2 Thursday April 28 2022 | the timestimes2
longtime lieutenant André Leon
Talley left out in the cold in the years
before his death.
“Every guest has a prearranged
arrival time,” Odell writes in an
excerpt of the book in Time magazine,
“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
that needs to be fixed.”
Yet can this book succeed where
other analyses of Wintour have failed
to get past the shuttering shades? The
most famous and nasty is the novel
The Devil Wears Prada, written by
Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant
to Wintour, and later filmed with
Meryl Streep playing the lightly
fictionalised Miranda Priestly. The
assistant sees through the empress’s
new gowns to “an empty, shallow,
bitter woman who has tons and tons of
gorgeous clothes and not much else”.
Kate Betts, a former protégée of
Wintour at Vogue, took issue with this
cheap caricature. “She seems to have
understood almost nothing about what
it might cost a person like MirandaPriestly,” Betts wrote in The New York
Times, “to become a character like
Miranda Priestly.”
In the same vein Alexandra
Shulman found the Odell biography
fell yet again for the Wintour
mythology that is a “creation of her
own”, Wintour’s ultimate designer
piece. Shulman was editor of British
Vogue for nearly 25 years and, like
Wintour, was brought up in London as
the daughter of a prominent Evening
Standard journalist. She admires
Wintour, tolerant of her rudeness as
she was also surprised by her kindness.
“I lived to tell the tale after she put
the phone down in mid-conversation
a couple of times,” Shulman writes in
Air Mail. “It wasn’t that bad.
“She survives not because she is an
excellent magazine editor, which she
is, but because she understands power
and what other powerful people want
and need. How frustrating it is then
not to get a greater understanding of
how this enigmatic woman operates.”
So what does it cost Anna Wintour
to become a character like Anna
Wintour? Wintour cultivates enigma:
at first the result of a shy childhood,
later deployed tactically. Like the
Queen, another long-reigning woman
loyal to the same haircut, she avoids
public speaking or confessionals and
trades in the power of symbol instead.G
osh. Really?
People are
hating on dogs
that are
“doodles”, the
poodle mixes
that are
sometimes
labradoodles (mixed with a
labrador) or golden doodles
(golden retriever) or cockapoos
(cocker spaniels) or schnoodles
(schnauzer) or even,
alarmingly, shitpoos (shih
tzu)? I had no idea. And I
am flabbergasted, outraged,
upset. If I had my doodle
(labrador) to hand, which I
don’t, as he lived to a good
age and then went and
died, the big, snuffling
idiot, I would tell him:
“Don’t listen. It’s not about
you, it’s about them. You are
perfect in every single way.”
I had no idea until I read a
viral piece from The Wall Street
Journal saying everyone is now
hating on doodles and then I
discovered extraordinarily vicious
Facebook pages devoted to hating
doodles, Reddit threads devoted
to hating doodles — “I’m so tired
of these generic fluffy dogs” —
and groomers saying they are so
“sick” of them they turn them
away. If I were a bank and saw
that in their business plan I would
probably turn them away. If I were
a bank I would also say, “If you
want to do your bit for dogs then
turn away all the French bulldogs
gasping for breath.” I accept that
isn’t a bank’s business or in its
own interests, but I’d feel
compelled to sa iyt anyway. I’d be
a dog lover first, banker second.
I’d have that printed on my
business card and office door.
Why? Why the hate? When
they are perfect in every single
way? The poodle is non-sheddingand supersmart. The only dog
smarter is the border collie, but
border collies want to herd you
even when you’re simply trying to
put your socks on. Yet poodles
can be highly strung, whereas
labradors are, to my mind, the
Vauxhall Corsa of dogs: no bellsand whistles but safe, steady,
reliable, consistent. And highly
trainable, except around picnics
(as I often discovered to my cost).
I consider labradoodles especially
superb as you get two retrievers
in one, which means you don’t get
that terrier thing of having to
stand in the same place in the
park for an hour while it barks at
a squirrel up a tree. (“Let’s go. No?
Another hour? Are you serious?”)
Plus any “outbreeding” generally
leads to fitter, healthier dogs. It’s
called “hybrid vigour” and it is the
same for just about all animals
apart from the infertile mule, the
poor thing.
One complaint being levelled
against doodles is that they are
not “purebred” dogs and are,
instead, “designer” dogs. Excuseme? What dog is “purebred”?
What dog isn’t a “designer” dog?
All breeds are the result of human
design and saying: “No, don’t have
sex with that, have sex with this!”
It’s how some characteristics are
enhanced and others diminished.
You look at a wolf and then a
chihuahua and think that
happened all by itself? The
golden retriever, that’s considered
purebred, but was actually
invented in the late 19th
century by crossing a flat-
coated retriever with a
tweed water spaniel and
then a red setter. The
dachshund? It’s thought to
be a dwarf bloodhound
mutation mixed with
miniature pointers and
pinschers. You thought,
what, that they just
naturally evolved to hunt
badgers? In your dreams.
