Cathy Horyn has a fascinating profile of Anna Wintour in today's New York Times Thursday Styles (or as Gawker calls it, "Thursgay Styles"), covering Anna's power brokering within the fashion industry, placing designers with houses (most recently, according to the article, the forthcoming line by Thom Browne for
Brooks Brothers), and generally getting cozy with advertisers and the business side of the fashion biz.
This is good stuff as New York Fashion Week begins (I'm upping my fashion coverage, and will post shortly on the Paris Couture), though Horyn's clearly got an agenda here. Horyn does a nice job of making Wintour's power sound very sinister and insular - so successful that more politically minded blog types felt it was worth wading into. I suspect there's less here than meets the eye - Wintour's championing of particular designers (two words: Marc Jacobs; two more: Proenza Schouler) is legendary, and seems more about the good of the business than personal aggrandizement.
What, after all, is Wintour's job? What does Vogue do? Most obviously, as Jennifer always says, it tells her what to wear. But there's more to it than that: Vogue divines the trends, finds the designers, and sets the styles. Because of that, it creates the hot designers who make them, the hot locations where they're presented, and the hot social types who wear the styles. And Vogue, more broadly, survives best when the fashion industry is healthy.
It takes an extremely smart, broad thinker to take all this in; it takes a veritable genius to distill these big picture issues and make the most beautiful, successful presentation of clothes in the world, with strong sales and increasing ad revenues in what has, generally, been termed some of the most challenging ad sales years ever for magazines.
So yes, I think Wintour is terrifying. I think she wields too much control and I think some good, possibly great designers (as well as photographers and writers) get overlooked by her Vogue. But I'll grant that she is a genius. No one - certainly no other fashion editor currently in the business - seems to have threaded the transitions to online marketing and publishing, while not losing sight of fashion and keeping fashion relevant in a faster, busier world where no one can simply dictate the trends of the season (we may well never again see the Dior-like dictates of the late forties and early fifties).
Indeed, Wintour is probably not the most powerful fashion editor ever - that would probably be Carmel Snow during her reign at Bazaar - or even the most powerful to come from Vogue (I'd say Diana Vreeland). It doesn't really matter; as long as Wintour can project an image - however true - that what she does is more about what's good for fashion and the industry than her personal benefit, she will hold all the cards. Fashion may never have had such a stern gatekeeper, but it's also never needed one quite so badly. And that's why it's her world, and we all just dress up for it.
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