Anna: The Biography
by Amy Odell
(Gallery, $30)
The Anna Wintour of myth turns out to be “far more intriguing than the flesh-and-blood reality,” said Robin Givhan in The Washington Post. In the public imagination, the longtime editor of Vogue is a fashion tyrant: cold to friends, cruel to underlings, bent on power. But at least as she’s portrayed in this deeply reported new 500-page biography, the 72-year-old tastemaker appears to be a more common type: a person of ambition who has built a successful career by being a canny, demanding boss. “If she has an inherent gift that separates her from her rivals, it’s her ability to see herself as others do.” When people show an inclination to fear her or worship her, she has been willing to exploit the advantage. But is that a product of character or of accepting stereotypes thrust upon her? “That’s the gnawing question. And it’s one Anna never answers.” Today, Wintour “wields a nonpareil clout that ranges far beyond decreeing what to wear,” said Brenda Cronin in The Wall Street Journal. She helps determine who matters in U.S. culture—a role for which she’s been “rehearsing all her life.” Born in the U.K. in 1949 to an American mother, she would be steered by her British father, the editor of the London Evening Standard, to make Vogue her career target. By 28, she had been fired by Harper’s Bazaar and lost another job in New York when a lesserknown title shuttered. But she persisted, landing at Vogue in 1983 and running two sister publications before being installed in Vogue’s top post in 1988. By then she had married, given birth to two children, and earned a reputation for running a tight ship.
Author Amy Odell “tries valiantly” to learn what makes Wintour tick, said Willy Staley in The New York Times. Though Wintour refused to be interviewed, Odell interviewed 250 others, including close Wintour associates. Often, they’re obsequious, leaving it to Odell to decide who her subject is behind the dark sunglasses. Because Odell declines the challenge, “you’ll walk away knowing every step—and misstep—in Wintour’s ascent to the heights of magazinedom, but without a working theory of the case.”