1. Dame Anna Wintour is a British-American media executive, who has been serving as editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988.
80 Facts About Anna Wintour
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Anna Wintour is praised for her skill in identifying emerging fashion trends, but has been criticised for her reportedly aloof and demanding personality.
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Anna Wintour became interested in fashion as a teenager and her career in fashion journalism began at two British magazines.
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Anna Wintour returned to London and was the Editor of British Vogue between 1985 and 1987.
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Anna Wintour was born in Hampstead, London, to Charles Anna Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard, and Eleanor "Nonie" Trego Baker.
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Anna Wintour's parents were married in 1940 and divorced in 1979.
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Anna Wintour's grandfather was Major-General Fitzgerald Anna Wintour, a British military officer and descendant of George Grenville, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
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Anna Wintour's great-great-great-great-grandfather was Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, who served as the Anglican Bishop of Derry.
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Anna Wintour is a niece of Cordelia James, Baroness James of Rusholme, the daughter of Fitzgerald Wintour.
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Anna Wintour attended North London Collegiate School, where she frequently rebelled against the dress code by taking up the hemlines of her skirts.
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Anna Wintour arranged for his daughter's first job, at the influential Biba boutique, when she was 15.
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Anna Wintour told her co-workers that she wanted to edit Vogue.
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Anna Wintour's connections helped her secure locations for innovative shoots by Helmut Newton, Jim Lee and other trend-setting photographers.
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Anna Wintour was reportedly introduced to Bob Marley by one of Bradshaw's friends, and disappeared with him for a week; in a 2017 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, she said she had never actually met the reggae legend, but certainly would have "hooked up" with him if she had.
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Anna Wintour has rarely discussed working there, due to that connection.
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Anna Wintour broke up with Bradshaw and began a relationship with French record producer Michel Esteban, for two years dividing her time with him between Paris and New York.
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Anna Wintour returned to work in 1980, succeeding Elsa Klensch as fashion editor for a new women's magazine named Savvy.
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Anna Wintour learned through her work on a cover involving Rachel Ward how effectively celebrity covers sold copies.
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Anna Wintour went to work at Vogue when Alex Liberman, who was then the editorial director for Conde Nast and publisher of Vogue, talked to Wintour about a position there in 1983.
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Anna Wintour eventually accepted after a bidding war that doubled her salary, becoming the magazine's first creative director, a position with vaguely defined responsibilities.
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Anna Wintour began dating child psychiatrist David Shaffer, an older acquaintance from London.
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In 1985, Anna Wintour attained her first editorship, taking over the UK edition of Vogue after Beatrix Miller retired.
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Anna Wintour's changes moved the magazine from its traditional eccentricity to a direction more in line with the American magazine.
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Anna Wintour wants to know what and why and where and how.
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Mirabella had preferred tight head shots of well-known models in studios; Anna Wintour's covers showed more of the body and were taken outside, like those Diana Vreeland had done years earlier.
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Anna Wintour used less well-known models, and mixed inexpensive clothes with high fashion: the first issue she was in charge of, November 1988, featured a Peter Lindbergh photograph of 19-year-old Michaela Bercu in a $50 pair of faded jeans and a bejeweled T-shirt by Christian Lacroix worth $10,000.
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Years later, Anna Wintour admitted the photo had never been planned as the cover shot.
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Anna Wintour exerts a great deal of control over the magazine's visual content.
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Anna Wintour reportedly has three full-time assistants but sometimes surprises callers by answering the phone herself.
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Anna Wintour had added the "Index" section, a few pages of tips meant to be torn out of the magazine.
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Anna Wintour in turn thought that the stories with popular culture angles Betts was assigning were beneath readers, and began pairing Betts with Plum Sykes, whom Betts reportedly detested as a "pretentious airhead".
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Anna Wintour wrote an editor's letter that complimented Betts and wished her well.
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Anna Wintour oversaw the introduction of three spinoffs: Teen Vogue, Vogue Living and Men's Vogue.
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Anna Wintour was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours.
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In that same publication, Cathy Horyn later wrote that while Anna Wintour had not lost her touch, the magazine had become "stale and predictable", as a reader had recently complained.
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Anna Wintour appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote it, defending the relevance of fashion in a tough economy.
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Anna Wintour assumed some of the responsibilities of Si Newhouse, the company's longtime chairman, who, in his mid-80s at the time, was retreating from his role at Conde Nast to oversee managing Advance Publications, its parent company.
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Anna Wintour starred in The Fashion Fund, which aired on Ovation TV that year as well; she was named the 39th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.
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Anna Wintour is seemingly the only person on earth who knows how to run a steady print operation in 2016.
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Anna Wintour was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to fashion and journalism and invested by Queen Elizabeth II in May 2017 at Buckingham Palace.
