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From Venus to Minerva: most fashion magazines play on women's insecurities. Anna Wintour's Vogue plays on their ambitions

Washington Monthly, April, 2005 by Christina Larson

Front Row, , Anna Wintour The Cool Life and Hot Times of Vogue's Editor in Chief

By Jerry Oppenheimer St. Martin's Press $24.95

Most women's magazines, in the guise of trying to help a gal get her fife straight, introduce a dozen more things to start worrying about, from how your date ruins your diet to how your haircut holds back your career. But for most of its history, Vogue has presented the point of view of the woman who has already arrived. Unlike its glossy peers on the newsstand, it isn't loaded with tips to flatten your abs, flaunt your cleavage, or squeeze into your thin jeans by Friday; it assumes you need no help mastering love moves no man can resist. It doesn't purport to solve problems, to help you feel less guilty. Instead, it reminds women to take satisfaction, parading all manner of fineries (clothes, furniture, travel destinations) that a successful woman might buy, or at least admire. While it surely exists to sell ads-which it does remarkably well--it does so primarily by exploiting ambition, not insecurity.

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The woman behind this commercial behemoth, editor in chief Anna Wintour, 55, a petite woman with a short bob and a penchant for Chanel suits and oversized sunglasses, first entered popular imagination a few years ago when a former assistant's novel, The Devil Wears Prada, painted Wintour as a vain and controlling woman who took pleasure in assigning impossible tasks to her cowering staffers (at one point, the fictionalized editor telephones from Paris to demand her assistant in New York track down a certain Parisian cab driver). Sometime after Devil hovered on The New York Times bestseller list for five months, Jerry Oppenheimer, author of unauthorized accounts of the fives of Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters, and the Clinton marriage, hit the dirt road, knowing there's a market for revealing powerful people as horrible neighbors.

Oppenheimer's Front Row, the first biography of Wintour, draws on interviews with erstwhile friends and embittered former employees, but received no help from its subject and minimal input from her current confidants. To Oppenheimer's dismay, he dug up tittle juicy gossip. And though he seems indifferent to the particulars of both the industry and execution of fashion (he depicts a teenage Wintour as wearing a "kicky, sexy outfit"--details, please), his book resembles a slideshow taken at a Paris runway show: Readers are treated to an alluring spectacle, but the parade feels strangely devoid of emotion or consequence, without a critical eye to direct our attention, to explain what's noteworthy in the collection. Oppenheimer has dumped the contents of his camera bag into our laps but made little attempt to make sense of the images captured on his film. Yet it's worth scrutinizing his negatives for clues as to how the editor of the nation's most profitable women's magazine has managed for 17 years to stay on top of what women want, even as women have continually redefined the nexuses between gender and work, between beauty and age.

Pretty, tough

To say that Vogue has long espoused a consistent point of view isn't to say that it hasn't evolved because, of course, what it means to be a satisfied woman has changed. In 1962, when ladies routinely derived their standing from the men in their fives, legendary socialite and editor Diana Vreeland took over a somewhat conventional fashion magazine and transformed Vogue into an eclectic Camelot-meets-Chelsea fusion of aristocratic refinement and bohemian wanderlust, a paean to wealth, irresponsibility, and elegance. Vreeland, who famously declared "the bikini is the most important invention since the atom bomb," brought models out of the studio, at the time a radical move, and staged photo shoots in exotic locations and fanciful domestic interiors, stoking the globe-trotting fantasies of the emerging jet set. She posed statuesque beauties with remote, otherworldly expressions lounging among the stones of ruined Colombian temples, as though the models themselves were divine beings. Vreeland, herself the wife of a rich and notably well-connected banker, later became Jackie Kennedy's fashion guru. At Vogue, she created a magazine for women in conspicuous possession of both luxury and leisure time--in essence for the wives of the most established men in the world.

Meantime, the teenaged Anna Wintour, daughter of a prominent British newspaper editor and an American heiress, had just dropped out of her fancy finishing school and was discovering the swinging '60s in London, living life as the Paris Hilton of her time--young, wealthy, self-possessed, pampered, achingly beautiful, precocious in attracting attention, and a magnet for interesting men (aristocrats, aspiring writers, underground newspaper editors). After some cursory details about her childhood (her well-heeled parents were introduced by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), Oppenheimer's story gains traction as Wintour carouses at clubs frequented by the Beatles and the Stones, consumed with the era's flamboyant mix of optimism, rebellion, and rock & roll. She got her signature bob haircut at age 15, decided that it complemented her delicate features, and has varied it little over four decades.

From Venus to Minerva: most fashion magazines play on women's insecurities. Anna Wintour's Vogue plays on their ambitions

Washington Monthly, April, 2005 by Christina Larson

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