Behind the gloss...

Anna Wintour helped set the standard for glossy women's magazines- and then she helped sink them. As she announces she'll step down as editor of US Vogue, here's why it could not have come sooner

Around 2021 there were rumours that Anna Wintour was about to leave Vogue. She had, after all, just celebrated her 70th birthday. Didn’t she just want to be a pensioner and sit out her days in that giant Hamptons castle she has build with the astonishingly beautiful Miranda Brook’s garden? (‘ She lives on the unfashionable side of The Hamptons, you know’ one bitchy front row habitué told me. I wasn’t sure if this was an explanation for why she wasn’t pursuing this as a retirement option.)

The front row was already a wildly withered version of its former self at that point. Gone were the fashion doyennes I had grown up watching- Emmanuelle Alt from Vogue Paris, Angelica Cheung from Vogue China, Glenda Bailey from Harpers Bazaar. All had exited stage left.

The rumour was it was part of a larger, cost-reducing cull across the entire industry, swapping out high status, highly paid editor-in-chiefs, for younger, ‘more digitally-savvy’ (read cheaper) editorial ingenues. The front row at Dolce and Gabbana that season proved the point more starkly than perhaps Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue, would have liked. Gone were the familiar ‘editor-in-chief’ faces we all recognised and admired. Instead only Anna Wintour sat centre stage, accompanied by a stony-faced Edward Enniful (who the further rumour was, was a shoe-in to replace her at US Vogue); whilst behind them sat a line of chattering young, ‘head of editorial content’ leads for the various Vogues around the world.

‘Did you ever think you’d see the day when Conde Nast would let their editors sit second row,’ a renowned fashion editor whispered to me as we took our own front seats opposite.

‘Never,’ I replied.