1988 at VOGUE: Inventing the Runway, the show dreamt up by Wintour about the history of the catwalk.

Our rendezvous is in a large underground space and we’re surrounded by three vast screens. It’s fairly dark inside but the sunglasses remain in place during our conversation.

I tentatively ask what they’re for. Are they a shield or for something more prosaic, short-sightedness perhaps?

“They help me see and they help me not see,” Wintour tells me, somewhat enigmatically. “They help me be seen and not be seen. They are a prop, I would say”.

The Lightroom in London uses digital projection and audio technology in a high-walled space to generate an immersive experience for visitors.

It has previously hosted a blockbuster David Hockney show and Tom Hanks’s exhibition on the history of space travel.

Now the exhibition space gives audiences a front-row seat at some of the most spectacular fashion shows in history, tapping into Vogue’s archive and contributor network.

Wintour admits that “for someone who goes to so many shows, you get a little, not jaded, but you get used to the experience”.

Since most visitors to the exhibition will not have had the chance to attend such events, she says they were keen to make sure it felt as though they were actually there.

As the reigning queen of the fashion world, Wintour has had a real front-row seat for decades – often on a delicate gold chair, the kind of furniture that is ubiquitous at the high end catwalk viewings where her invitation is always a dead cert.

In the blurb to the exhibition, Wintour writes that she has “probably spent a year of my life waiting for fashion shows, which are famously tardy, to begin”.

She tells me the American designer Marc Jacobs once held a runway show that was an hour and a half late, but “we all yelled at him so much after that, the next season, he not only started the show on time, he actually started five minutes early”.

The Italian designer Gianni Versace, though, was “always on time”,

“It didn’t matter who wasn’t there, it could have been the Pope, he didn’t care”.

That would have suited Wintour, who is “horribly punctual, usually early”.

She arrives early for our interview. Fortunately, I’d been warned it was a character trait and we were ready.

The Vogue show offers audiences a series of vibrant chapters, narrated by Cate Blanchett, which tell the story of fashion and the runway.

“It’s quite nostalgic to sit in the space and look at the incredible changes that have happened in fashion,” Wintour tells me.

We’re treated to a series of the magazine’s front covers from the early days, black and white footage of the first catwalk shows and images of the couture salons of the early twentieth century.

Fashion then was “very elitist – you had to be invited and it was a very tight little world,” says Wintour.

Contrast that with the debut show by the musician and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton in 2023. A pop-culture event, it was held on the Pont Neuf in Paris, with the likes of Beyonce, Rihanna and of course Wintour in attendance, and got one billion views online.

The democratisation of fashion means, as Wintour puts it, “now everyone can come to the party, which is as it should be”.

The exhibition also takes us back to 2017 when Karl Lagerfeld devised a space-station inspired runway set, complete with a rocket blasting off as models stood beside it decked in Chanel. Wintour told me it was “extraordinary… and you couldn’t wait to see what he was going to come up with next”.

Lagerfeld had form. Ten years earlier for Fendi, he had broken new ground, using the Great Wall of China as a catwalk, his models parading along the stone. Fashion designers of his stature clearly don’t do things by halves.

To insiders, Wintour has been one of the most significant players in fashion for the best part of 40 years – a maker of careers, an advocate for the power of fashion to meld with the A-list of entertainment.

She’s the driving force behind the annual Met Gala in New York, which sees the worlds of fashion and fame collide and go viral in a spectacle of outrageous outfits and celebrity appearances on the first Monday of every May.

Those not on the inside are more likely to wonder just how closely Wintour resembles Miranda Priestly, the fictional tyrannical magazine boss from the film The Devil Wears Prada, whose portrayal by Meryl Streep is seared into the memories of fans.

“Is there some reason that my coffee isn’t here? Has she died or something?” Priestly inquires dismissively about her assistant.

“Details of your incompetence do not interest me,” she later tells her.

On Wintour’s trip to London, she leant in to the comparison, attending the gala performance of the new musical version of the film. There, she told the BBC that it was “for the audience and for the people I work with to decide if there are any similarities between me and Miranda Priestly”.

When we spoke, I wanted to know if she finds the public persona of Anna Wintour – the sharp, bobbed hair, the meticulous outfits, the glasses – a role she feels she has to perform.

“I don’t really think about it,” she says. “What I’m really interested in is the creative aspect of my job.”

Wintour tells me she only brought one or two suitcases with her to London and she won’t be drawn on whether she dresses down when she’s at home in the US. “It’s really about respect in how you present yourself.”

More than one person has told me that nobody ever says ‘no’ to Wintour. Donatella Versace says the same in the recent Disney documentary, In Vogue: The 90s.

Wintour demures. “That is absolutely untrue. They often say no, but that’s a good thing. No is a wonderful word”.

Do you think people are frightened of you, I ask her. “I hope not,” she replies.

Under her leadership, through talent, force of personality and an eye for what sells, Wintour has tried to future proof Vogue, turning it into a global brand. She is also global content advisor for Conde Nast, the magazine’s publisher.

In the modern era, when influencers can take photos of fashion moments and pump them out immediately, Wintour has successfully positioned Vogue as an arbiter of taste and style.

Fashion and advertising are entwined in Vogue’s content but Wintour doesn’t accept my premise that fashion journalism can be sycophantic.

“That’s simply not true and it’s sometimes, I think, frustrating to us that work in fashion, that there is an outside perception fashion is frivolous and superficial.

“In fact, it’s a huge business. We give employment to millions of people around the world.”

I take that answer to mean that Wintour, the daughter of a former editor of the Evening Standard newspaper, sees herself more as a fashion ambassador than a journalist.

But of course she is also a journalist, arguably one of the most famous journalistic faces on the planet – and one that has no obvious successor.

I ask her, at 75, how much longer she plans to stay in her role.

“I have no plans to leave my job,” she says, adding: “Currently.”

VOGUE: Inventing the Runway is at Lightroom, London until April 2025.