92 TIME May 9/May 16, 2022
△
Odell
interviewed
more than 250
people for the
biographyON THE EVENING OF MAY 2, ANNA WINTOUR WILL TAKE
her place at the top of the carpeted steps leading into New
York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wintour, now
Condé Nast’s global chief content offi cer as well as the
global editorial director of Vogue, has been hosting the
Met Gala for nearly 30 years. She is always happy on this
night —but it’s work. So every detail must be perfect.
Former Met Gala planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff
describes Wintour as “militant” each year. “Where is ev-
erybody? It’s time,” Wintour says. “ Can you tell me where
they are?” The Vogue staff knows. Every guest has a prear-
ranged arrival time, and Wintour’s people know what cars
they’ll arrive in, if they’ve left the house, what they’ll be
wearing, and if they’ve broken a zipper along the way.
A night of excess , the Met Gala is where Wintour
fl aunts her dominance over an industry that’s predicated
on the understanding that there is an “in” and an “out.”
In Wintour’s world, some people are always “out”— low-
performing assistants, the Met’s event planners who tell
her she can’t hang a dropped ceiling over a priceless statue,
the Hilton sisters. Some, whose success, power, creativity,
and beauty are undeniable, are therefore always “in.” Some
get moved from one status to the other. Wintour’s longevity
as a fashion mega-infl uencer in a business that is fi ckle by
design is unmatched, and the Met Gala is the ultimate man-
ifestation of her power. But her selection of who gets her
endorsement in the industry, and therefore who gets fast-
tracked to success, extends far beyond the guest list.
“As much as she loves a person who has talent,” long-
time colleague André Leon Talley said before his death, “if
she does not love you, then you’re in trouble.”
THE MET GALA started as a fundraiser for the Costume In-
stitute in 1948 , a midnight supper for New York society.
Wintour began planning it in 1995. The guest list led it to
be dubbed the “Oscars of the East Coast,” but that moniker
no longer fi ts: in terms of the cultural signifi cance of the
red carpet, the Met Gala now surpasses the Oscars.
The event has not been without controversies, which
have only increased buzz. In 2018, Scarlett Johansson
walked the “Heavenly Bodies” carpet in one of the more
demure evening gowns of the night, by Marchesa, but still
caused quite a spectacle. It was the fi rst major red-carpet
appearance for the label since designer Georgina Chap-
man’s husband, Harvey Weinstein, had been brought down
for decades of sexual harassment and abuse in 2017.
Someone working closely with Wintour at the time said
there was no indication that she had known about the al-
legations against Weinstein. Nonetheless, her loyalty to
certain people ran deep. Weinstein had feverishly courted
her favor since the mid-’90s, desperate for her approval
and for Vogue to cover his fi lms. Their
decades-long relationship seemed to
explain why Wintour had to be talked
out of having lunch with him at his
invitation after the news came out (to
avoid the possibility of being photo-
graphed together). And presumably
why it took eight days for her state-
ment denouncing his behavior to ap-
pear in the New York Times after it
broke the story. (“Anna has been in
the public eye for 30 years, speaks
regularly about her life and work,
and yet she has often found herself
in a position in which others claim to
be telling her story,” a spokesperson
for Vogue wrote when asked to com-
ment on this piece. “Anna: The Bi-
ography was written without Anna’s
participation .”)
Before she issued her statement,
Wintour cut off contact with Wein-
stein and set up a call with his wife,
whose career she had been supporting
for more than a decade. The day after
the 2018 gala, on The Late Show With
Stephen Colbert, Wintour commented
directly: “Georgina is a brilliant de-
signer, and I don’t think she should be
blamed for her husband’s behavior.
I think it was a great gesture of sup-
port on Scarlett’s part to wear a dress
like that, a beautiful dress like that, on
such a public occasion.” A dress that
Wintour, as she does for most of her
guests, had likely approved.
Over the decades, Wintour
has seemed to view it as her job to
rehabilitate her favorite designers
felled by scandal. When John Galliano
was fi red from Christian Dior after
being fi lmed spewing an antisemitic
tirade at a bar in 2011—saying, “I love
Hitler”—Wintour sprang into action.
Before she managed to place him in a
job at what’s now Maison Margiela, she
called Parsons to ask if he could have a
faculty appointment. The school was
prepared to give him a three-day class
to teach, but was forced to cancel it
after a wave of backlash.
Wintour’s alliances with power-
ful men came under further scrutiny
when Vogue’s favored photographers
Mario Testino and Bruce Weber were
also accused of sexual misconduct.
This time, however, Wintour an-
nounced that, despite them being herEXCERPT
The mega-infl uence
of Anna Wintour
BY AMY ODELL