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

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

I’m assembly the girl who has been editor-in-chief of Vogue journal since 1988 at VOGUE: Inventing the Runway, the present dreamt up by Wintour concerning the historical past of the catwalk.

Our rendezvous is in a big underground area and we’re surrounded by three huge screens. It’s pretty darkish inside however the sun shades stay in place throughout our dialog.

I tentatively ask what they’re for. Are they a defend or for one thing extra prosaic, short-sightedness maybe?

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

The Lightroom in London makes use of digital projection and audio know-how in a high-walled area to generate an immersive expertise for guests.

It has beforehand hosted a blockbuster David Hockney present and Tom Hanks’s exhibition on the historical past of area journey.

Now the exhibition area offers audiences a front-row seat at a few of the most spectacular style exhibits in historical past, tapping into Vogue’s archive and contributor community.

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 present by the musician and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton in 2023. A pop-culture occasion, it was held on the Pont Neuf in Paris, with the likes of Beyonce, Rihanna and naturally Wintour in attendance, and obtained one billion views on-line.

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

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

Lagerfeld had type. Ten years earlier for Fendi, he had damaged new floor, utilizing the Great Wall of China as a catwalk, his fashions parading alongside the stone. Fashion designers of his stature clearly don’t do issues by halves.

To insiders, Wintour has been one of the important gamers in style for one of the best a part of 40 years – a maker of careers, an advocate for the facility of style to meld with the A-list of leisure.

She’s the driving pressure behind the annual Met Gala in New York, which sees the worlds of style and fame collide and go viral in a spectacle of outrageous outfits and celeb appearances on the primary Monday of each May.

Those not on the within usually tend to marvel simply how intently Wintour resembles Miranda Priestly, the fictional tyrannical journal boss from the movie The Devil Wears Prada, whose portrayal by Meryl Streep is seared into the recollections of followers.

“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 journey to London, she leant in to the comparability, attending the gala efficiency of the brand new musical model of the movie. There, she instructed 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 suppose individuals are scared of you, I ask her. “I hope not,” she replies.

Under her management, by expertise, pressure of character and one eye on what sells, Wintour has tried to future proof Vogue, turning it into a world model. She can also be international content material advisor for Conde Nast, the journal’s writer.

In the trendy period, when influencers can take photographs of style moments and pump them out instantly, Wintour has efficiently positioned Vogue as an arbiter of style and magnificence.

Fashion and promoting are entwined in Vogue’s content material however Wintour doesn’t settle for my premise that style journalism could 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, including: “Currently.”

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