Whether Anna Wintour manages to survive this moment or not, one thing is clear: The Mean Girl era she epitomizes is over.
With grief comes clarity. And as we collectively grieve so much and so deeply these days, it’s hard to imagine that we ever considered meanness aspirational.
For decades, no figure in popular culture has been considered meaner. Anna’s longtime sobriquet, Nuclear Wintour, says it all. Here is a woman who has revelled in the worst of high fashion — its exclusionary nature, its ruthless, capricious edicts, its insistence on eating disorders and self-loathing as paths to physical perfection — and made this not just her personal brand but that of Vogue and Condé Nast itself.
It was valorized in “The Devil Wears Prada,” which helped legitimize Wintour’s ways while glamorizing her cruelty.
Tim Gunn has since compared Wintour to Medusa. Ralph Rucci has recently called her “satanic” and the cause of “so much personal evil and destruction.” Her former right-hand man André Leon Talley has depicted Wintour as “ruthless” and “incapable of human kindness” in his new memoir.
According to a recent piece in the New York Times, Wintour makes underlings show up 30 minutes ahead of her to any meeting she might attend. Another report had her mocking fellow fashion editors who fled Paris Fashion Week due to coronavirus. Former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter has said there were days Wintour treated him like a servant. Condé Nast, said former Lucky editor-in-chief Kim France, has long been a place where “difficulty was regarded as brilliance.”
Wintour has been at the top of Condé’s pyramid for decades. As the saying goes: The fish rots from the head.
This kind of management style — rude, abrasive, tyrannical — is predicated on the idea that it’s better to be feared than admired, that the highest levels of productivity will result. We’ve seen it executed from the White House to Wall Street, from “Mad Men” to movie moguls such as Harvey Weinstein.
The standard defense of Anna Wintour: When men do it, it’s called being a leader. When women do it, it’s called being a bitch.
That’s true. But it doesn’t make it right.
Think about the bestselling book “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,” written by Stanford professor of management science Robert I. Sutton. Published in 2007, this book’s arguments caused such a tectonic shift in thinking that companies from JetBlue to Google instituted some or all of its practices.
As Sutton wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “Demeaning people do terrible damage to others and to their companies.”
Sounds painfully obvious, doesn’t it?
So much of day-to-day life now feels arbitrarily, unrelentingly cruel. We are plagued by a virus that keeps us from hugging and kissing our loved ones, that devastated our economy in weeks, that has left over 20 million Americans unsure where their next job or meal is coming from, that has killed nearly 120,000 of us and will surely kill more.
We watch videos and read news reports of unarmed black Americans killed by police. We are a physically and existentially sick nation. The world is terrifying in ways both new and heartbreakingly familiar. I don’t know about you, but never have the smallest acts of kindness meant more.
In this context, how does an Anna Wintour even survive? What purpose does a walking avatar of cruelty and racial exclusion serve?
Surely she never saw it coming, but Anna, at long last, is out of fashion.