Anna Wintour Wiki – Biography
Anna Wintour is a British-American journalist and editor who has been editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988 and artistic director for Condé Nast, Vogue’s publisher, since 2013. With her trademark pageboy bob haircut and dark sunglasses, Wintour has become an important figure in much of the fashion world, widely praised for her eye for fashion trends and her support for younger designers. Her reportedly aloof and demanding personality has earned her the nickname “Nuclear Wintour”.
Her father, Charles Wintour, editor of the London Evening Standard (1959–1976), consulted her on how to make the newspaper relevant to the youth of the era. She became interested in fashion as a teenager. Her career in fashion journalism began at two British magazines. Later, she moved to the US, with stints at New York and House & Garden. She returned to London and was the editor of British Vogue between 1985 and 1987. A year later, she assumed control of the franchise’s magazine in New York, reviving what many saw as a stagnating publication. Her use of the magazine to shape the fashion industry has been the subject of debate within it. Animal rights activists have attacked her for promoting fur, while other critics have charged her with using the magazine to promote elitist views of femininity and beauty.
A former personal assistant, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the 2003 bestselling roman à clef The Devil Wears Prada, later made into a successful 2006 film starring Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a fashion editor, believed to be based on Wintour. In 2009, she was the focus of another film, R. J. Cutler’s documentary The September Issue.
Anna Wintour Age
Anna Wintour is 70-years-old.
Early life & Family
Wintour was born in Hampstead, London in 1949, to Charles Wintour (1917–1999), editor of the Evening Standard, and Eleanor Nonie Trego Baker an American, the daughter of a Harvard Law School professor. Her parents were married in 1940 and divorced in 1979. Wintour was named after her maternal grandmother, Anna Baker a merchant’s daughter from Pennsylvania. Audrey Slaughter, a magazine editor who founded publications such as Honey and Petticoat, is her stepmother.
Wintour is a member of a landed gentry family. Through her paternal grandmother, Wintour is a great-great-great granddaughter of the late-18th-century novelist Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire and her first husband, the Irish politician John Thomas Foster. Her great-great-great-great grandfather was Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, who served as the Anglican Bishop of Derry. Sir Augustus Vere Foster, 4th Baronet, the last Baronet of that name, was a granduncle of Wintour’s.
She had four siblings. Her older brother, Gerald, died in a traffic accident as a child. One of her younger brothers, Patrick, is also a journalist, currently diplomatic editor of The Guardian. James and Nora Wintour have worked in London local government and for international non-governmental organisations, respectively.
In her youth, Wintour was educated at the independent North London Collegiate School, where she frequently rebelled against the dress code by taking up the hemlines of her skirts. At the age of 14, she began wearing her hair in a bob. She developed an interest in fashion as a regular viewer of Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go!, and from the issues of Seventeen which her grandmother sent from the United States. “Growing up in London in the ’60s, you’d have to have had Irving Penn’s sack over your head not to know something extraordinary was happening in fashion,” she recalled. Her father regularly consulted her when he was considering ideas for increasing readership in the youth market.
At the age of 15, she began dating well-connected older men. She was involved briefly with Piers Paul Read, then 24. In her later teens, she and gossip columnist Nigel Dempster became a fixture on the London club circuit.
Couple Split Years Ago
The couple privately split years ago, a source tells PEOPLE.
Wintour, 70, and Bryan, 74, met at the Benefit Ball for the New York Ballet in 1997 when they were each married to different people — the Vogue editor to psychiatrist David Shaffer (with whom she shares children Charles Shaffer, 35, and Bee Shaffer Carrozzini, 33) and the telecommunications businessman to second wife Katherine Bryan.
News of a relationship between the two began in February 1998, according to New York Magazine, and was covered closely by tabloids at the time.
“There are certain things that no one wants to read about in the tabloid press,” Wintour said in a New York Magazine profile in 1999. “You know that your friends and your family have one vision, and if the outside world has another, then that’s just something that you just don’t focus on.”