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In 2023, Anna Wintour suggested the creation of an event similar to the Met Gala in London to raise funds for the local arts scene, which has struggled to recover in the aftermath of COVID.
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Anna Wintour was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to fashion.
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In 2025, Dame Anna Wintour was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Anna Wintour has encouraged fashion houses such as Christian Dior to hire younger, fresher designers such as John Galliano.
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Anna Wintour persuaded Donald Trump to let Marc Jacobs use a ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a show when Jacobs and his partner were short of cash.
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Anna Wintour's salary was reported to be $2 million a year in 2005.
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Anna Wintour serves as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she has organised benefits that have raised $50 million for the museum's Costume Institute.
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Anna Wintour was briefly involved with novelist Piers Paul Read when she was 15 and he was 24.
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Anna Wintour married child psychiatrist David Shaffer in 1984, and they had a son named Charles was born on 1985 and and a daughter named Katherine was born on 1987 and before divorcing in 1999.
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Anna Wintour turns off her mobile phone so as not to be disturbed while eating her lunch, which is most often a steak or a hamburger without the bun.
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Anna Wintour continued to wear them during both pregnancies, opening the skirts slightly in back and keeping her jacket on to cover up.
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Anna Wintour was listed as "one of the 50 best-dressed over 50s" by The Guardian in March 2013.
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Anna Wintour has supported the Democratic Party since Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate run and John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.
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Anna Wintour served as a "bundler" of contributions during Barack Obama's presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
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Anna Wintour co-hosted fundraisers for Obama's campaigns with Sarah Jessica Parker, with one being a 50-person, $40,000-per-person dinner at Parker's West Village town house with Meryl Streep, Michael Kors, and advertising executive Trey Laird among the attendees.
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Anna Wintour teamed with Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein on fundraisers during Obama's first term, with Donna Karan among the attendees.
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In 2013, when Vogues former director of communications stepped down, Anna Wintour was rumoured to be looking to hire someone with a political background.
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Anna Wintour supported Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, forming part of Clinton's long list of wealthy donors and served as Clinton's consultant on wardrobe choices for key moments of the campaign.
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Anna Wintour endorsed Joe Biden for the 2020 United States presidential election.
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Anna Wintour herself makes a cameo appearance near the end of the book, where it is said she and Miranda dislike each other.
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Kate Betts, who had been fired by Harper's after two years during which staffers said she tried too hard to emulate Anna Wintour, reviewed it harshly in The New York Times Book Review:.
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Anna Wintour had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly.
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Anna Wintour denied it through a spokesperson who said she was interested in anything that "supports fashion".
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Anna Wintour is often described as emotionally distant by those who have come to know her well, even her close friends.
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Anna Wintour has said she admired her father Charles, known as "Chilly Charlie" for being "inscrutable".
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Anna Wintour is never going to be friends with her assistant.
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Anna Wintour has often been described as a perfectionist who routinely makes impossible, arbitrary demands of subordinates: "kitchen scissors at work", in the words of one commentator.
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Anna Wintour once made a junior staffer look through a photographer's trash to find a picture he had refused to give her.
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Anna Wintour has often been the target of animal rights organisations like PETA, who are angered by her use of fur in Vogue, her pro-fur editorials and her refusal to run paid advertisements from animal rights organisations.
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Anna Wintour has "lost count" of the times she has been physically attacked by activists.
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Anna Wintour reportedly told Oprah Winfrey to lose weight before her cover photograph.
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At the 2005 Anglomania celebration, a Vogue-sponsored salute to British fashion at the Met, Anna Wintour is said to have personally chosen the clothes for prominent attendees such as Jennifer Lopez, Kate Moss, Donald Trump, and Diane von Furstenberg.
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Anna Wintour has been credited with killing grunge fashion in the early 1990s, when it was not selling well, by telling designers if they continued to avoid glamour their looks would not be photographed for Vogue.
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Anna Wintour has been accused of setting herself apart even from peers.
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Giorgio Armani, who at the time was co-chairing a Met exhibition on superheroes' costumes with Anna Wintour, drew some attention for his personal remarks.
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Anna Wintour accused her of preferring French and American fashion over Italian.
77.
In 2005, Anna Wintour was heavily criticised by the New York chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance after Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley said on The Oprah Winfrey Show, at one point, Anna Wintour demanded he lose weight.
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Anna Wintour has made similar statements in defence of her reported refusal to hire fat people.
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Anna Wintour has been called a feminist whose changes to Vogue have reflected, acknowledged, and reinforced advances in the status of women.
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Anna Wintour was the only fashion editor who refused to follow an Armani ultimatum to feature more of its clothes in the magazine's editorial pages, although she has admitted if she has to choose between two dresses, one by an advertiser and the other not, she will choose the former every time.