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Condé Nast

She went to work at Vogue when Alex Liberman, who was then the editorial director for Condé Nast and publisher of Vogue, talked to Wintour about a position there in 1983. She eventually accepted after a bidding war that doubled her salary, becoming the magazine's first creative director, a position with vaguely defined responsibilities. Her changes to the magazine were often made without Mirabella's knowledge, causing friction among the staff. She began dating child psychiatrist David Shaffer, an older acquaintance from London. They married in 1984.

In 1985, Wintour attained her first editorship, taking over the UK edition of Vogue after Beatrix Miller retired. Once in charge, she replaced many of the staff and exerted far more control over the magazine than any previous editor had, earning the nickname "Nuclear Wintour" in the process. Those editors who were retained began to refer to the period as "The Wintour of Our Discontent". Her changes moved the magazine from its traditional eccentricity to a direction more in line with the American magazine. Wintour's ideal reader was the same woman Savvy had tried to reach. "There's a new kind of woman out there", she told the Evening Standard. "She's interested in business and money. She doesn't have time to shop anymore. She wants to know what and why and where and how."

In 1987, Wintour returned to New York City to take over House & Garden. Its circulation had long lagged behind rival Architectural Digest, and Condé Nast hoped she could improve it. Again, she made radical changes to staff and look, canceling $2 million worth of photo spreads and articles in her first week. She put so much fashion in photo spreads that it became known as " House & Garment," and enough celebrities that it was referred to as " Vanity Chair " within the industry. These changes worsened the magazine's problems. When the title was shortened to just HG, many longtime subscribers thought they were getting a new magazine and put it aside for the real thing to arrive. Most of those subscriptions were eventually canceled and, while some fashion advertisers came over, most of the magazine's traditional advertisers pulled out.

Ten months later, she became editor of U.S. Vogue. Industry insiders worried that under Mirabella, the magazine was losing ground to the recently-introduced American edition of Elle. After making sweeping changes in staff, Wintour changed the style of the cover pictures. Mirabella had preferred tight head shots of well-known models in studios; Wintour's covers showed more of the body and were taken outside, like those Diana Vreeland had done years earlier. She used less well-known models, and mixed inexpensive clothes with high fashion: the first issue she was in charge of, November 1988, featured a Peter Lindbergh photograph of 19-year-old Michaela Bercu in a $50 pair of faded jeans and a bejeweled T-shirt by Christian Lacroix worth $10,000. It was the first time a Vogue cover model had worn jeans; when the printer saw it they called the magazine's offices, thinking it was the wrong image.

In 2012, Wintour reflected on the cover:

It was so unlike the studied and elegant close-ups that were typical of Vogue's covers back then, with tons of makeup and major jewelry. This one broke all the rules. Michaela wasn't looking at you, and worse, she had her eyes almost closed. Her hair was blowing across her face. It looked easy, casual, a moment that had been snapped on the street, which it had been, and which was the whole point. Afterwards, in the way that these things can happen, people applied all sorts of interpretations: It was about mixing high and low, Michaela was pregnant, it was a religious statement. But none of these things was true. I had just looked at that picture and sensed the winds of change. And you can't ask for more from a cover image than that.

Years later, Wintour admitted the photo had never been planned as the cover shot. In 2011, when Vogue put its entire archive online, Wintour was quoted as saying, "I just said, 'Well, let's just try this.' And off we went. It was just very natural. To me it just said, 'This is something new. This is something different.' The printers called to make sure that was supposed to be the cover, as they thought a mistake might have been made." In 2015, she said if she had to pick a favorite of her covers, it would be that one. "t was a leap of faith and it was certainly a big change for Vogue."

"Wintour's approach hit a nerve—this was the way real women put clothes together (with the likely exception of wearing multi-thousand-dollar T-shirts)", one reviewer says. On the June 1989 cover, model Estelle Lefebure was shown in wet hair, with just a bathrobe and no apparent makeup. Photographers, makeup artists, and hairstylists got credited along with the models. In August 2014, Gigi Hadid paid tribute to Wintour's first cover.

She exerts a great deal of control over the magazine's visual content. Since her first days as editor, she has required that photographers not begin until she has approved Polaroids of the setup and clothing. Afterwards, they must submit all their work to the magazine, not just their personal choices.

Her control over the text is less certain. Her staff claim she reads everything written for publication, but former editor Richard Story has claimed she rarely, if ever, reads any of Vogue ' s arts coverage or book reviews. Earlier in her career, she often left writing of the text that accompanied her layouts to others; former coworkers claim she has minimal skills in that area. Today, she writes little for the magazine save the monthly editor's letter. She reportedly has three full-time assistants but sometimes surprises callers by answering the phone herself.