Anna Wintour
Responses

Others have defended Wintour. Amanda Fortini at Slate said she was comfortable with Wintour's elitism since that was intrinsic to fashion:

Most of us read Vogue not with the intention of buying the wildly expensive clothes, but because doing so educates our eye and hones our taste, similar to the way eating gourmet food refines the palate. This is a pleasure enabled by Wintour's ruthless aesthetic, her refusal to participate in the democratizing tendency of most of her competitors. To deny her that privilege is to deny her readers the privilege of fantasy in the form of beautifully photographed Paris couture.

Emma Brockes sees this in Wintour herself: " unwavering ability to look as if she lives within the pages of her magazine has a sort of honesty to it, proof that, whatever one thinks about it, the lifestyle peddled by Vogue is at least physically possible."

"Print publications have to be as luxurious an experience as possible", Wintour explained in 2015. "You have to feel it coming off the page. You have to see photographs and pieces that you couldn't possibly see anywhere else."

Some friends see her purported coldness as just traditional British reserve, or shyness. Brockes says it may be mutual, "partly a reflection of how awkward people are with her, particularly women, who get preemptively chippy when faced with the prospect of meeting Fashion Incarnate." When Morley Safer asked her about complaints about her personality, she said,

I have so many people here, Morley, that have worked with me for 15, 20 years, and, you know, if I'm such a bitch, they must really be a glutton for punishment because they're still here. If one comes across sometimes as being cold or brusque, it's simply because I'm striving for the best.

She has made similar statements in defence of her reported refusal to hire fat people. "It's important to me that the people that are working here, particularly in the fashion department", she says, "will present themselves in a way that makes sense to the outside world that they work at Vogue."

Her defenders have called criticism sexist. "Powerful women in the media always get inspected more thoroughly than their male counterparts", said The New York Times in a piece about Wintour shortly after The Devil Wears Prada ' s release. When Wintour took over at Vogue, gossip columnist Liz Smith reported rumours she had gotten the job through an affair with Si Newhouse. A reportedly furious Wintour made her anger the subject of one of her first staff meetings; she still complained about the allegation when accepting a media award in 2002.

She has been called a feminist whose changes to Vogue have reflected, acknowledged, and reinforced advances in the status of women. Reviewing Oppenheimer's book in the Washington Monthly, managing editor Christina Larson notes that Vogue, unlike many other women's magazines,

...doesn't play to its readership's sense of inadequacy... 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... it does so primarily by exploiting ambition, not insecurity.

Wintour, unlike Vreeland, "...shifted Vogue ' s focus from the cult of beauty to the cult of the creation of beauty." To Wintour, the focus on celebrities is a welcome development as it means women are making the cover of Vogue at least in part for what they have accomplished, not just how they look.

Complaints about her role as fashion éminence grise are dismissed by those familiar with how she actually exercises it. "She's honest. She tells you what she thinks. Yes is yes and no is no", according to designer Karl Lagerfeld. "She's not too pushy", agrees François-Henri Pinault, chief executive officer of Kering, Gucci 's parent company. "She lets you know it's not a problem if you can't do something she wants." Defenders also point out she continued supporting Gucci despite her strong belief Kering should not have let Tom Ford go. Designers such as Alice Roi and Isabel Toledo have flourished without indulging Wintour or Vogue. Her willingness to throw her weight around has helped keep Vogue independent despite its heavy reliance on advertising dollars. Wintour was the only fashion editor who refused to follow an Armani ultimatum to feature more of its clothes in the magazine's editorial pages, although she has also admitted if she has to choose between two dresses, one by an advertiser and the other not, she will choose the former every time. "Commercial is not a dirty word to me."

Wintour herself, when asked about it, dismisses the notion that she has all the power attributed to her. "I don't think of myself as a powerful person", she told Forbes in 2011, when it named her 69th on its list of the world's hundred most powerful women. "You know, what does it mean? It means you get a better seat in a restaurant or tickets to a screening or whatever it may be. But it is a wonderful opportunity to be able to help others, and for that I'm extremely grateful."

In response to criticisms like Beene's, she has defended the democratisation of what were once exclusive luxury brands. "It means more people are going to get better fashion", she told Dana Thomas. "And the more people who can have fashion, the better."
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