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From left: Anna Wintour at the 1995 Met Gala; Scarlett
Johansson at the 2018 event; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021personal friends, Vogue would stop
working with them right away.The abiliTy to make decisions about
who matters is the great source of
Wintour’s power—along with her abil-
ity to put people in the “out” bucket
in an instant. “If you get frozen by her,
that’s it. She’s a Scorpio, you’re done,”
says friend Lisa Love. “It’s that cold.”
Anyone who attends the Met Gala
this year will know that they are, at
least for now, “in.” But being blessed
by Wintour does not always translate
to positive feedback outside of the in-
dustry. Last year, U.S. Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended
for the first time, wearing a gown by
Aurora James that read TAX THE RICH.
For a politician whose every move
draws debate, entering Wintour’s
world, even just for a night, stirred up
a swarm of critics, among them Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote,
“AOC wanted to get glammed up and
pal around with the ruling class at an
event that’s the antithesis of all she be-
lieves in.”
It’s a sentiment that echoes howremains enough to prevent advertis-
ers from pulling money from Condé
Nast magazines. Her phone call is all it
takes to get a brand to sponsor a mu-
seum exhibit for millions of dollars.
She is, in a capitalist society, exactly
the kind of person a company like
Condé Nast wants to keep at all costs.
At 72 years old, Wintour surely
has a plan for her exit from Condé
Nast and for her future—but, aside
from telling friends maybe she’ll do
something where she’s being paid for
her advice instead of giving it away,
she hasn’t told them what it is. Sally
Singer, who worked for her for nearly
20 years, explains Wintour’s vision for
Vogue, which perhaps mirrors the one
she had for herself. “There was never
an idea that Vogue was an editorial
project alone,” she says. “It was an in-
tervention into the fashion world.”
Wintour has built her own king-
dom. And the world’s most beautiful,
most powerful people are living in it.
The rest are just looking on.Odell is the author of Anna: The Biog-
raphy, from which this piece is adaptedpeople feel about exclusionary prac-
tices across every category of life in
America. In 2020, with social-justice
protests sweeping the globe, Win-
tour’s leadership of Vogue, particularly
practices that led to a decades-long
lack of diversity in its pages and on
her staff, came under harsh scrutiny.
On June 4, 2020, she sent her staff an
email, quickly leaked to the New York
Post’s Page Six, which read, “I know
Vogue has not found enough ways to
elevate and give space to Black edi-
tors, writers, photographers, design-
ers, and other creators. We have made
mistakes too, publishing images or
stories that have been hurtful or in-
tolerant. I take full responsibility for
those mistakes.” Days later, the New
York Times published an article head-
lined “Can Anna Wintour Survive the
Social Justice Movement?”
Yet Wintour’s influence remains
profound and unmatchable. She
ended 2020 with a promotion, an-
nounced in mid-December, to Condé
Nast’s chief content officer, giving
her oversight of all magazine brands.
FROM LEFT: RON GALELLA—RON GALELLA COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; JACKSON LEE—GETTY IMAGES; KEVIN MAZUR—MG21/GETTY IMAGESThe mere mention of Wintour’s name