If you read between the lines
it seems doodles are mostly
reviled because they are
associated with a particular
lifestyle. They’ve become the
Waitrose of dogs. True, doodle
puppies aren’t cheap, but have
you seen the cost of French
bulldogs, which often gasp for
breath? You think they don’t
deserve a bit of “hybrid vigour”?
Where’s the anger about that?
As for puppy milling, once
certain dogs become popular
it’s a huge problem, and it makes
my blood boil, but don’t blame
the doodle. Blame humankind.
The right thing to do is to adopt,
not shop, but why make it
breed-specific?
Mostly haters seem to hate
doodles because they are now
ubiquitous and this is their fault.
As I would say to my dog: “You’re
just going to have to stop being
perfect in every single way. Apart
from the picnic thing.”What we
did before
that they’d had enough,
that they’re better than
this, and then return
home ten minutes
later? Not meekly, but
because they’d decided
to give you “another
chance”?
How did people form
their baseless opinions
based on the baseless
opinions of the
baselessly opinionated?
How did show-offs
show off and attention-
seekers seek attention?
Where did anyone get
their factual
inaccuracies from? In
my day you had to go to
the library to findthings out, or consult
an encyclopaedia,
so if you were after
factual inaccuracies
it was pretty tough.
They simply weren’t
on tap like they are
today.
And how did anyone
measure their worth
without followers and
retweets, or lack
thereof? How might
you know you are less
popular than the
photograph, say, of the
dinner of someone
more popular? Or their
cat? It’s hard to
imagine, now, how
people lived with that,and the not knowing.
And if my children
were still young I’d
certainly now expect
them to ask: “Mummy,
what did you do before
you could have Nigel
Farage in your face
24/7?” And I’d have to
say, “It was awful!” or,
“I guess we just had to
manage.”
In short, thank God
for Twitter, saviour of
us all, and please do
like and retweet this,
because while it’s
useful to know you
are less popular than
someone’s cat, it does
still hurt.Elon Musk has
purchased Twitter in
the interests of “free
speech”, although free
speech, it turns out, is
expensive ($44 billion).
It made me wonder:
what did Twitter users
do before Twitter?
When someone upset
them, did they storm
out the house, swearing
they’d never be back,Deborah Ross
Leave doodles alone,
even if they are the
Waitrose of dogs
It’s not just
At Monday’s Met Gala, there’s one lady
the A-list will all queue to meet. A new
book aims to decode Anna Wintour’s
mystique. By Helen Rumbelow
O
n Monday Anna
Wintour will stand
at the top of the
steps up to the
Metropolitan
Museum of Art in
New York and
observe as the
world’s A-list celebrities — she knows
they are A-list because she curates this
list herself — ascend, then wait in a
queue for their turn to kiss the air as
near to her cheek as they dare.
To us uninvited civilians the annual
Met Gala is a few minutes of photo-
ogling escapism. Now that the Oscars
has gone a bit wrong, this is the most
glamorous crowd, and their often
pantomime-like costumes are both
ridiculous and efficient at securing
front pages.
But for Wintour, the editor of
American Vogue for 34 years, who has
been organising the event since 1995,
this occasion is less office party and
more court of the monarch. The celebs
have come and gone over the decades,
the frocks moth-eaten in the attic, but
at 72 her grip on power remains
queenly. She has approved every guest
and many of their outfits (they are
allowed their choice of underwear).
Wintour has gone beyond editing a
magazine; she edits people too.
No wonder that a key scene of Anna
(as she is known simply in the fashion
industry), the new biography by the
American journalist Amy Odell, is set
at the Met Gala. It’s not clear how far
Wintour approved the book, though
some of her oldest friends, such as the
journalist Emma Soames and the
designer Tom Ford, speak on record.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former
Met Gala planner, tells Odell that
Wintour was “militant” during the
gala. It is a strange word to use — I
wonder if she meant “military” — but
I guess both speak to the levels of
ruthless perfectionism observed in
Wintour, only matched by her layers
of armour, which involve not just her
hair-helmet and the giant, almost
postsurgical dark glasses, but the
imperious terseness too.
Wolkoff reports in the book that
when Wintour takes her place at the
head of the Met’s stairs, she demands
of her staff about the guests, “Where
are they? Can you tell me where they
are?” This is not the preparty panic of
a hostess fearing no one will show. Of
course hundreds of celebrities are
coming, people have fought for the
right to buy a $30,000 ticket. Wintour
is instead requesting precise tracking.
She is mentally manoeuvring the
powerful and their fashion designers
just as she does symbolically through
the patronage of American Vogue:
Michelle Obama three times on the
front cover; Melania Trump nowhere
near; some like the disgraced designer
John Galliano rehabilitated after an
antisemitic rant; others like herShe understands
power and what
other people
want and need