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When Anna Wintour had her first interview for a position at Vogue, Grace Mirabella, who was then the editor, asked what her dream job was. “Yours,” Wintour said. She started at the magazine in 1983 as a creative director. At the time, she reportedly believed that an editor should have a term limit of five years. Four decades after becoming the editor in chief, Wintour is, in a sense, waking up. Late last week, she announced that she would be stepping away from the editorship of American Vogue. The news broke amid the Bezos wedding and Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, among other things, and immediately made ripples. Someone who was present for Wintour’s announcement told the Daily Mail that it felt like “God stepping down from being God.”
“She is not ‘stepping down’ (as many headlines have mistakenly said), but instead shifting focus to her two global roles,” a representative from Condé Nast, Vogue’s corporate parent, wanted to make clear. Those are: chief content officer and global editorial director. “She will still be at shows, doing Met and Vogue World, etc. I imagine she will also be traveling to other markets more frequently now that she will have a bit more time to do so.” Nor is Wintour looking for a replacement. She is instead seeking a “head of editorial content” who will serve under her as a direct report. Across the company, she has oversight over almost every magazine: Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, and GQ among them. (The sole exception is The New Yorker.) “Ding dong the queen is…???” William Norwich—the novelist, fashion editor, and gossip columnist, who worked with Wintour for two spans at Vogue—emailed me. (His first book, Learning to Drive, from 1996, was inspired by his time at a New York driving school with Wintour. “Of course, she passed and got her license, and I failed,” he said.)
“She is not leaving,” Michael Boodro, a longtime editor at Vogue and other magazines, told me. “She will not retire. Anna will always be a fierce guardian of the Vogue brand. She will try, I am convinced, to see it made fresh. Not that that will necessarily be easy for her. She is used to being in control.”
Stella Bugbee, the Styles editor at the New York Times, said that Wintour has a “stamina more akin to elite athletes than old-fashioned editors.” With her endurance has come a “hunger for change at American Vogue,” Bugbee noted. “Vogue and Anna have no shortage of critics. I’ve been one over the years. People complain, but they need Vogue. Identity is oppositional. You need an establishment to be antiestablishment. You can’t have punk rock without the monarchy.”
Recho Omondi, the host of The Cutting Room Floor, a popular fashion podcast, considered the widespread belief that fashion designers live or die by Wintour’s personal approval. “Absolutely true,” she said, “and it was most prominent in the global era of print because she oversaw a magazine, which was the number one most influential form of communication at the time.”
That may since have changed. “No designer needs a print publication to say anything about them to make or break their career, because of what’s happened with the decentralization of the internet,” Omondi told me. “What we have left are the remains: magazines like Vogue with these really strong IPs over one hundred years old, and that part is influential. But the format of print itself is dead. Not only is print dead, desktop is dead. We’re two lifetimes past print being dead—that’s a very 2010, 2012 concept. We’re in the world of short-form vertical content.” In sum, Omondi said: “She was deeply influential for a really long time. I would just say that time has long passed.”
Tina Brown, a former Condé colleague, once told Jessica Testa, a media correspondent for the Times, that Wintour would “never” leave Vogue. “When reminded that Ms. Wintour is not immortal,” Testa wrote, “Ms. Brown smiled devilishly and replied, ‘Yes, she is.’” Michael Grynbaum—also a media correspondent for the Times, and the author of a forthcoming book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America—told me that readers still “ultimately crave an editor’s expertise, or at least a distinctive editorial sensibility.”
Amy Odell, the author of Anna: The Biography (2022), observed that, over the course of her career at Vogue, Wintour spent about half the time growing her star editor status and the other half “managing a decline” tied to the 2008 recession. “I always had the feeling that Vogue benefited from her being there because she’s Anna Wintour,” Odell said. “Her name and presence carries weight with advertisers, designers, celebrities. But maybe she knows that, and that’s why she felt she couldn’t just leave.” She added, “If you look at what she’s accomplished and her career, no, not every aspect of her legacy has aged well or will, but she’s led this important business and cultural institution for thirty-seven years. Jeff Bezos ran Amazon for less than that. Bill Gates ran Microsoft for less than that.”
Dodai Stewart, a writer and editor covering New York City for the Times, said that Wintour’s rank as “the most influential magazine editor of our time” is “undeniable.” Per Stewart, “she proved herself, time and time again, to be a creative genius and discerning arbiter of style. But history ought also to remember her formidable legacy, including a damaging parochialism around race, weight, and class. The flip side of her work as the architect of aspirational goals for women was a toxic elitism.”
“Early on, I began to notice how Anna’s successes with Vogue were constantly chronicled, but rarely as the sort of business news afforded the coverage her male peers got,” Norwich told me. “It was always through a rather catty filter.” He’s looking to read more about Condé’s business model going forward, which he described as “turning news consumption into an experience for all.” As he put it: “Not only can you wear clothes, use the beauty products, drive the cars advertised, furnish your house in these silos, you can basically wear the media POV of Vogue or GQ or AD. And Anna is the empress of this new business, along with Roger Lynch,” the chief executive.
Empress is a big title, but hardly a job. Robin Givhan, the cultural critic and author, most recently, of Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh (2025), pointed out to me that “certainly editors in chief now—or editorial content officers, if that’s the title—don’t have the same kind of all-encompassing clout they once did, and I think that’s probably for the best.”
Who will run Vogue next? “I would be very surprised if it was someone who was not part of the Vogue family,” Odell said. Virtually every top editor at Condé has had some experience at the company, she pointed out; Wintour was at British Vogue and House & Garden (the era in which her employees called her “Nuclear Wintour”). She sees this move as a way for Wintour to cement her legacy, “to do her best to set the title up for success when she does eventually leave. I mean, she can’t stay there forever. Nobody can.”
“The gingerly way to say it,” Rachel Tashjian, the fashion critic at the Washington Post, told me, is that the succession question “seems to be a lot about maintaining the status quo at the magazine.” Be that as it may, she said, “anyone who has that mixture of arrogance and extraordinary taste and vision, I don’t know that they would be looking to be a magazine editor. It’s really hard to have personality and taste, but also a full-time job.”
“There are people who have been talked about as the quote-unquote next Anna Wintour, but there really isn’t a next,” Givhan said. “There’s a next chapter for Vogue.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correctly cite an article by Jessica Testa.
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